Vacationland, Nederland

Goedemorgen! We’ve officially been on the ground for 5.5 weeks, and in our new school/daycare/work regimen for a full 4. Per my Family Sabbatical Handbook bible, I had expected that a crash would come sometime around now. After building for awhile, it hit this week.

Contrary to what I’d expected, the crash wasn’t exactly about culture shock, or homesickness, or people-sickness (though we do miss you beloveds in Maine, Texas, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, and elsewhere). It wasn’t a complete fed-up-ness with the tremendous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy moving a whole family to a Very Organized Place such as Nederland requires. Instead, it has been the crash of our carefully-constructed world with all of its support systems, props and crutches, such that we could each get through the days and still a) be reasonable versions of ourselves, and b) not have to look too closely at how insane it is sometimes to live in the ways that we do.

But here, the support structures are different: no friends you could call in a pinch (though we’re working on this); no car to drive when needed; no teachers and caregivers who you know and who know your children so well that they can help them navigate the hard stuff. For example, Orri has had 3 colds, a rash, and two high fevers in his first four weeks of daycare. Twice I have found myself strapping a burning-up baby onto my bike and pedaling him through the pouring rain to pick up Iver at school, because — what other option did I have?

I know that the support systems will come, or we will figure out reasonable alternatives. The generosity of the people we’re meeting here has been heart-openingly tremendous. One American mom from Iver’s class picked me and Orri up with her SUV and infant car seat and drove us to the coffee date for Year 3 parents, which was across town. A British mom stopped me out of the blue in the supermarket and invited me to an expats playgroup. A Brazilian mom showed up at the parents’ coffee with a piece of bicycle gear she’d bought to keep Orri warm, just because she thought we could use it. The room parent for Iver’s class, a Spanish dad, has taken me around at pickups and dropoffs and introduced me to all the other parents, so that we can plug in better. He also invited our whole family on a long Sunday bike ride, and made dinner for us. One Dutch neighbor, who is a pediatric nurse, offered her services anytime I have a sick child. Her husband texts me with interesting things happening in the town that we should know about. Prospective babysitters have literally shown up at our door, excited to offer their services to the new English-speaking family on the block. We receive package deliveries for our neighbors, and vice versa, because this is a normal thing to do here.

Perhaps I sound bragadocious. It’s not that. It’s that without our old support system in place, each of these small acts of kindness has brought me to tears. Humans really are capable of such profound goodness. And there’s such a sense of interdependence, both in the expat community and with the Dutch people that I’ve met, that consistently bowls me over. So much of the American way is habituated to doing it by yourself, in your own house, for your own people. Here, there is the sense that we need each other, that we are watching out for each other, that we are a part of each other’s everyday lives, every day. I feel greatly inspired these days to up my game in terms of perceiving others’ needs and offering help. It is so clear to me right now that we are our sibling’s keepers.

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Back to the crash. Orri’s crash has been largely about sickness, and the transition to daycare, all of which has disturbed his nights for the past month. Iver’s crash has been bigger, not about any one thing, but a collection of stresses that result in giant, explosive cries at home and some pretty unsavory behavior with Michael and me. He holds things together very well at school and seems to be making some friends, which is beautiful to watch. But he’s struggling, predictably, with the small playground and limited recess, with not being at the top of his class academically anymore (because kids from all over the world have some pretty incredible skills), with the rigors of a more academic system with less of a focus on creative expression, and with the general exhaustion of all the newness that every day entails – just to get through the day. And we adults are trying in all the ways we know how, ineffectually I fear, to help him find some equilibrium without hurting himself or others in the process.

For my part, I’m struggling with the schedule and with meeting everyone’s needs in the course of very long days. Dutch mothers tend to work very part-time, if they work at all, and the expat families tend to only have one working parent, usually a father. This is partly visa- and language-related. But, as many of the expat moms have said to me, when one parent is working full-time away from home, who is going to do pickups and dropoffs, manage the school-related things that need to happen, have the flexible schedule, take care of the house, make the lunches, get the kids early on Weds when all schools let out at 12:15…and on and on? Indeed. Who is going to do that work? When I say to them that we came here for my husband’s full-time gig, but that I’m also working, half days and half nights, the other moms’ eyes grow round in astonishment. They can’t believe that I’m doing this, especially with a baby at home.

And honestly, it has begun to seem completely nuts to me, too. In an American context, most of the families that I know have two working parents. Maybe we know it’s crazy, but it’s in the air we breathe, so we just accept that these years are bat-shit nuts, that we never sit down or slow down, and that we’re traumatized by the pace of our lives. (Or, I don’t know, some Sheryl-Sandberg types get off on that, but I most definitely do not find that kind of adrenaline-fueled way of living to be appealing). Much of the rest of the world thinks that this way of living is undesirable. And I increasingly do, too.

And now for the necessary caveat: I love my job. I really do. I have the most amazing, flexible job working with incredible clients and colleagues. It is deeply fulfilling and meaningful. Being able to bring my job with me to the Netherlands and to adapt the schedule for our lives here is an unbelievable privilege. So why am I complaining?

I’m complaining because the thing that always gets the shaft is the caretaking work and the caretaker. Always. If you haven’t read Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family, you must. Work will always take whatever of your time, energy, and pound of flesh that it requires, especially in a timecard-keeping, hours-billing work world. Caretaking – the giant emotional and physical needs of children, the gargantuan labor of keeping a household, the fundamental project of holding a marriage or a self together – always gets the squeeze. Other cultures seem to get this, that caretaking is real work that we should prioritize just as highly as wage-earning work, especially for certain periods of our lives, like when we have children at home. Foolishly, blusteringly, my American self thought that I could import my American life here and take on even more caretaking responsibilities (because I love caretaking more than anything else, per this poem), and all it would cost would be my own sleep and sanity.

In other words, we are having a family sabbatical without the sabbatical part. There is, it seems, not much precedent for how to do that. No map. And in the maplessness I feel both brave and lonely, proud and disappointed. Deeply grateful and also kind of robbed. And sheesh, so mind-numbingly tired.

The new normal arrived last Monday. We made it through the first week, all seemingly exhausted and relieved by the end of Friday night. It was a good week, all told. The thing about trying to establish a routine — really, trying to establish anything — in a new place, language and culture is that there’s both the constant high of discovery and the persistent difficulty of the differences, as if you’re living a parallel reality happening underwater, where everything looks slightly familiar but refracted. Frictive. Slower.

Despite my general glass-half-full outlook on most things, an honest accounting of this experience involves describing points of friction. So here’s some of that, and then more points of fascination and insight.

The Dutch bureaucracy has been rather mind-boggling. Though we started wrangling with it 5 months ago when we decided to make this move, it still feels like we have many bureaucratic mountains to climb. The Dutch are so inured to this that people just shrug sympathetically. For example, you can’t do anything here without a Dutch bank account and bank card, which you can’t get until you have your Dutch BSN (social security number). We had an appointment to receive our BSNs at City Hall the day after we arrived, when we found out that it would take 1-2 weeks by post to receive our numbers. We lived in limbo for several weeks until the BSNs finally arrived. After which we all four went to the bank to set up our accounts, only to find that the first bank requires you to go to a different branch for personal accounts, where you show up to find out that the bank refuses to work with people like you — short-termers who won’t be profitable for them to serve for merely a year. So we find another bank, drag the kids there, and after an hour-plus of extensive paperwork during which the baby fell apart and all four of us turned hangry, we finally received our long-awaited, key-to-everything account. Except that we just have one temporary debit card, and we can’t do online banking until we sign a form that will come by mail in 5 business days, and then we wait another 5 business days, and then we can go into the branch and request online banking via a human being.

Also we can’t get our new Dutch health insurance until we have our residence permits, which were supposed to have arrived by yesterday. Instead, we got a confirmation letter that we’re approved as residents, but it turns out we need to drag the kids more than an hour away by train to an IND office so that our biometric data can be collected and analyzed. Never fear — our residence permits will be available for pickup yet another week after that, another hour-long train ride away.

I sound annoying to myself, chronicling these first-world problems. Imagine speaking neither Dutch nor English in this process, or being illiterate, or not having resources/time to be able to actually do all these things. The bureaucracy has been on par with the stultifying amount of paperwork involved in, say, buying a house in the States. (More like buying three houses.) You muscle through the process because you have to. The issue here has been trying to do it all with so much of regular life dependent on it: the school and daycare need our residence permits, we’re paying high train and bus fees because we can’t get regular transport cards without the bank card, we’ve been putting off payments to utility companies because they’ll only accept bank card payments, we couldn’t get phones in the beginning without a Dutch bank card, and I’m uncomfortable having us without health insurance for so long. Oh, and Michael can’t get paid until he can follow 5 more steps to get set up with a business account to receive his paycheck. This is what I mean about moving underwater. At the pace we’re going, it feels like we’ll just get this all sorted and it will be time to head home.

Okay, enough. I’m sure there will be plenty more of this to chronicle. On the bright side, the highs of new discoveries are keeping my exhausted boat afloat.

Friday, Orri stayed home with a predictable first-week-of-daycare cold. We’re now without insurance, so I took him to the neighborhood apotheek to ask about medication. Two pharmacists came out and spoke with me in English about all our options and how to keep him comfortable, and then sold me fancy baby cough syrup and saline. They were apologetic for the cost: €5.60, or about US $7. Then I went upstairs to the neighborhood doctor’s practice, to find out what’s involved in an appointment if we need to see a doc. “You’ll have to pay out of pocket,” the receptionist said sadly. The cost to see the doc for uninsured people? €27 ($32 USD).

The night before, I had signed up for an all-inclusive health insurance package for our family — the one we can’t finalize until our permits are ready. All children are covered for free. The adults got full coverage with 100% of costs covered (with a small deductible), including global coverage while we’re traveling and all hospital fees 100% covered. The cost will be €220/month, total, for both of us.

A PSA to my American people: Our healthcare system at home is completely rigged in favor of corporate profitability, and this is happening on the backs of citizens and at the cost of our health. Don’t let anyone convince you that medical costs and insurance costs need to be like they are, or that there’s no hope for a good, affordable public option. Much of the world controls costs and has an affordable single-payer or private insurance-based system regulated by the government. We. Can. Too.

On the social front, we’ve had some incredibly lovely interactions with some Dutch neighbors, particular a family that lives two doors down. There’s a mom who’s a pediatric nurse and offered to help anytime with kid health issues, and a dad who’s an alderman for the city of Arnhem, where we live. They have five children ages 9-15. There’s much to say that I admire about this family, but for now, will just report this: Their two nine-year-olds go to school in the neighborhood, but the 11-year-old and 15-year-old go to school in the next city over (one bikes there roundtrip each day, while the younger one takes the train alone). The 13-year-old takes the train into the center of our city for her school. It’s safe and no one freaks out about their children traveling independently to school. “They’re dependable and they’re ready for it,” their mother explains.

Surprisingly, the expat community has been a little harder to break into. We’ve met a number of folks through the school, but no family get-togethers or playdates have materialized just yet, despite some efforts on my part. People seem a bit weirded out by my zealous invitations. Perhaps I’m trying too hard? Too, there’s the sense that we’re just here for a year, whereas many other families are in this for the long haul. I’m curious to see if we can find our way socially, despite the end date.

So many other notes. A few more observations, and then I’ll stop.

1. This place is incredibly kid- and baby-friendly. Everywhere, even the bank, has at least a small play area for kids with a kid-sized table and chairs and a few toys (and a surprising number of large screens at low levels with interactive games for tiny people. I’m not a fan of this, but the awareness of kids’ needs is super sweet). People seem surprisingly cool with kids being in public just as they are — rarely silent, not always “well behaved.” All kinds of adults engage our kids and want to talk with them.
2. The bike culture is phenomenal, and everyone, even the tiniest child, rides a bike of some sort. Orri at 14 months is all over his scoot trike, zooming down the street in our neighborhood. However, perhaps because the bike traffic and the cars are so segregated (there are bike paths to go almost everywhere, many which never cross a road), it’s easy to trust car drivers too much — and disturbing to see the near-misses we’ve already encountered, and the angry drivers shouting in us in Dutch out of their car windows. It seems true the world over that something happens to people when they get behind the wheel of a car that makes them behave in ways they wouldn’t if they were on foot or two wheels.
3. The weather has been pretty delightful since we arrived. I’m dreading The Season That Shall Not Be Named, coming soon (winter is fine, it’s the one that comes before that always does me in). For now, we’re living with our backdoor always open, the kids in and out, lots of time on foot and on bikes, moving, picking fruit, eating from roadside stands. The weekday schedule feels pretty hectic, but I love that our transitions are largely happening outside rather than in closed containers, and that there are many times in the day here that I make it outside to feel the earth and tune in to the street.
4. The Dutch are CLEAN, phenomenally, inexplicably clean. How do they pull it off? Cleanliness seems so important to people. There’s a company that offers a contract to clean and wash out your curbside trash cans so they don’t remain dirty on the inside. I have a feeling we are not going to be able to keep up with this cleanliness craze.

And finally, while we are here in the land of polders and the protracted national Dutch battle to hold the water back, the Texas coast floods brutally. The whole world is aching for southeast Texas. We are following along from afar, and we are aching with you, too.

Yesterday was one of those late-summer we’re-actually-on-vacation transported-far-away kinds of days. We rode bikes from our house through incredible rolling farmlands, crossed the river on a small solar-powered bike ferry,

and followed a pristine, shady bike trail through woods along the river,

until we happened upon the spectacular Doorwerth castle, which emerged out of nowhere.

Nothing like happening upon a picnic spot a few miles from your home that features multiple turrets, drawbridges, and a moat, circa CE 1280.

(Then, lest I sound like it’s all castles and cow pastures, we rushed home to receive an IKEA delivery, and I continued in vain a protracted attempt to navigate T-Mobile’s Dutch phone system.)

But today, school calls. We visited both boys’ new schools, which begin on Monday.

This will be Orri’s first preschool, a stone’s throw away from our house, where I’ll be working. We were given a lovely tour by a woman who also teaches Dutch at Iver’s school, and Orri moved right in. He’ll be in a mixed-age classroom called the “adelaars” (eagles — the daycare is called Wigwam). The children sleep in small quiet sleep rooms with 2-3 beds apiece that seem like tiny wooden sleep chambers aboard a spaceship. They eat bread, fruit, and yogurt in community meals, and go outside for long stretches every day. There’s a shoeless policy for the whole daycare — no shoes or socks so that kids can get the sensory feedback of walking barefoot. The bathrooms have tiny toilets and sinks just barely off the ground, to help encourage toddlers to learn care for their own bodies. The teachers keep a book about all of the events of the child’s day, and parents are encouraged to write notes back in the book at night so that the teachers have a sense of what happened with the child in their non-daycare hours. (Needless to say, I’m reporting on this because I love it all, at least the way it looks right now.)

The “team leader” (a young man!) sat with me for an hour, asking questions about Orri’s routine, preferences, and talking about how to help him transition to daycare. I asked questions like, “what happens if we come to pick him up and he’s asleep?”, assuming that the answer is your standard, “we wake him up and you take him home,” but au contraire! The young man looked at me in horror. “Sleep is very important! We would never wake him because it was pickup time! We will call you when he wakes and you can come get him,” he reassured me.

“What about your policies and procedures?” I asked, expecting the tome handbook that is required by every childcare institution in the States. (Not knocking the handbook, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there might not be one.)

He looked baffled. The main thing he wanted me to know is that parents should slow down to the child’s speed when they come for drop off and pick up, and try to be quiet and integrate themselves into the child’s world of discovery and attention.

Sickness? “Well, you call us and we talk about how sick he is and we make a decision together about whether he should come to school that day.”

Other questions? “Oh, text me or call me or catch me on Whatsapp,” he says. The same goes for anything I might not understand daycare-wise because it’s in Dutch.

I left feeling pretty impressed and hopeful about having this wee boy spend half-days this way. He was also given a tiny green backpack for his baby things, which looked like a doll’s pack but still dwarfed his baby body. “Back back!” he proclaimed happily when I strapped it on him. 14 months old today.

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Iver is unsettled all day, anxiously awaiting the big school visit, an intro afternoon for new students. We’re hoping that this international school will be a site for building some community here, a center for other expats and families on adventure. We do the 7-minute ride to school, park our bikes, and head inside. The woman greeting us at the door turns out to be one of his two teachers, both of whom happen to be Americans. We compare points of connection, then head inside for a sweet but somewhat disorganized overview, replete with lovely snacks. There’s a cafe/cafeteria in the school that serves up hot lunches (Iver’s first school lunch!) as well as coffee, tea, and wireless in a parents’ area where parents can hang during the day (work from home’rs like myself, presumably, or the many spouses/partners who can’t legally work in the Netherlands).

On our way up to the classroom, we meet another family with a 7-year-old boy who loves Legos, Iver’s classmate, who arrived 2 days ago from Kuwait. We’re comparing points of similarity and reveling in this good luck, when we realize that another new girl in his class is a Francophone who doesn’t speak English. Probably I should’ve kept my mouth closed and let Iver reveal himself at his own pace, but her parents were asking questions about how she’d fare in an English class with zero English skills, so I piped in to offer Iver’s help and support. He dutifully stepped up to the job, this being a role he’d secretly hoped to play: translator who wouldn’t be the weird bilingual kid anymore (which he sometimes is in an American context), but instead someone who has special skills and can have a helper job that lends him A Place of His Own in the class. We’d hoped for this exact scenario — and it came to pass!

The teachers seemed like great human beings, two women who share a teaching job (one Mon-Weds, the other Thurs/Fri), both married to Dutchmen and raising Dutch kids. I wished that they’d engaged the kids moreso than the parents, as I could see Iver trying to connect with them in his awkward, sweet 7-year-old way (and struggling). I noted, as did Iver, that there’s less recess than he’s used to, just 15 minutes in the morning and 50 minutes for a combined lunch/recess. And similarly, we noted that the playground is all built-environment. “No quarry for mining anything,” he noted wistfully. Later, he exacted his toll for the sub-par playground by loosening a spring from the playground floor and pocketing it as a kind of first construction/deconstruction project. “Probably at recre, I’ll just find a spot to sit and not move for the whole time,” he said with resignation.

Other notes: huge interactive whiteboard screens in the classroom (why so large? I wonder), and computers, which he’s not at all used to. A great little reading room attached to the classroom. Lots of windows and natural light, but not nearly enough playground space, although there are walking field trips around the neighborhood, petting zoo, etc. Gym just two times a week, but drama, dance, choir, Dutch, philosophy, and lots of other lessons of interest. Definitely the “whole person” view of the world, which doesn’t take music and art as extra but as core to the development of the human being. One of his teachers is a former primatologist, the other a former yoga instructor. So I’m looking forward to seeing both an understanding of apes and a commitment to mindfulness applied in that classroom.

But the real sense of community materialized afterwards on the playground, as it so often does. We met another American, a 6-year-old boy who’d recently arrived and who had lived just a few miles from Michael’s parents’ house in western Mass, and who also loved Legos and dove right in with Iver. Then a different American family who we’d met previously, with their daughter. And low and behold, the woman from the artist colony showed up on her bike, wanting to make a connection with the school, and I introduced her to the Dutch teacher we’d met at the daycare that morning. (I actually knew two Dutch people and introduced them to each other!!! Not in Dutch, alas. But someday.) And then the French family came to play, too. We all lingered there, swapping notes about where we lived and what we’d seen and what was different about Dutch playgrounds — not all the safety features, many more kids taking more risks and getting hurt, parents and kids both perfectly fine with that. Why even good wine is so very cheap (4-5 euros per bottle). What it’s like exploring a new place.

I left feeling socialized and happy, glad to see my big boy finding his way and taking some risks, with plenty to process later with him. Glad the ice was broken for him, and for us. So glad to have found some similar souls in that community, or at least people engaged in a similar experience that, much like having babies at the same time as other people, instantly connects you regardless of your differences. We could use a lot more of that in America right now — instant points of connection with people that transcend differences.

And then Iver opted to ride his bike all the way home alone, while I went grocery shopping. The Dutch independence has found its way into our household, at least a bit, already! Feeling excited and hopeful, if also wistful that summer is almost over and it’s time to hunker down for a new normal.

Four days in, and it feels like we’re really here. As of this morning, we all have bikes, our house has internet, and we both have Dutch cell phones. We’ve ridden the bus and the train (delightful), navigated the social security system (bureaucratic but ultra friendly), bought groceries (mostly simple, though paying is complicated), and fought politely with internet and phone providers (frustrating and insightful). We’ve seen the rain/sun/heavy rain/drizzle/sun/fog cycle in rapid succession more times that we can count. Iver has jumped on the trampoline to his heart’s content, and also ventured solo around the block to take our trash to the “restavfal” neighborhood trash system. Orri has screamed “BIIIIIIKE!” with glee more times than I can count (and his glee is holding strong, despite the ubiquity of bikes). We’ve started to find places for all of our old and new things in this Dutch home of ours. We’ve found the apple, pear, and plum trees and the blackberry vines in the yard.

People have been lovely and friendly, always inquiring first if we’re tourists, but growing more interested when we say that we’ve moved here. The neighbors in particular have been welcoming and so happy to help: Just minutes ago, a guy down the block knocked on our door to give us a printed-out party invitation to a housewarming party he’s throwing in a month (that’s my kind of planner). Yesterday we met Mika, who’s moving away but answered all our questions about the complex multi-stream trash and recycling system. Then today another neighbor, a pediatric nurse, who offered within 5 minutes of meeting us to help with any kid-related medical emergency.

I’m discovering that almost every family on our small block has a crew of kids, average 3-5 per family! Though most of the kids are Iver’s age or older (few of them are still in the bleary-eyed infant and toddler years), the parents seem surprisingly well-rested and happy, as if it’s the easiest thing to have a large passel of kids at home. More social deconstruction of this is likely to follow, as I attempt to understand how they’re doing it and still standing. First guess (best guess?): When health insurance is automatically free for all children, perhaps there’s some breathing room to not wonder how you’re going to afford to, for example, get your kids the medical care they need.

Much more to say, but for now, a note on being away rather than at home. While this year feels like a ripe time to leave the US, this particular week, it feels like America is on fire, a la the summer of 1967 (not that I was there, but the way I imagine the collective national consciousness to have been). Hair trigger, explosive, we-are-in-danger-of-losing-ourselves kinds of times. We’ve had limited internet to track what’s happening in Charlottesville, but then a report comes through, and how can this possibly be? Do the Dutch people around us know how heartbroken so many Americans are? World War II seems so present here, such a recent memory. But white Americans have been so comfortable for so long that they choose to ignore the fact that, as Ta-Nahesi Coates said, the war is still raging in our country. It goes on. The race war, the drug war, the culture wars, the regime and the resistance. I have no idea yet what it will mean to participate in the resistance from afar. But it is wildly escapist to be here, and I do not take the ability to escape for granted. This is what privilege looks like, and we are both gladly taking the chance to be away, and also watching closely from afar to figure out what our role is.