Vacationland, Nederland

We have landed back here in the Netherlands, 3 weeks ago, strangely a year to the day after we arrived back in Maine. We’re living in Maastricht in the south for two, maybe three, years, while Michael has a university staff job and I continue with my consulting business. While I’m counting, this makes 3 international moves (one way) in 3 summers, which feels especially big for my baby, who is just 3 years old.

I’ve been wanting to catalogue everything about this return, stockpiling fragments of culture and self and contrast. We’re in a different city, region, neighborhood, schools, house, job, so the configuration is different and there’s much new to learn and navigate.

But from the moment we arrived at Schipol (the airport in Amsterdam), I felt like I’d reunited with a self who’d been waiting for me here, and immediately I merged back into her. By that time, we’d been traveling for 20+ hours with the kids, cat, 6 suitcases, a duffle bag, and various carry-ons. We needed food, so I walked into the Albert Heijn grocery at the airport and began efficiently filling a basket, knowing exactly what we eat here and how it is packaged and where to find it — how to shop and feed our Dutch selves (which is different than how we eat in America). My limited Dutch came right back, as did the interesting mix of giddy humility — I am a stranger here, I have so much to learn, I will do my best to be good to this place, thank you for having me.

The merger was instant, the snapping back of a rubberband to its familiar position. I can’t say that I never felt at home in America, because of course it’s actually heimat. But there is a full, mature, adult self that I left behind in Nederland, and she was waiting to reclaim me.

(Where did American Misty go when I merged with Nederland Misty? When I studied abroad in London during college, I had the time of my life, and would’ve wagered that I’d left behind a UK Misty who would wait for future Misty to return. When I finally made it back at age 32, with my husband and 2-year-old in tow, there wasn’t much left of my selfhood there. It was depressing to find that I couldn’t locate that bright shiny expansive young woman to reattach to.)

This time, it wasn’t until we were in a van from the airport to Maastricht, on our way to see our new home for the first time, surveying familiar landscapes, that some part of me realized that we’d left Arnhem for good. I was seized with sadness. An entire year later, so much life in between, and suddenly we are returning yet not going home again, not to our street or schools or neighbors or friends. Not even to the same Dutch or the exact same culture, though much is similar. I’ve had a few moments of grieving since, finally able to realize that that time of 2017-2018 is not on pause but permanently over. Still, when I took the kids this week to visit Arnhem, it was a joyous reunion with our old lives there: staying on our street with our dear neighbor-friends and their two boys; showing up at school pickup to a flood of Iver’s old friends and teachers embracing him, me making visitation plans with the beloved parents; picking pears from our old pear tree; noting every little change in the neighborhood; visiting Orri’s old daycare with his delightful teacher, him asking about one specific toy he has longed for for an entire year.

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Three weeks in, I feel stronger already, cycling everywhere with a 35 lb. child on the back and cargo up front (but not as strong as I’ll come to be, especially once fall rains and wind set in). I’ve moved more in the past 3 weeks than I probably did all of last year in the US, thanks to car-less living. I’m having to re-learn Dutch cycling with a new bike configuration, and am not altogether certain that I’ve picked the right bike, which is unwieldy. We’re considering getting a bakfiets (Dutch-style cargo bike), which requires a whole other level of bike muscles and coordination, even with an electric assist. And the boys have each got their biking on, sometimes riding Orri’s new toddler bike (complete with handbrakes and a cargo rack) together, dinking style.

Once again, we’re living on the edge of a very interesting city, with cornfields just two blocks away. Unlike most of NL, this region has hills (we’re just a few miles from Germany to the east and Belgium to the west), and there’s both spectacular biking and vistas just right outside. Ten minutes from our house is a huge quarry, the curfsgroeve, surrounded by a gorgeous wild public forest, the enchanted European forest of my dreams. The city center is a few kilometers away and spectacular, all terraces and cobblestones and underground limestone caves and a beautiful river, the Maas, which we get to cross via the Sint Servaas bridge, the oldest bridge in the Netherlands (built in the late 1200s). The pic below is a charcoal drawing of the bridge on the wall of the underground caves.

I’m charmed every single day, smitten by the hills and terraces and the ripe grapes in our yard and the mix of tidy efficiency and laid-back, sweeping beauty. Our first morning, we discovered a pear orchard, sheep, and an interesting playground with a sand-working system at the end of our street. I watched two girls walk by our house with their pet baby goat. When we took the train to IKEA on our second day to try to get some furniture and basic things for our 100% empty house, Iver merged with his train-loving self and whispered, grinning ear to ear, “Now this is the life.”

It helps that it’s August, that we’ve had a few weeks of lovely weather. Michael had to start working a week after we arrived, but I’ve had three weeks off with the kids to put together something of a life and to settle — a tremendous gift. It’s worth saying that I could write a tome about the hard parts: how freaking exhausting it is to move internationally; how the stuff we shipped from America, which was supposed to be here today, won’t arrive until October; how hard the goodbyes were and the months of letting go of Maine; how tetchy and tired we’ve all four been, sometimes nasty to each other. That’s the hardest part for me: the paradox of doing something risky and huge and beautiful, knowing that because of this, we adults are way harder on our kids and causing them way more stress than if we’d just hunkered down to our American lives. I know that it’s probably good stress and there are riches of experience in store for them and all of that, blah blah, all the stuff that people fantasize about with an international move. I generally believe it’s true. But we all have already borne a tremendous amount of weight to make this happen (voluntary for adults, not so for our kiddos), and I know from before that we have months of settling in to go until we really live here.

But today, this afternoon, finishing our last week of summer, with friends coming from Arnhem to visit tonight: Instead of dwelling on the hard parts that threaten to consume, I’m just going to say that I’m so glad to have returned and so grateful that we get to do this, again and in a different way. Thank you, Universe. Breath, taken away.

It’s morning, and I’m sitting outside at a cafe on a canal, looking around this beautiful city and considering The Lessons of the Year, part 2. There are probably a book’s worth of other insights to write down and metabolize, and surely much of this will become clearer once we’ve returned, bringing our new selves to our old lives.

Dropping Iver at school, I ran into my Brazilian friend Raquel, who led me to a lovely cafe in the city center where I’d never been before, and sat for a coffee. We talked about being martians — about embracing the ways that we will always be not from the places we’re living, about negotiating the foreign self even when we are home, about the beauty of journeying and seeking a place to belong and living in liminal space…and about the perils of not choosing a place to be, putting down roots, embracing some place as fully home (especially for our kids). She is someone committed to the principle of marveling at the world, and she has spent the last 3 years wrangling and negotiating to stay here in Holland, not quite a refugee but seeing the writing on the wall about Brazil’s decline, and finding creative ways to commit to a life elsewhere — dealing over and over with being rejected by immigration and/or barely scraping by with a way to stay. And yet she, her husband and their 8-year-old continue to reinvent themselves, to imagine the next phase, to embrace being here now for however long it lasts, and to look to the next where to, if this can’t be a long-term home for them.

It would be dramatic to call ourselves refugees from America, but the last 18-ish months have made it feel like that is what we were doing in coming here, and in seeking to stay: that we are both living the long-held dream of living abroad as a family, and we are also getting away from America in its spiraling decline towards autocracy. Today, after the last few days of atrocious Supreme Court decisions, after waking up today to find that there will be a new Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice, the news from America couldn’t feel starker. After a year away from the oppressive decline of our country (a break that I never take for granted), it feels like a small violence to our little family to not desperately seek any way we can to stay in Sanity Land, to raise our kids here, to consider this a possible fork in the family story where we could’ve given our kids a future…but we didn’t fight like hell, pull out every single stop, to make it happen.

I don’t have an answer to this. All I know is that I wish for all of my beloved American people to experience life elsewhere, particularly in a happy, stable place with a strong social contract. We all need to experience tangibly and to remember that this spiral is not inevitable, that there are ways of life that don’t involve fear and contraction, and that we are each other’s keepers.

So, back to the lessons of the year:

1. Trust. Recently I read an excerpt of Helen Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. There are many, many books on this subject by British and American authors, trying to remind us that our stressed, time-poverty way of living is just cultural — it’s not natural or normal, it’s just a particular cultural product of this moment in time. One of the hallmarks she identifies of happy, effective cultures is trust. People basically trust each other; they trust their governments and social institutions (while holding them strongly to account for their actions); and they trust that the social contract is strong. In the Netherlands, this is partly because of a long-held, unifying belief called the polder model, which I’ve written about before. The idea is essentially that the Dutch people are experts at holding back the sea and the water, and they know how to work together across differences to create and execute plans that are about water management. They trust their ability to work together. And they’ve experienced an extreme, historically recent trauma that has required a collective reconciliation and healing (occupation during WW2, the ensuing famine).

   And the result is that, paradoxically, Dutch people generally trust each other. They’re direct: They trust that if they tell you you’re doing something wrong in a direct and friendly way, you’ll listen, take it seriously, and engage about it, likely even change your behavior, if it’s reasonable to do so. Heck, they trust in the idea that there’s a shared reality and shared reason. People believe in facts and hold the pursuit of facts to be valuable.

   Some examples of the kind of trust that I’m talking about: They trust their kids to navigate the world independently from a very young age. They trust other adults to help care for their kids and provide support (rather than policing the ways that other parents are raising their children). They trust that people are basically respectful. When I left my suitcase on a city bus last weekend, the drivers of subsequent buses told me, it’ll turn up, just keep coming to the bus stop. And sure enough, three buses later, there came the #5 Schuytgraaf, with my suitcase exactly where I’d left it.

   Notably, the Dutch can have hard conversations and express difficult feelings without worrying that their relationships will be damaged. Talking to my new Dutch friend Sheila, she is puzzled about why Americans can’t talk to each other anymore. “We can have a disagreement, even argue forcefully about something, and then it’s done and we have our coffee and we go on,” she explains. There isn’t alienation or exile. They know how to talk to each other with tolerance and respect. This is not a police state.

   I know that personally, I have lost the ability to do this. I have so much pent-up rage, particularly in the last several years, that I fantasize about forcefully cutting off the Trump voters in my life, no matter how much I love them — in equal parts to punish them for what I perceive as narrow-minded thinking that is hurting all of us, but also to protect them from the extreme degree of my rage. I self-censor tremendously, for fear of being unintentionally racist, classist, for fear of my privilege as a white woman stamping on someone else’s experience. I keep quiet when I should engage; and so when I do engage, what comes out is extreme force, rather than an invitation to connect. I functionally can’t listen anymore, because I have felt so long oppressed and unable to speak, in one direction or another, out of fear of being attacked or censored. The left is just as bad in this as the right is: We’ve created a Way That You Have to Talk that leaves no room for people to try to engage, even imperfectly, and it is sucking the life out of meaningful connection across differences.

   But most of all? I don’t trust my American interlocutors to be able to truly engage. I expect to get rage and fear right back. I believe that they also don’t know how to listen anymore. We’re so pent up and amped up, myself very much included in this, that we’re like firebombs, ready to explode at the slightest provocation. We don’t trust each other. The fear and anxiety that results from living without a fundamental trust in the world, each other, and our own ability to handle hard things — THIS is what’s killing our collective and our country.

   Just one year away and I see this with complete clarity. Now…how to hold onto that trust and bring it back with me, to deploy trust in the face of fear and rage?

2. Humility: Holland has been a particularly exquisite place to live abroad, because people are kind, generous, and generally happy. They find you as a foreigner to be at worst annoying and a little slow, and at best, genuinely interesting. However, one of the universal aspects of expat life is that you are humbled, all the time, by being a non-native. You live in a perpetual state of friction, of not exactly knowing if what you’re doing is right, of not knowing where to search for answers, of making embarrassing but necessary mistakes in service of learning. You have to apologize a lot for what you don’t know, and to ask for help — like an overgrown child. This would be so much more pronounced in a culture where you don’t share a common language (we’ve been lucky to land somewhere where almost everyone speaks English to some degree). Raquel was describing to me living in Dutch, working and writing in English, and living at home in Portuguese — the micro-abrasions of living in 100% non-native mode, never fully settling into the sureness of being from.

   While that friction takes some getting used to, I generally really appreciate it. When you’re always humbled, it’s impossible to posture. You have to approach each interaction without a sense of entitlement (a particularly important lesson for Americans), knowing that you will be imposing upon someone else’s generosity. Each minor accomplishment feels grand — just moving through the world, completing baseline tasks, perhaps with een beetje (a little bit) more understanding than the last time that you did it.

   There’s also a de-centering of your past experience that feels worthwhile. Although I’ve been living a partial American life all year, because I’ve continued to work my US job from afar, I no longer qualify for so many things that Americans take for granted. There are many services I can’t use without an American address and phone number (for which there is no European replacement). The unconscious nativism of my compatriots has been shaken for me, even in minor ways — the rest of the world, even privileged people, live without a lot of products, services, access.

   This has been a remarkable lesson. I so want to hold onto this spirit of humility, to being strangers in a strange land, aware of what sets us apart, even as we strive to assimilate. Not afraid to ask for help, and not paralyzed by what we don’t know. We don’t have to pretend anymore not to be overgrown children who are just trying to find our way in the world, aspiring to adulthood though we may be.

As usual, this is a lot for one post. More wrapping and synthesizing yet to come, I hope.

Tomorrow is 10 full months since our arrival. We are not done with our time here yet, and I’m holding hard to every minute — every bike ride through the fields, every trip on the bike ferry, every hop over to the boys’ schools, every beautiful long bright evening in this solstice-season. And yet, the plane tickets home are bought, childcare is arranged for the fall, a final vacation is planned, even the time of our check-out from the house has been arranged. Only 6 more weeks in this lovely paradise, and it will be time to say goodbye to this adventure, at least for now.

I’m feeling such poignance, sadness and nostalgia as well as intense gratitude, all co-existing in layers, right there against the planning and logistics layers, the need to suddenly put our old lives back together again in some new configuration, the need to wrap up this life here and leave it well completed. To do right by this ending. It is much, but it is not as much as an international move to an unknown place. It is not starting over. And so in that way, the feels feel bigger than they were a year ago, but the logistics, somewhat smaller.

I have learned so much this year. We four have. I’ve been wanting to try to start articulating, to put these pieces down either as advice for reconstructing our American lives, or at least as reflections that I can return to as touchstones for whether we’re living well, for if we’re doing right by the long-term gifts of this short-term experience. We would love to return here someday, but there would be no way to put our lives back together exactly as we have them now — this situation has been wholly unique. So here’s what I have learned and savored, at least a start on the list, and what I’d love to re-create if there was a way to. Much of it is cultural, structural and place-based, but some of it has happened at the household level.

1. A sense of security: I’ve written about this before, but this year is the first time in my adult life that I’ve experienced a pervasive sense of abundance, that we are not working so hard in order to try to insulate ourselves against calamity somehow. A social safety net is a powerful preventive for anxiety, and a prerequisite, I now believe, to a happy society. Which makes me worry mightily about where America is now, much less where we are headed.
2. A stripped-down household: The task of paring down before we left the US was completely overwhelming and emotionally loaded. That was the third major move that Michael and I have made where we didn’t move our whole household — we just picked up the most important pieces and split, leaving much our household behind. IT IS SO PROFOUNDLY FREEING TO DO THIS, especially with kids. We moved here with four suitcases and a bike box, shipping nothing, trusting that what we’d need would be rented or would come to us. And it has! We’ve had a year of living with someone else’s furniture and a handful of our own things. We each have about 1 weeks’ worth of season-appropriate clothes, and we wear them until they’re worn out, washing every couple of days. We have two small fridges, and we shop for a couple of days at a time (the bike can’t hold more than a couple of days’ worth of groceries anyway).

   To me, this has meant glorious freedom. Freedom from amassing too much stuff, freedom from caretaking so many possessions, freedom from tremendous clutter and this sense that everything needs attention — otherwise the basement overflows and there are always Decisions to Be Made so that you’re not wasting stuff. Perhaps other people don’t feel this. It’s super, super lucky to have access to stuff, period. But I have loved living in a spend-thrift culture, in a stripped-down household, with the explicit intent not to collect too much that we’ll have to offload or stuff into suitcases to take back. Especially with kids…I spend more time being with my kids and making the most of what we have than dealing with all of our stuff.

3. Simplicity, density, access: Access and accessibility has been one of the greatest themes of this year, and one of the harder ones to re-create in the US. Public transportation is top-notch, just wonderful. We haven’t had a car, and we go most places on our bikes (all year long). We’ve been so fortunate to luck into a situation where Iver’s school and Orri’s daycare are both in our neighborhood — a 5-minute ride to Iver’s and a 1-minute ride to Orri’s kinderopvang around the corner. I’m working from home as usual, and Michael goes three quick stops on the train from our neighborhood to the next city for work each day. Our lives are super compact and low impact. We can be in an amazing big city in 45 minutes by train, and in Amsterdam by train in 1.25 hours. We can ride to the center of our beautiful old city, Arnhem, in 30 minutes, or take a solar-powered bike ferry across the river to gorgeous biking trails in about 15 minutes (almost all of our biking is done on dedicated bike paths). We can be in Germany by train in 20 minutes, Belgium in an hour, Paris in 4-5 hours. I’m taking the train next week to my best friend’s wedding in east Germany, just 7 hours to get there.

   The absence of cars and car-based commutes, and the density of even suburban living, and the general simplicity this has offered us, has made our lives so much easier. I know people who have created very compact American lives, but this really is the exception — for most people, that’s not really an option, and a biking life doesn’t work in Maine 6 months out of the year. And there’s no infrastructure for biking or a real functioning public transport system. Having this has given us so much of our lives back, and given our kids so much more: independence for Iver with public transportation and his bike; the ability to do almost everything in our neighborhood, but to quickly access a big wide world nearby. I can’t believe what a game-changer this is. My not-yet-two-year-old can ride his trike to school and back. Incredible.

4. Working to live, not living to work: It is common here for people to take 4-5 weeks of summer vacation with their kids, in addition to sporadic holidays during the year. Government and academic institutions give 42 days/year of paid time off to their employees, and appalling bare minimum vacation would be 20 days/year, in addition to public holidays and vacations. “Americans live to work. We work to live,” a few Dutch friends have told me. I do love my work, and I have pretty much the most flexible job imaginable by American standards, for which I could not be more grateful (heck, we are here for a year, and my boss and company have had to do a ton to make this work for me). And yet, I feel guilty about taking two weeks off to do the move back to the US. My bosses never get two consecutive weeks off.
   The work terms that Americans are used to just seem unsustainable and unpalatable to me now. We need time to refresh, to re-think what we’re doing and how, to reconnect to our families and to ourselves. It’s a recipe for burnout and disaster to work at the pace we’ve been doing as a culture for all of these years. I don’t know how to achieve this exactly, but I want to take 5 weeks off in the summer to be with my kids each year, to have big adventures, to make summertime memories, and to return to myself in a way that I can sustain for the rest of the year. Instead of an impossible dream, this feels like a non-negotiable to me now, as it is a non-negotiable to everyone here.
5. Family friendliness: I’ve also written about this a bunch before, but Holland is an unique and special place in its family-friendliness. I’ve experienced profound child-friendliness in Latin America and India before — people who will scoop up your kids in restaurants and parade them around, play with them, gladly receive their loud exuberance with a smile. But Holland is a level even above this: They believe children shouldn’t just go everywhere that adults go, but that there should be special experiences for kids, that kids should be free to do their kid thing in all settings, and that this is the only way of integrating kids into broader society. This is a culture of raising adults, and it starts from the beginning. I LOVE it. It is not unusual to see a pack of teenagers riding their skateboards through the grocery store, and little kids always get their own carts and happily crash around the store, doing their own shoppings. At the end of grocery store aisles are games for kids to sit and play while their parents shop. People laugh while toddlers rearrange the shopping carts. No one is freaked out about kids playing in the streets, or kids transporting themselves, and it’s completely normal to see a 3-year-old riding his bike down a path with a parent riding alongside him while the kid weaves and crashes. They’re learning. We all have a responsibility to support that. I love this.
6. Directness and an absence of judgment: People will tell you what their opinion is, or what to do. The Dutch are direct. You hear this and learn it from the moment you arrive. I’ve heard recently that expat friends feel that the Dutch are direct but don’t necessarily want to hear directness from outsiders — but I haven’t experienced this. I’ve been dressed down by people for riding on the wrong bike path (mea culpa), or for riding my bike through a schoolyard of kids playing. The dressing-down was like the best parenting lectures: a direct, firm teaching, not condescending, but a clear articulation of the shared expectations, with an underlying sense that everyone wants to do the right thing, but sometimes people need clearer instruction or help. I’ve appreciated these moments so much — and instead of feeling defensive and shame spiraling, the delivery has allowed me to take responsibility, to step up and receive the feedback and do better. I want so much to hold onto this quality, to channel it, and to interact with others this way. It is tolerant and it is profoundly civil. (Not that I haven’t been yelled at from a car or flicked off a couple of times, but those aren’t the defaults — those are truly extreme cases of jerks, who exist everywhere.)
7. Generosity and interdependence: As outsiders and newcomers, both in a community of expats (Iver’s school community) and a Dutch neighborhood, we have been the recipients of profound caring, support, and generosity this year. Just more than I could’ve possibly imagined: invitations to gatherings and meals; gifts and loans of clothing, supplies, food, books, toys, bike gear, rides to outings and the hospital, cars shared; assistance with a million difficult things, like help retrieving my stuck bike and sawing off the old lock, people watching Iver so I could take Orri to the doctor and watching Orri so I could retrieve Iver; invitations to join other people’s vacations; needs anticipated and met without us even having to ask. There is a profound generosity of people in the world, across cultures, I deeply believe. But my sense of it here is that people who are not striving so hard to create their own personal safety net (because there isn’t a shared social one) have a lot more slack/extra to turn outwards, and they do. They show up. I am so grateful for our friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who have helped us this year, and feel so committed to channeling and practicing generosity to everyone we come into contact with going forward…especially as we move out of the baby years and slowly have more time/energy/presence of mind, and especially in a culture that needs as much generosity as it can get.

There’s much more, but I’m at time. I hope to write as much as I can, as we wrap this time, say goodbye, and as we land in our new old lives.

So long, no write. It has been a 6-week flurry, including my work trip to a conference in New Orleans; back-to-back with Michael’s work trip to a conference in Poland; then King’s Day in NL; a vacation for us in the Pyrenees in Spain (!); a visit from my mother, grandmother, sister, and brother-in-law; and beginning today, a visit from my in-laws. Amidst normal life, working, school and daycare…what has become a very sweet everyday life for us, 9 months into this adventure, having found our way through the transition and figured out a routine.

While in Spain, we received the news that it’s unlikely there will be a way for us to stay via Michael’s work. This wasn’t wholly unexpected, but we had hoped to find a way to extend this adventure, so there’s some grief involved in knowing that we likely only have 2.5 more months here. Iver is thrilled to return to Maine — though he has had a really incredible year of expansion and growth here, his friends and his sense of home are still intact, and lately he has begun to actively miss everyone. “I can’t wait to get home,” he intones frequently. But then he’ll start to reflect on what he’s going to miss: his wide physical range by bike and public transport; constant access to trains and train culture; the friends he has made this year; his dynamic with his current school class; and our house here. And he is realizing that he is now a split self with his heart in two places (Maine and Arnhem) and a self in two languages (English and French, though not Dutch). “And now I’ll always be missing someone,” he says reflectively. Or, “you know, I think we should come back and live in the Netherlands again someday.”

The adults, for our part, are on the fence. We aren’t done with this place. It has been a profound year of growth and expansion for us, too, and we are really, really loving this way of life: so much access to new places and ideas; the life on bikes; a much greater sense of social and financial security; a new language to pursue; the climate (maybe it’s just me, but spring coming a month earlier than Maine was huge for my mental health); a different way of being with friends, neighbors, and people you meet day-to-day (a more relaxed, less judgmental, more direct way of engaging); the child-friendliness of everything; and on and on. But we are divided selves too, though we were already divided before we came, mostly recently between Texas and Maine. Knowing now that we are probably heading home soon, I’ve let my mind wander to Willard Beach, our incredibly lovely friends and family, the large cache of children’s books and toys that I can’t wait to show Orri, our garden, Iver’s school community.

I’m not ready to write the wrap-up post, or to really encounter the feelings of return and questions of re-integration that will ramp up over the months ahead. We haven’t bought our return plane tickets, because…we are just psychologically not there yet. Returning offers just as many questions as staying here does: What will the school situation be for the kids long term? What will Michael’s work situation look like in Maine? Though there are some points of relative stability, a few of our anchors have shifted while we’ve been away.

For now, I can say that it’s clear that we are changed, that this year has been profoundly worth it (thus far), that we have a lot of new perspective on Big Life Questions, such as The Way We Want to Live. Although Orri may not remember much of this experience, it has been an incredible year for Iver, which came at the right time developmentally: he will remember everything, and he was ready to have his mind blown by the big wide world. We have grown our muscles and skills as a family for travel and for working together (even though much of it hasn’t been easy, and the day-to-day involves a seeming constant program of negotiating between four very different sets of needs).

More on all this as the adventure progresses. For now, some highlights from the last six weeks:

King’s Day

Formerly Queen’s Day, we experienced the great spring ritual that is the celebration of the Dutch monarch’s birthday. The entire country wears orange for the House of Orange (the Dutch dynasty) — wigs, hats, clothes, body paint, fake orange eyelashes — and hangs out together in parks, shopping centers, or any place that people can gather. Booths and blankets are rolled out and filled with old items that people want to give away or sell: essentially a national shared yard sale and drunken revelry. Iver’s friends’ parents (also our friends) bedecked him in Dutch-flag body paint, and we all hung out together in the grass at a park, eating the favorite national food (frietjes, aka French Fries), drinking light Dutch/Belgian-style beer, hearing live bands play an endless string of American music (because…that’s what everyone listens to), and Orri soaking himself in the classic Dutch playground setup, which involves some kind of water canal/duct situation with spouts, pumps, dams, and streams.

Spain

In a bit of beautiful synchrony (not sure there’s a better word for it), some friends here with an 8-year-old boy who’s also a friend of Iver’s invited us to a town in the Pyrenees for the May school holiday. Months ago I had read an article about this grand abandoned train station, Canfranc-Estacion, in the Pyrenees, and I couldn’t shake the sense of wonder at the photographs, nor the fascination with this ruin of human beauty, genius, and aspiration (which is its own cautionary tale). It turns out that this town where we were invited was the very same spot as the station, and our friends’ brother-in-law is leading the renovation of the station…such a gift to me from the universe.

The station proved to be magical — incredibly majestic, with a history involving the safe harbor and escape of hundreds of Jews, plus spies hiding out and passing intelligence to the Allies during World War 2, among other highlights. The renovation of the inside, which has just begun, is such a striking portrait of the grandeur of travel in the early 20th century — such a contrast to the easy, quotidian middle-class travel that we are doing this year: budget airlines, country-hopping, incredible access and privilege, but none of it this kind of intentional luxury from another era:

The greatest highlight of the trip, besides the delight of our friends’ company, their local knowledge, getting to speak a language we love, and breathtaking hikes in the Pyrenees, was the treasures of the cargo-train yard. Our friends took us past the “no pasar” signs into an abandoned, 100-year-old train round-house, complete with 17-car turntable, with the roof falling through, graffiti on the walls, and old train parts scattered everywhere. For me, it was a spiritual experience of human innovation and ruin, industry and nature, the layers of earth and time colliding. The quiet in that ruined roundhouse was impeccable. Best of all, it was a shared spiritual experience with our 8-year-old railfan/ferroequinologist (train fanatic), who has waited his entire life to see a roundhouse and turntable like that. “This is the best holiday of my life,” he kept muttering under his breath, with a dazed, goofy grin. (Admittedly, I often find it hard to identify shared interests with him, so this combination of train+ruin experience was a welcome gift.)

There’s much more to reflect on, especially the family visits, but my time for now is done. For today, I’ll leave you with a vision of Dutch springtime:

I kind of feel like my bike today. Clobbered. (Mine’s the one at the bottom of the bike pile. On a very windy day, when the bike rack at the train station is full and you park your bike in a line, this domino effect can happen, and you find yourself trying to pull up a bunch of locked bikes to get to yours, somewhere in the pile. Fortunately, the bikes are hardy. I wish to be as hardy as this Dutch bike.)

The beauty of the March for Our Lives had been with me this week — this sense of movement and hopefulness. We weren’t there, and there wasn’t one in our town, but the photos from all over the US and the world made me cry. Generation Z, you are such a beacon of hope. We are going to fix this, I felt. America, the best of you is yet to come.

In the months since we’ve been in Holland, I’ve been letting myself consider (again, after years of seeking not to engage) how to have a relationship with my extended family in Texas. I love these people, deeply, and they love us. But with almost everyone there (except a couple of my cousins), their ideas about the world mean that we have only a surface relationship. They don’t really know or want to know what I believe, and they’re not going to engage with me/us about what they believe. They’re conservative, many of them Trump supporters. We have a surface relationship, and my living far away means that we see each other maybe once a year. I’m strange and foreign to them, but more or less harmless, as long as I don’t talk about my weird beliefs and therefore agree to keep the peace.

But this part of me, the white Southern woman who was well-trained not to step out of line and to only speak the niceties, broke last year. She broke after the Trump election, and she has refused to be reassembled. And the rest of me refuses to pretend she’s still there.

The solution of running farther from them, forever, is definitely one fantasy. Already I’ve created a situation where they don’t know my kids well, and my kids don’t know them, much to my sadness. And in so doing, I’ve also created a situation where some of the younger members of my Texas family don’t really know anyone who holds beliefs different than they do. And I’m watching from afar at the horrifying things that these younger people believe, and realizing that I could’ve been part of offering a different way…but no. We stay separate and silent, because this family cares more about keeping the peace than engaging, and I have accepted their terms for our relationship.

I want to write about what’s different in Holland, how this place’s culture promotes an egalitarian society. About how things aren’t so stratified, meaning that there is no equivalent divide between “working class” and “elites” (as there is in America), who hold completely irreconcilable ideas about the world. (Of course there are interpersonal differences in belief here, and a fair share of difficulties. But people talk, debate, share, speak their minds, directly. They also listen. It is a part of the norm, even among people with wildly divergent ideas. And above all there is tolerance…the sense that as long as we have shared social norms, and respect each other’s way, and care for each other collectively, there’s enough space for a whole range of ideas.)

I want to write about this. But today, it just feels too personal to launch the full social critique that’s ricocheting around my mind. Today, this feels like a question of self-exile. How far do you have to go to be able to have relationships with people you love but don’t really know, who are happy not to really know you? How far do you need to distance yourself in order to be yourself? What is the enduring value of relationships that may only ever be a few inches deep? And yet, what am I denying myself and my kids in choosing exile for us, especially exile from people who deeply want to love them (if not me)? We were already in self-imposed exile in Maine…across an ocean is another level of choosing awayness.

And in the coffee shop where I’m sitting, because American music is everywhere, the Dixie Chicks sing: “My life goes by, and I dream of wandering in the house that might have been. I listen to my pride, when my heart cried out for you, now every day I wake up in the house that might’ve been.” And suddenly I’m an 18-year-old girl again, hearing this song in my first year of college, afraid that I might be leaving my own family behind because their ideas just don’t feel right to me. We come so far…and yet the self that comes from these places never really leaves us.

I’m having one of those days. A honeymoon day, I’ll call it. They’ve happened more and more as the months here have gone along, where I’ve experienced something in its complexity and found myself more in love with some aspect of this place than before…such that even though the rocky cliffs of Maine and the voices of people that I love beckon us home, I can’t imagine leaving this.

The best discovery of the last month for me has been Rozet Library, our main city library. It is heaven on earth. I would happily take up residence in that place and never leave. Until recently, we’d only ventured to the closest branch library, located in a mall and with a 50 Euro charge for a library card. When I finally made it to Rozet, I understood what the fee pays for.

This beautiful place is Rozet. It’s a “culture house,” meaning that it’s a library, a museum, a restaurant, a bar, public meeting rooms, an auditorium, and a place to vote on election days. Orri and I go to a music class for toddlers there on Wednesday mornings. In the summertime, there’s a bar on the roof with a huge open patio, to look out over the city. On the first floor is a superb, relaxed restaurant with great wifi, where you can eat and work into the evening, with an extensive wine list. The basement is the museum of the province, with all kinds of interesting artifacts, photographs, games for kids, and books.

On the book floors, there is a huge area devoted to kids and reading, with tons of places to sit, lay, and curl up with a book, including cozy cases set into the wall where you can lay on cushions for hours. There are fluffy floor mats, and bean bags, and books in Dutch, English, and French. And there’s a giant indoor slide that goes from the kids’ book floor down to the adult book floor:

Kids inside the library are rowdy — but no one seems to mind. At first I mechanically remind Iver to be quiet…until it’s clear that adults are just happy that kids are at the library, and no one is promoting silence.

And then this thing happens: I see a group of older boys figure out that they can mount the handrails on the multiple floors of stairs, and go sailing down and flying through the air at top speed. They do this over and over. The adults, seemingly both parents and library employees, just look on and laugh. No one is policing them, or telling them they’re too rowdy. Probably there are adults who are bothered by this. But I find the general support for kids being kids in public spaces to be off-the-hook wonderful, and I just stand back and swoon while these boys enjoy their library.

Below-ground in the museum, Iver looks at historical books of trains and stations. On the top floor, Orri dances and plays the ukelele in music class. And we all eat dinner in the cafe. This, I feel, this is going to be hard to let go.

(In true Dutch fashion, my neighbor tells me that she’s disappointed in Rozet, because the collection isn’t large enough and in her old town, the library was much larger.)

When I studied abroad in London during college, my group had an ongoing discussion of what it meant to be feminist travelers in an intersectional, third-wave sort of sense: avoiding cultural appropriation; being sensitive to your own propensity to romanticize places; the politics of being privileged travelers rather than immigrants; general ethics around your responsibility to the places you visit. I always carry those lessons with me, and try to practice even the simple stuff, like learning at least a few things in the language of the place you’re visiting.

Here, we are both privileged travelers and, at least for this year, we are immigrants, though not of necessity. I have learned a lot of Dutch, but am still not conversational. It’s a practice to keep an eye out for the tensions and the hard things — to actively not romanticize or fetishize this place, such that we fail to actually see it and its people clearly. There are two Dutch mothers of toddlers on our street who are my new friends, and they help me to keep it real. They talk about how people complain about taxes and don’t want to pay into the collective good (just like everywhere else, although I suspect less frequently). One tells me that the Dutch cult of happy families (my term, not hers) means that new mothers don’t necessarily talk about the hard parts of motherhood, and that despite all the celebration, it can feel profoundly lonely pretending that everything is easy and natural when you’re really struggling. I’ve also just learned that although almost all of the collective benefits here are phenomenal, mothers and fathers get only 10 paid postpartum weeks of parental leave before being expected to return to work — paltry by any standards, except for America’s.

And yet, there are so many honeymoon days. In the way that kids’ brains are constantly stimulated by the dopamine of new experiences, because almost everything is new to them, this year has been an utter dopamine feast for Michael and me. Novelty can go so far in quality of life. So can perspective, the lack of which can weigh us down tremendously when we’re stuck and can’t get access to it. Eventually, I know, we would acclimate, hit peak discovery, and we would find fault with everyday things, too. Certainly, the winter grayness has been wearing on us. But today I am marveling at this little city and its charms, this people and their good-natured kindness and tolerance, and the pervasive feeling of safety and hopefulness. Oh, and springtime on the way.

Today, February 7, is the midway point in our time here. I’m realizing that I haven’t written in three months, during which time we have celebrated an 8th birthday, an 18-month birthday, and a 50th birthday; experienced San Maartin, Sinterklaas, and the Kerstman (Santa Claus Christmas Man); traveled to The Hague/Den Haag to see the North Sea; gone to Iceland and experienced some winter magic there; shot off New Year’s fireworks in Reykjavik; seen Sigur Ros play their last concert of a long tour, 10 years since we last saw them; visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; hosted our first round of American visitors (two if you count my dear friend who is living in Germany); biked 10km home in the snowy dark from a party.

We have spent time with other families; hunkered down amidst illness; and all the usual winter activities of home (minus real snow shoveling). We have drunk mulled wine (gluhwein) from pots served outdoors; seen a real-life manger with actual animals erected at the neighborhood school; bustled a Christmas tree (kerstboom) home 4km strapped to the back of my bike; thrown said kerstboom onto a gigantic pile of trees and watched the whole neighborhood’s collective kerstboom-ery explode into a gargantuan bonfire. And Sinterklaas (the Dutch St. Nick) mysteriously came to our house on December 5th, leaving a personally-composed poem to Iver and Orri and a bag of treats for them on our doorstep. (We suspect some wonderful neighbors of making sure our kids were included in the magic.)

So much has been beautiful. And much has been hard. The hard parts are difficult to write about when you’re inside of them — at least for me, the path of least resistance is to hunker down and get quiet. Amidst so much to see and do and try, we have also had to encounter the parts of our family dynamic that are depressingly the same as they were in the US: the interpersonal and development-related struggles; the reality of lots of illness in a northern clime; lack of sleep with a toddler; and the difficulties for me of working on an American schedule but having the rest of the family on a Dutch schedule. The scenery is different, but you’re still the same people, spending much of your time bumping around in a house together, trying as best you can to create shared magic and joy. And sometimes failing spectacularly at it, despite your best efforts.

Though I hesitate to write this down, since we returned from Iceland in early January, it feels like we have turned a corner. We left Holland needing a break from the gray and the rain (and got it in the 5 hours of daily sunshine, from dawn to dusk, in Reykjavik), from feeling trapped at home by illness and low energy while we ignored the call of the big wide world. When we returned to the Netherlands a week later, we were coming back — all four of us healthy! — to the familiar: a language that we could parse, if not speak well; systems we now know how to navigate; a culture that we can decode; friends and neighbors with whom we now have some shared months. We had some stories to tell and people here to tell them to. We loved Iceland, but we were glad to get back to our bikes, our trains, our new way of life. Suddenly, something even more foreign allowed me to see that we’ve built a base here, and to claim this as our home (for however long).

Some cultural insights and observations, which I am always making mental lists of and then forgetting before I can write them down (this time, mostly related to family life):

People here are happy. I could talk about this ad nauseum, but it was most notable to me on a recent work trip back to the US. Americans are exhausted and low right now, so much moreso in the Trump years, but we were running ourselves ragged long before now. The Dutch feel mostly secure and are not conflicted about their priorities. As multiple people have told me here, “We work to live. We don’t live to work.” They are not tired; they pay high taxes but have plenty of disposable income; they are not very competitive; and they are happy. It has been a marvelous re-set for me to step away from American striving and to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Holland, as mentioned previously, is extremely family friendly. Working mothers, which means most mothers here, are not doing two full-time shifts. Most mothers and many fathers work part-time and have 1-3 full days per week with their kids. Family life comes first, and kids go everywhere with adults because almost everywhere (the bike shop, the grocery store, the bank, museums, restaurants) is kid-friendly. Kids are loud, and adults expect them to be. They’re also confident, friendly, and capable. Adults expect that, too. Rather than judge your parenting, other adults stop to admire and engage with your kids, or they help you when it’s clearly needed. Evidence: our neighbor across the street, a dad with older kids, who volunteered to babysit for us for free last Saturday, while we went to a work party. Or the woman at the grocery store who whipped out a pack of tissues and used the whole thing drying off the seat on the mechanical airplane that Orri wanted to ride, so he could have a comfortable ride. I could go on.

Men do a ton of parenting. At the pool where I take Orri to swim, which is really a series of incredibly fun pools for kids of different ages (baby pools, a wave pool, a huge slide that starts on top of the roof and spirals through the building, water spouts, bubble pads), there are free, drop-in swim lessons each morning for babies and toddlers. More than half of the parents splashing around with their tiny ones in the middle of the morning are dads or grandfathers. It’s common to see dads out with their kids on weekdays having a Papadag (Papa Day), which is built into the regular family schedule, just like the Mamadag. Michael used to feel so alone as a part-time dad doing a lot of parenting (which I hear has evolved somewhat in Maine in the past 8 years). Here, his social world would be completely different.

The norm is to be direct about what’s not okay, and relaxed about everything else. This is only a small exaggeration. Dutch people are so direct, as every cultural guide will tell you. I’ve been stopped twice by Dutch people who explained clearly, kindly, and forcefully what I was doing wrong on a bike (once taking a shortcut that I didn’t realize was off limits; another time biking through the schoolyard while kids were playing). Both times, because of their combined firmness and kindness, I felt both grateful for the correction and ashamed at my failure to notice — it’s much easier not to feel defensive and to take real responsibility for your mistakes when someone is kind rather than excoriating.

But by the same token, I am stunned every day by the things that are not a big deal, not causes to freak out or sources of litigation. You don’t really sign waivers for anything. At the pool, kids can run on wet surfaces and climb up slippery, high tiled surfaces and jump off in the shallow end. There is no sick policy at school or daycare, just a general “keep them home if they seem really sick.” No one freaks out about lice or fevers or pink-eye, because they know they’re contagious and everyone is going to get them anyway, whether you keep your kid home or not. There is no chicken pox vaccine. Instead, parents try to get their young kids sick with chicken pox so that they’ll develop a natural immunity early in life. (One neighbor rushed her toddler to a sick cousin’s house at Christmas so he could get extended chicken pox exposure.) Adults believe in developing kids’ immune systems and their street skills. School is never cancelled due to weather. You come or you don’t based on where you live and whether you can make it. From what I understand, employees don’t have a set number of sick days or vacation days. They take what they need when they need it, and people just work around it, because: sh*t happens. And everyone knows that people with young kids need lots of sick time.

This, more than any other part of life here, is what I’m growing to love. People may not like the way you do things, but there is a strong social contract of tolerance, of living and letting live, and trying to help others where you can and telling them when something is intolerable. I’ve read a few theories about how the Dutch have instantiated these values, including the polder model of consensus-based decision-making, which prioritizes “a pragmatic recognition of pluriformity” and “cooperation despite differences.”

In a time when it feels like America is increasingly a police state (from all camps, not just from the actual police — see Planet of Cops); when everyone is angry and no one knows how to talk to the other camps anymore; and when people want nothing so much as to police every little aspect of your parenting; in a time when you have to work so hard to raise free-range kids and to push back against the ingrained anxiety of American culture…the Dutch just don’t buy it. They don’t understand why we (Americans at large) would want to keep our kids indoors and chaperone them everywhere and control all their inputs, nor why we’d want to teach them that work is the most important thing in having a good life. They’re fascinated and puzzled by our values, and they wonder how you can grow independent, capable, autonomous citizens by sheltering your kids so much. The Dutch are not without their own cultural struggles — particularly in the big cities — but they have a set of shared values that seem to mostly work in allowing people to live together peacefully, and in raising the happiest kids in the world.

It is a pleasure and a gift to get to see this cultural model up close and to imagine what we might incorporate into our family life long-term, and what we might export to America, at least to our small social world. I am trying to inhale it, to make it a part of me and of our little family, something we can carry home.