One Year Post Au-Pair

Happy one year anniversary!

One year ago today, I was kicked out of my au pair situation on three day's notice after being sat down at the breakfast table and told I was two-faced, a liar, a terrible person, and incapable of being trusted.  I then moved to my new apartment in Göttingen with the help of two Brits in a sexy car and my barn friend with her life-saving horse trailer, which was awesome in and of itself.

I think today deserves some acknowledgement, so I'm going to celebrate with a list of eight things I learned from eight months of my life that were really not that fun.

1)  There's only one thing worst than getting headlice when you're 23 years old and have hair down to your ass, and that's getting headlice when you're 23 years old and have hair down to your ass with a host mom who not only manages to track down your mom's name and email address online, but also has the balls to send her an email informing her that her daughter refuses to share her "feelings" about said headlice.

Ready for this, world?

...Lice suck.

Consider my feelings shared.

2)  The Waldorf school system and ideology is hands-down the craziest you will ever encounter in your life, unless you run into a cult founded by a mystic prophesizing the second coming of Jesus and a racial apocalypse who believes children should be fed grass and taught to dance their names.  Wait, no, that's just a Waldorf school.  My bad.

3)  Milk.  Only does the body good if you drink it in host-family-approved quantities.  In which case my levels of milk consumption are doing my body about as much good as a heroin-infused Big Mac.

4)  Potty training is a sign of poor parenting, and it's one of the reasons children grow up to be stressed-out and angry.  Studies have also shown that nearly every mass murderer and professional ping-pong player in history was potty-trained.  Consider it just one of the many things my parents did wrong to turn me into the terrible, badly-adjusted person I am today.  Thanks, Mom and Dad.

5)  Bread for dinner.  Great as long as you can sneak downstairs two hours later to eat dinner again.

6)  Organic food is just normal food with a jacked-up price tag delivered to your grocery cart by someone who doesn't own pants that fit and needs to shower more often.

7)  There are many better ways to get into a country's culture than to be come an au pair.  One way is to be a hobo in that country.  Another way is to be a prostitute in that country.  Another way is to do basically anything other than au pairing in that country.

And, the most important lesson I learned:

8)  My brain is a weird, creative, sarcastic, very very special place--I like it just the way it is, but I learned that other people will not.  And that's okay.  As it turns out, the world doesn't stop turning when people you desperately want to like you decide they hate you for all the same reasons you love yourself.  I learned that I am capable of moving on and moving forward.  And despite an end to my au pair experience that dictated to me for fifteen minutes all the reasons I should hate myself, I don't.  In the end, I am the queen of finding things to laugh about.

Edit: That's a golden scepter, not a golden penis.  Just so we're on the same page.