Stumbling Toward Home in France

Three years into France, I keep circling the same problem: housing and language both remind me that home doesn’t come once you’re “ready.” You live into it, whether you like it or not.

Fluency and home aren’t things you wait for — you live your way into them

TLDR:
Thoughts circling around housing, trust, and language in France — chats with a relative, American paranoia residue, horror stories of snacks and attics, and why commitment is never clean.

Nephew

When my nephew visited from Texas, he admired our little rental — then casually mentioned the square footage of his place back home.

“Right. So everything’s bigger in Texas.”

“Feels that way sometimes,” I said.

“Does that mean everything’s smaller in France?”

I’ve been squeezing into bistro tables that feel like dollhouse furniture. His place is probably twice the size, but charmless. He admired the woodwork.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Why don’t you just buy it?”

I laughed.

“Because it’s not ours. And even if it were, buying here feels… different. Heavier.”

“Heavier how?”

“Like lifting one of our cats. He’s fifteen pounds, but when you pick him up, he goes totally limp, dead weight. Somehow feels like forty. France feels like that. We’ve been here long enough to start feeling at home, but not all the way there. Owning a place here means deciding that. And right now it still feels like holding the cat too long — you love him, but it’s easier for everybody if you let him drop.”

French

Not a week goes by without a breakdown — a reminder I’m not fluent.

“But you’re good,” he said. “I’ve heard you order, joke, deal with people. You get by.”

“Getting by isn’t fluent.”

Part of me wants him to see how I still stumble, how some things never stop being tricky. And it is. But nobody ever showed me that when I was his age

He grinned. “So French is like the house — you live in it, but it’s not yours.”

“A bit.”

“Does it have to be?”

“A little, at least.”

The American Hangover

That’s what I’ve started calling it — what you carry after years in a system built on burnout, precarity, and distrust. Even when things are good, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Maybe it’s just you?” my nephew said.

“Maybe it is just me.”

In the U.S., we grew up with the Halloween story of razor blades in apples — pure myth, but it shaped behavior for decades.

France has its own food scares: glass in strawberries, needles in pizzas, additives in baguettes, wine cut with chemicals. A more French kind of horror story. Still hoaxes, still about the same thing: fear that what sustains you can’t be trusted.

“So you don’t trust France?” he asked.

“It’s not that,” I said. “If anything, France has treated us better than I expected. But buying a home, putting down roots — feels like tempting fate. Irrational, sure. But that’s where my head goes.”

Language, like trust, only builds through use. You don’t wait until you’re fluent to speak; you speak until you’re fluent.

Maybe houses are the same. You don’t wait until the conditions are perfect. You commit — and in the process of living, you make it yours.

Brooklyn

When we left our last apartment in the U.S., we had just come back from weeks in the French countryside. A long flight, a longer cab ride, bags heavy in our hands.

We opened the door to our Brooklyn place — a square box with windows on one side, already $2,500 a month (now a bargain at $3,500 in that neighborhood). We turned on the lights, dropped the shades, and looked around.

“Fuck this place,” I said.

My wife agreed.

That was it. The moment was clear.

Maybe we’re waiting for a moment like that in France.

Musical Interlude

On & On Erykah Badu (1996)

On & On is a laid-back, neo-soul track that blends jazz, hip hop, and R&B. A hypnotic bassline and mellow groove, she delivers philosophical lyrics about cycles of life, lessons, and self-knowledge. Her voice is warm and conversational and the song feels intimate and close — a kind of mantra that set the tone for her debut album Baduizm. I mean, this was her debut single?

Erykah Badu is profoundly influential on neo-soul and contemporary R&B, foundational to the last 30 years of American music. Her entire catalog is remarkable and has aged beautifully.

Fantasy (Thirst) Traps

Maybe that’s what we’re waiting for in France.

Every expat forum tells has some cautionary tales: nightmare renovations, bureaucratic dead ends, families trapped by decisions they can’t undo. Instagram tilts the other way — “hard but satisfying” projects, photogenic progress shots, triumphant reveals.

I once cleaned out an attic in a Tyvek suit, masked and sweating, wading through fiberglass, squirrel nests, and endless sparrow droppings. It felt like a horror set — Alien or The Descent — minus the monsters. The “after” shot couldn’t be worth the claustrophobic crawl it took to get there. I’d hesitate before taking that on again.

Someone falls in love with a seaside town on holiday, buys a house there years after, pours money into it, and then sees the town differently. Or they didn’t know the town and the area at all.

July feels very different from January.

We’ve seen it firsthand too. Friends dropped a hundred thousand euros into structural fixes and are nowhere near finished.

Others restoring centuries-old farmhouses admit they’re now “married to the project.” One man told me he rushed his renovation because he knew he had only a decade before his kids left home — he wanted it done in time for them to live there.

Charm

We’ve made our lists, toured Breton longhouses with walls so thick they’re the foundation itself — romantic, yes, but that also means dirt floors, bad wiring, water issues, collapsing roofs. And then there’s the paperwork: confirmations, permits, bureaucracy at every step.

A friend with a 500-year-old property, officially listed as patrimony, once tore down junky outbuildings when they arrived.

Later, when he tried to add a kitchen, he learned expansion was far harder than demolition — at least on paper. So he bought junk sheds from neighbors, reported that he’d “removed” them, and called it even. Absurd, but still easier than zoning issues.

That’s property here: wild, inconsistent, it can be cheap but also ready to swallow every euro. Charm comes with rot. Beauty comes with bureaucracy.

There are reasons that many French people don’t want to take on those projects.

For us, we can’t afford to treat a house as an experiment.

Old Information

Maybe the only certainty you ever get is choosing.

Someone imagines France, buys a house years later, pours in money and labor — then realizes their needs have changed. A friend told me he rushed his restoration because he wanted it finished before his kids left home. He’d seen a man spend twelve years on his dream house; by the time it was done, his kids were grown. My friend didn’t want that story.

For me, the timer isn’t kids, it’s energy, motivation, priorities. How much I have now, how much in ten years, what I’m willing or able to take on.