Bis Bald Marcel!

Our family's last night with Marcel was exactly how it should be, full of fun and laughter and so relaxed, as if the evening was never going to end. The storms that had cancelled Marcel's final water skiing outing the night before finally cleared and we spent the evening on the water.  We ate picnic dinners on the boat and Marcel got a last run on skis in.  We anchored at a popular sandbar where shallow water stretches for dozens of feet out into the lake and the kids and Marcel splashed around in the water and tossed a football around with friends. With his skin tanned from a summer spent as much as possible outside and cracking jokes effortlessly with our family, Marcel resembled more an American than the German who constantly needed to look up words on the translator app on his phone when he first arrived. 

Early the next morning, the whole family drove Marcel to the airport, waited as he and his girlfriend checked their bags and then hugged him one last time before they walked through security and onto the next adventure in their lives.  I'm the really emotional type, yet hate to have people see me cry, so I couldn't bare to turn around for one final wave because I couldn't hold back my tears any longer.

I was sad Marcel's time with us had come to an end, but also so proud of him.  He had stepped way out of his comfort zone to move away from home for the first time to a place he had never heard of.  He had had to make new friends.  He had swapped his lucrative sales job for a year of taking care of four young children.  But to see him accomplish his goals was awesome. He could carry on a conversation with anyone and even make them laugh, while speaking a language he had once not considered himself good at when he took English in school.  He traveled a lot and got to experience the United States in a way different than if he had come as a tourist.  He will someday enter parenthood with much more experience than Chris or I ever had, notably, he knows how to change a diaper. 

What was even more special was watching Marcel learn about himself over the course of a year.  Like so many au pairs, he had chosen to "take a year off," as if he were putting his life back in Germany on pause.  The reality is that living away from home in a new country and speaking another language will change a person.  No longer able to rely on his soccer team for his social circle, he learned how to make friends and met people from all over the world.  He had left behind his family in Germany, but he discovered he has family in Minnesota.  He came here with clear plans of what he was going back to when he returned to his hometown only to decide he wanted to do something different with his life.  He had changed, and it was clear before he left that the course of this future had changed as well.