France: What’s a Runaway Wife? How I decided to leave home, family and friends to end my life in France

Almost everybody who leaves home to live in Paris feels compelled to write about it. The “it” is living in Paris.

Not everybody explains exactly what made them abandon their native land or how the folks they left behind learned to forgive them. Plenty of great writers have tried with mixed results: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Milan Kundera, and Henry Miller.

After 40 years of making my living by writing and editing, I decided if this place I now call home is a good enough subject for these folks, I should try it.

My long-suffering, travel-averse husband began referring to me as his “runaway wife.” About five years ago I packed up a couple of suitcases of the things I believed I couldn’t live without (including but not limited to a year’s supply of the pharmaceuticals that keep me alive and my good scissors) and booked a flight from America to France.

My husband was the only person who didn’t complain or try to convince me to stay home. Read into this what you like.

My grown children, two of the three anyway, were mostly glad I was heading to a place I’ve been visiting, celebrating, working in, escaping to, and hiding in for more than 50 years.

My kids weren’t thrilled that I would no longer be available to adore my four grandchildren or babysit for them when needed. But mostly they thought I needed to do something for myself after years of full-time work, child-rearing, house maintenance, car care, administrative chores, hospice management for dying friends and parents, recovering from multiple illnesses, and trying to boss everyone I knew, around, and around and around.

Trying to figure out how to enjoy life

I’d vowed that when I retired in 2013 I’d figure out how to enjoy life or die trying.

Other folks died first:

• My closest friend and surrogate parent succumbed to a lifetime of illnesses in 2012,
• then my actual parents shuffled off their mortal coils in quick succession.
• Numerous close friends enlisted in the choir eternal during the four years after I stopped working.

By 2017 these deaths and my native land had broken their fragile sticks with me after the American electorate allowed the Tangerine Idi Amin to squat in the White House and lead his Taintfungus Administration in demolishing democracy and the fragile culture of the Wasteland of the Free.

I was barely able to fight off the encroaching depression caused by a social life filled with funerals and a combination of grotesque American culture controlled by ‘ammosexuals‘ and ‘fascist carnival barkers‘ who worshiped money, celebrities, and violent athletics.

I gotta get out of this place became my theme song.

It didn’t help that my husband retired simultaneously and was working to adjust to not having a job he’d once enjoyed and excelled at. Nothing seemed to be going even remotely well and I was living in a house where I’d lived through all of the pain and sorrow of being ill myself, losing loved ones, and watching my country dissolve into a third-world pit of despair.

Nobody was feeling either hopeful or optimistic and even the birth of my four grandchildren didn’t work at keeping my head above water.

I needed joy and there wasn’t much.

About this time, my good friend in France sent me a video of herself, urging me to come and visit. Holding a full platter of Breton seafood, oysters, langoustines, and mussels, she implored

Valerie, you have to come. The crustaces doesn’t wait.”

I just took off

I watched the video twice… walked into my home office, and booked a ticket to France.

I announced to my husband I was going and he briefly acknowledged the news and went back to arguing politics online with strangers.

He was used to me traveling for both work and pleasure and seemed confident I’d soon find my way home from wherever I got off to.

My closest friends weren’t so sure. When I told them I was headed to France and had no plans to return, they believed me and weren’t convinced I was thinking like a woman who should be allowed a day pass from the asylum.

Some were pissed that I was abandoning This American Life and them. Their faith in my fidelity to my native land and the people who had cared for me when my brain exploded in 2005 (a subdural hemorrhage of the primary artery in my brain that took years to recover from and heal the damage done to my speech and cognition, physical capability and energy) was shaken.

My two sisters had long ago ceased to depend on my presence and fellowship.

They had grown accustomed to my occasionally unhinged behavior.

More than anyone, they knew when I couldn’t fix a problem, I just took off.

They never blinked when I left.

One Year became Five

That first year turned into five, with a brief break in 2020 when Covid shut down France and I spent the first “confinement” locked in a small Paris apartment with my husband who’d been visiting for a month that turned into three when airports closed, borders slammed shut and it was too dangerous to try and repatriate.

As soon as the restrictions eased, we returned to America to face the death from cancer of a beloved brother-in-law, followed eight days later by the death of my elder sister in her home of a heart attack on a Sunday morning.

America was proving to be as horrid in 2020 as it was when I fled to Paris in 2017. Not to mention all the marching in the streets, and lunatics denying the pandemic, elections, and everything. Mass shootings were commonplace and livestock dewormer was hailed as the new miracle cure by a spotlight-starved Florida man.

As soon as France began issuing visas in the summer of 2021 and the border opened to foreigners, I was in Washington dropping off my paperwork for permission to return to France for a “long stay” (or long séjour as their immigration calls it.)

Headed to Orly

A few days after my passport returned from the French embassy with my visa, I was on a plane headed for Orly. My husband, now sick himself and needing surgery, was left behind in the care of my eldest son while I recovered my wits and my shredded sanity on the coast of Brittany. After a month of Breton oysters and kouign-amman, I moved into a new, spacious apartment in the trendy Paris Marais’ third arrondissement, which I vowed I’d only leave feet first.

My spouse of 42 years wasn’t thrilled.

I wasn’t apologetic.

I was, to put it kindly, being a selfish, narcissistic jerk.

We were at an impasse. That’s when my patient husband began referring to me as his “runaway wife.” Stateside friends, he discovered, believed I’d left him, but he didn’t know it. Even though I’d come back to America for stints as long as a month since 2017 and he’d visited me often in France for those years, he and many others were now convinced I was gone for good. It was beginning to dawn on me that they were right.

Maybe there was someone in France I preferred, friends and family imagined… Some even had the hutzpah to ask me outright, including my physician daughter and my bold brother-in-law, who never had a question they hesitated to ask.

No, I’d respond with a laugh. I was looking for less responsibility and complications, not more. A French friend had embroidered for me what I had always imagined was just a funny line I used when women griped about their male partners:

Men, you can’t live with ‘em, you can’t kill ‘em.”

I didn’t know it, but my kind, generous, funny husband wasn’t among those who thought this was funny or clever. He’d been understanding and encouraging about my escape to France; he concluded I was looking and acting like a runaway.

He was right. Despite his illness and need for surgery, I took off. I’d decided over the previous years that there would always be some crisis that would warrant my return to the land of the not-so-free and often cowardly.

It was a place that nearly sucked the life out of me and I couldn’t bear to be there.”

 

The Will to Live

The Wasteland of the free robbed me of the will to live and Paris gave me joy, optimism, and the gift of wanting to get out of bed in the morning.

This is no small thing when you’re gripped by hopelessness and despair.

After nearly a week of transatlantic discussion and debate, our 44 years of living together and negotiation practice resolved our bi-continent dilemma: We’d compromise so we weren’t separated by 4,000 miles. We wound up giving a little time to the other’s preferred country.

My husband’s lack of French and love of his garden kept him from permanently living in France; my despair and unwillingness to live in America had my heels firmly dug into French soil — despite the part-time job of battling Gallic bureaucracy.

We’d both give a little and receive way more time with each other. That’s when the fun really began.

I had my favorite country, culture, and human all together about 90% of the time.

You’d think things were perfect, but this is France and perfection is never achieved here.

It’s unrelentingly pursued. La belle France has warts and the question for those who emigrate here is whether we can tolerate them.

I found that with enough bread, universal health care, and good shoes, I could.

Writing about the radical change that is my Paris life would help me sort out what the hell I was doing and what it cost me.

To be continued….

Have you ever been or considered becoming a Runaway Wife? Please share in the comments below.

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