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Huffington Post re-ran a piece where the author talks about a time when she shared a story and the person in mourning lashed out at her. The author points out our tendency to default to sharing ourselves. “When she began to share her raw emotions, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say, so I defaulted to a subject with which I was comfortable: myself.”

She wasn’t malicious. She was trying to comfort her by pointing out a connection.

She wanted to talk to me about her father, to tell me about the kind of man he was, so I could fully appreciate the magnitude of her loss. Instead, I asked her to stop for a moment and listen to my story about my dad’s tragic death.

And what follows is a deep look into how she defaults to sharing in general. “I started to notice how often I responded to stories of loss and struggle with stories of my own experiences.” It is just as easy to respond with, “Tell me about him,” as it is to respond with your own story of loss.

Except.

I looked at the shift responses in the post, and the reality is that hearing someone else understands and has a similar story (and maybe even thoughts on how to lessen the emotional pain) has made me feel less alone during a difficult time. I think it’s too simple to say, “always respond with support and never with shift,” and miss the point. In order to make human connections, we need to connect. And sometimes that happens — for me — through a shift response. From hearing that someone else has gone through something, too, when they actually have knowledge into what I’m possibly feeling.

What are your thoughts?

The France trip was great buuuuuut those posts were the highlights from the trip.

I didn’t talk about how we were dripping with sweat while in Paris, and there was a particularly awful train ride from Versailles back into the city where we could barely breathe. There was the night we couldn’t agree on a place for dinner and we ended up consuming what may have been the grossest pizza that has ever entered my mouth. Or how many times I worried about the freakin’ rental car because they made us upgrade and the car stressed me out. (The happiest moment of the trip: returning the rental car.)

I didn’t write about the waiter who HATED us, or how he talked shit about us to our new waiter when we returned the next night, or how Josh gleefully announced that he needed to go back to the restaurant a third time because we were smitten with this waiter who hated us. (We did. We went back. He was still mean.)

I didn’t write about the bird that shat on me in Luxembourg Gardens. It was my first time ever having a bird shit on me. It hurt. It felt like someone shot me with a paint ball. I had to take off my shirt in a public bathroom (after paying 1 euro for the privilege of using said bathroom) to wash my shirt. I became wary of all pigeons after that moment despite being a huge lover of pigeons.

The main point: Yes, it was fun. Yes, I love traveling with the twins and Josh, especially when they are providing alternative titles to art at the Louvre. But behind every pretty picture of Sacré-Cœur there also exists a woman worried about pickpockets.

So yesterday, we left off in St. Malo, which was our first foray into Brittany. We left that city and went down to the Loire Valley, specifically Blois, which is where Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (the father of modern magic) is from.

We did several days of château-hopping including Chambord, Blois, Amboise, and a boat ride under Chenonceau. We also saw quicksand for the third time. Isn’t that bizarre? I went 45 years of my life without ever seeing quicksand, and then we saw it in three different regions of France.

But what made the Loire Valley really special is that we spent a day with our friend from home (and the twins’ former French teacher) because she was there visiting her family. She showed us around her town, and her mother made us a five course lunch. (Which was followed by an enormous dinner after our walk.) And it was just such a fun day to watch our kids run around the yard while we drank Birlou and ate crusty bread.

We realized while we were there that sticking to our original plan to head next to Toulouse wasn’t possible due to the heat wave. Carcassonne was 103 degrees with few indoor spaces. The whole reason we were heading to Toulouse was because I’m obsessed with Occitan, so our friend suggested that we instead head back to Brittany where (1) it will be cooler, (2) it also has a local language — Breton, and (3) IT HAS PUFFINS!

We had no clue that France also had puffins, and since we are obsessed with puffins, we headed to Perros-Gueric (and the rest of the Pink Granite Coast) for a few days to read on the beach and watch seabirds. We learned, once we got there, that the gannets are the same flock we saw last year in Scotland, and they travel between Perros-Gueric and Bass Rock off of Berwick.

So we hung out in Perros-Gueric and ate galettes and tried to learn some Breizh. (Plijet bras on oc’h ober anaoudegezh ganeoc’h!)

And finally we returned to Paris for a few days to do a bunch of neighbourhood walks, including Montmartre and Saint Germain des Prés. Oh! And we went down into the Catacombs. And I returned to a scarf store that I loved 19 years ago and got myself a bunch of scarves for winter. While we didn’t go to any of the soccer games, we were there for all of the World Cup fun.

And then we flew home, to a land that has ice cubes but a severe lack of creperies. And, at least in our area, 100% less quicksand.

We need to go back to do the eastern side of the country in the future, though we may aim to go somewhere a little colder on our next trip.

So which country is the birthplace of modern magic, has one official language but seven local languages, and a capital city with zero stop signs? France! I mean, sure, the country may be better known for its baguettes, art, and landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, but if I said that, you wouldn’t have gotten the joy of Googling yesterday.

So I’ve spoken about this Gwyneth Paltrow story before, but I really wanted that for my kids, too: “I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a [person] who will always love you, no matter what.” And we said that to them on the last day, while we were standing in front of St. Sulpice. They got to see the City of Love (and a lot of the rest of France) with two people who will love them, no matter what. Plus, they got to practice using their French on a daily basis.

So we went to France for about three weeks.

We started in Paris and stayed near the Eiffel Tower for a week.

We spent the first part of the trip in the canicule, or heat wave. Yes, it was just as bad as you were hearing on the news. It’s a city with very little air conditioning, so we had to shift things around and did most of the neighbour walks towards the end of the trip (we returned to Paris) and spent most of the first part of the trip in art museums and various landmarks.

We went to the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Pompidou, and Rodin. We went out to Versailles. We went to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile. We went to 3579206 churches. (Okay, maybe it was more like 12 churches, but it felt like 3579206 churches.) And every single garden in the city. We ate falafel in the Marais and baguettes on Rue Crémieux. And crepes. There were so many crepes.

And Josh finally proposed on the Pont Neuf, which is what I had hoped he would do 19 years earlier.

And then we rented a car and headed to… Normandy. And I annoyed everyone in the car by belting out “Normandy” from Once Upon a Mattress. Our first stop was Étretat.

It was gorgeous, but even better, the water was so cold! We had a great time on the beach and then continued on to Bayeux, which was a highlight of the trip. We loved the town and the Bayeux Tapestry. And we toured the World War II fields. And we fell in love with the poppies that line all the roads in the area.

After a few days, we continued on to Mont St. Michel.

And St. Malo, which is technically Brittany. We ended up returning to Brittany later, but that story in a moment.

Actually, this is getting a little long, so I’ll throw up the rest of the towns tomorrow.

I once went to a conference where they handed out 23andMe kits to every attendee. I gave mine away when I got home. I have no desire to do a genetic test, even though I do have a desire to get the results. I know, that doesn’t really make sense. But what I mean is that if there was a way to get the information without it passing through a company, I would do it in a heartbeat.

But because the information goes through 23andMe or gets added to a database on Ancestry.com, I’m not keen to participate. I don’t think we have any big family secrets, but I’m going to guess that all of the other people in this article also would have said that before taking the test.

Dozens of reports have emerged of people discovering via genetic testing that they were conceived by a sperm or egg donor, or that their parents had secret affairs. Some have found and connected with half siblings or even met the donors responsible for their conception … Decades ago, no one ever imagined that family secrets like these would ever be revealed by science.

It’s one thing when you go into genetic testing seeking information. It’s another to think you have the information and discover that you were lied to at some point, usually by someone who loved you. And that’s before we get to the heart of the matter: that these tests ask you to give a company with a very lax privacy policy a lot of data. I don’t even use my fingerprint to unlock my phone. I really don’t want to hand 23andMe my DNA.

I know a lot of people find the tests fascinating, and I do, too. Really, if I could run the rest at home and keep the results in my house, I would do it. I’m even jealous when people talk about getting their results and having all of that information. But then articles like the one above pop up.