Precarity & Permanence

A few weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail – one of those official letters that you get periodically as an immigrant, but never as a citizen. I was 37 when I started getting these blue-and-white letters from the Dutch government, granting us the right to live in, or letting us know that we’d soon have to leave, this country.

These letters have always come with instructions and an expiration date: You may pick up your residence permit, or you must show up to give biometric data (photo, fingerprints, signature, eye scan), or you must de-register yourself from the country and go back to where you came from, and you must do it by x/x/xxxx. These letters from the IND (Immigratie en Naturalisatie Dienst) are generally helpful and polite rather than punitive, even when they’re telling you that your permit is going to expire and you must move away. But there is an “or else” to them. You don’t want to mess with the IND.

So much has changed in the last 7 years since I got my first Dutch residence permit. Looking back at it now, I can see in the headshot that my face is fuller, 14 months postpartum and exhausted from an international move with a baby and a highly-disrupted 7-year-old. I couldn’t read a word on that residence permit except my own name and Michael’s (my permit sponsor). Now, I can read both the permit and most of these long, official blue IND letters, without significant Google Translate support. The letters have even taught me a smattering of weirdly formal Dutch vocabulary: voldoende (sufficient), overweging (consideration), hoger beroep (appeal), and more recently, since I took my integration exams, geslaagd (now one of my favorite Dutch words, as it means “passed”).

But these blue letters still evoke a heart-pounding anxiety: Is the government going to show up in my mailbox and tell me I’ve inadvertently done something wrong? That I submitted the wrong application and must leave the country in 30 days’ time (like the letter that our next-door neighbors received, after 15 years of legitimate legal residence here, simply because they submitted the wrong form)? Or that, sorry, I failed to meet the criteria for the desired permit type, and now our 5-year clock for permanent residency has been reset back to Day 1?

These are things you don’t experience when you are a citizen in your home country. You might live with all kinds of precarity — but not this particular kind.

When you are an immigrant, there are no, as my home country calls them, “inalienable rights” to live where you live. While you may have a job and pay taxes and have your children in schools and even own property, should you be so lucky, all of this is subject to an ever-present state of precarity. We could own a house here, which we do, and still be told, if Michael were to lose his job, that we have to leave in 30 days. It’s an unlikely scenario, and there are a few backdoor visa routes, but it’s not unheard of.

Last year, the Netherlands elected the Dutch Trump’s party to lead the government, which shocked much of the country (wait, isn’t this the most liberal democracy in the world?), not to mention the world. There is currently a strong anti-immigration sentiment in some places here, especially in the conservative south of the Netherlands, where we live. There is also a growing anti-European nationalism, which has consequences like threatening immigrant rights (especially for refugees), raising the level of Dutch proficiency required for integration and work environments, and limiting university admissions for foreign students (not to mention fewer university programs to be offered in English).

There is much to say about where these sentiments come from. I deeply understand people’s desire to protect their culture, language and way of life – a bone-deep human impulse. What I don’t subscribe to is the zero-sum story of immigrants as a threat, or the racism and bigotry inherent in welcoming some kinds of immigrants but not others (especially the ones who most need shelter and opportunity), or the incredibly short-sighted notion that national borders are somehow going to protect a society from the kinds of climate migration that are coming, or the ridiculous idea that any country deserves a “unique and special” exemption from its social contract with the greater world.

At the same time, there is much to say about the genuine kindness and generosity we experience every day from our Dutch friends, neighbors, fellow parents, and members of the band that I joined. I do not experience this anti-immigrant sentiment often. Recently, a fellow parent said to me on the school playground, “Don’t worry. You’re one of those good immigrants. We don’t mind you.” Which just laid bare all of the privilege built into our particular precarity. I stood there speechless, wanting to lay down in the schoolyard and weep.

And so. I got this letter in the mail. BESCHIKKING, it said in enormous letters at the top, a word I hadn’t encountered before. “DECISION,” Google Translate told me, although the word also translates as “ORDER.” Iver’s letter, which came at the same time, also had the same heading.

My heart racing, I read on to find that I have been granted permanent permission, renewable automatically every 5 years, to stay here, to live our lives here, to work freely, and to integrate in almost every way. Permanent residency.

In a typical, very nice Dutch way, the letter explained the benefits of my permanent residency (the equivalent of an American green card):

“With an ‘EU residence permit for long-term residents’ you almost have the same rights as someone with Dutch nationality. The big differences are that you are not allowed to vote in national elections and are not allowed to work in certain special (government) sectors (e.g. police, army). To do this, you must first apply for Dutch nationality.

“However, the same rights apply to work, education and vocational training, recognition of professional diplomas, certificates and other titles, social security, social assistance and social protection, tax benefits, access to goods and services, procedures for obtaining housing, freedom of association and affiliation or participation in an employer’s or workers’ organization and free access to the entire territory of the Member State.”

I was ecstatic. This wild sense of joy and freedom and relief filled me, and stayed with me all day. Even now as I think of it, there is a giant exhale somewhere deep inside of me. The precarity, this new character in my life since 2017, has been relegated to a tiny, quiet character in a corner, rather than a whole room in the house, of my psyche. For however long we want to stay…we have permission, formal permission, to be here.

This decision, wildly, came 4 months earlier than I had expected. (The consideration is supposed to be a 6-month process.) It came the very same week that the Netherlands celebrated 80 years of freedom from the Nazis, with a liberation concert at the American cemetery and a parade of locals dressed up in 1940s US military gear, driving around in 80-year-old US military vehicles, playing US big-band music. The week that the country of my birth and citizenship, anachronistically, was quite present in the country where we have made a life. The same week that I got confirmation that my petition to vote in the US elections had been approved, and my absentee ballot was forthcoming. The same week I got confirmation that my 2023 US taxes had been filed.

Permanent residence. Permanence. And what of this daunting word? What does permanence even mean, in a day and age where regimes everywhere are so quickly changing?

“Dutchies forever!” a friend of mine said when I told him the news. Which struck me strangely, because that’s not actually how I feel. I don’t feel like I’m not an American anymore, and the word “permanence” at this point seems to me almost laughable. Like saying that your children permanently live with you, or that you have a permanent work contract. Nothing is actually permanent. The most that one can tentatively imply from “permanence,” at least in human time, seems to me to be “for the unspecified, forseeable future.”

Instead, what permanence means to me is that we have guaranteed rights. Our precarity has been reduced. That we have open-endedness, and we have access. Our kids can go to university in the Netherlands, if they so choose, for very little cost (one of the main reasons that I decided to apply). If something were to happen to our work or to our health, we not only don’t have to leave the country, but we can apply for the social safety net to help us. We can leave and come back to this country easily when we travel. And we have open access to work on the Dutch job market, without any restrictions or salary requirements.

If you asked me if we are going to stay here for the rest of our lives, how could I possibly answer you? We have no idea. In writing his book on first words and last words, Bye Bye I Love You (coming in February!), Michael has said that he doesn’t want to die in Dutch. We miss our families terribly, all the time, and we count the cost of every missed birthday (like my grandmothers’ 90^th birthday in August), every wedding and graduation. Recently Orri has been saying that he desperately wants to go to a wedding, which at age 8 he’s never experienced. I’m acutely aware that by the time I was 8, I had been to easily 10+ weddings, and the funerals of two great-grandfathers.

But too, I know that it gets harder to leave, the longer that time goes on. Partly I feel that I’m out of moves: I just don’t have it in me to start over again, to build a new community, or even necessarily to attempt to retrofit my current self into my former world. Partly, we now count the cost of having moved our kids 3x, back and forth across an ocean, and asked them repeatedly to adapt to a new life.

Aside from the “starting over” fatigue, we are committed to the kids being in a place that’s good for them – for Iver to finish high school here, and for Orri to stay in a situation that’s good for him, as long as it is good. As deep as my American roots are (and they are deep in both Texas and Maine), I have also planted a third taproot here in Maastricht, and it has taken hold. Between joining a Brazilian samba band last year with 40 of the loveliest people (mostly locals) and making some friends and buying a house and making progress with Dutch (het komt goed!) and this year registering my European consultancy (Guide Bird), it genuinely feels like we have an intact life here. That we are not commuting between worlds, but trying to be where we are as fully as possible.

Dual citizenship is not allowed in the Netherlands for people like us, or we might pursue it – especially for Orri, who is functionally Dutch, and who might actually one day want to vote in elections or run for office. But we will not give up our American citizenship, our right to travel back or, if needed, to move home for some time to be with our families. Nor, pointedly, would we give up our right to vote in US national elections. Even though it means paying taxes in two countries, we will not give up that part of ourselves. And so we will now be American citizens and Dutch permanent residents. No longer newcomers or floating expats, but grounded immigrants. Bi-country. Both/and.

And this week, a coda: Yesterday, Michael passed his last integration exam. And I found out that I’d been given wrong information about Orri’s application – so they both, now, qualify for permanent residency too. All 4 of us, on this extended family adventure together.

Way of Speaking

The Dutch have a way of speaking that I am always striving to emulate. This post is most importantly about how Dutch adults talk to children (feel free to skip directly to that part) and how much I love it. But first, some notes on my Dutch language-learning journey.

When you are an adult foreign language learner, you are always a pretender. You make a ridiculous number of mistakes with high frequency, and on your best days, you sound like a child (something that adulthood tries to stamp out of us, generally speaking: to be adult is to attempt to be flawless, even when we know that’s a myth – and it is certainly to avoid the shame and self-judgment inherent in frequent, frankly dumb mistakes).

DuoLingo just told me that I have been studying Dutch on and off for 5 years, since April of 2017 when we first decided we were moving to Arnhem. The journey has been mixed in methods: DuoLingo and an online class when we were in the US; informal conversation with another school parent who volunteered to teach me; tips and hints from neighbors and friends; lots of children’s book reading with Orri; and finally, an excellent teacher for the last 1.5 years who has helped me achieve leaps and bounds. I love the language (“why?” Dutch people sometimes ask me, genuinely bewildered), but progress is also the child of necessity: Although it’s possible to exist socially here almost entirely in English, there is a tremendous amount that you miss — and that you risk — when you cannot read between the lines of a tax or visa letter, or get the gist of a parent meeting at school, or read a street sign. A few days ago I had written an email to Orri’s teacher, and the note I got back seemed to me, between Google Translate and my own interpretation, a bit harsh. I can mostly read the words now — but the tone is next level, and only comes from repeat exposure. (A Dutch friend agreed to read the teacher’s note for me and assured me that, no, this is a completely straightforward business communication, it’s even friendly.)

With each level that I unlock — doing longer stretches in Dutch at the market or store, reading aloud in Dutch to Orri’s class, having full conversations with 5-year-olds who have patience for lots of errors — my jump in self confidence and pride is palpable. And, ever Lisa-Simpson-esque, I am almost silly in my eagerness to help other expat Dutch learners: Michael finally offered gently that it hurts his feelings when I correct every single Dutch sentence he ever produces.

Iver, on the other hand, makes fun of my Dutch. Like the 12-year-old boy that he is, he will press any available advantage, and although his Dutch isn’t better than mine, he rolls his eyes at my singsong voice and non-native accent, over-correcting every perceived infraction. He is old enough to have internalized the message that mistakes are bad, and so although his comprehension is pretty strong and he has several hours of Dutch in school per week, plays on a (non-American) football team in Dutch, etc., he rarely tries to speak — opting instead to mock my attempts. But I persevere, attempting to model for him that the stakes are way higher for living here and not speaking, the rewards for error-ful Dutch way greater than not even trying at all.

And Orri? He is a dream to have as a language-learning teacher, bringing all the patient tolerance of an almost 6-year-old. He loves having one area of life in which he is and always will be superior to the rest of us. At this point, he has lived in NL for 4 of his almost 6 years, and spends more hours per week in Dutch than in English (school, aftercare, football, swim lessons). He is linguistically and culturally a Dutch person who comes from an American family — whereas Iver is an American expat kid. Adults are surprised to find out that Orri is a native English speaker, when they haven’t yet met his family. He is a local, not even just Dutch but a Limburger, from this specific region with this specific accent, even though he doesn’t speak the local dialect (but claims to understand it). Though he sometimes gets tired of translating for me (“if you want to learn this word, you should look it up in the dictionary!”), he is mostly willing to listen to me work through pronunciation and answer my questions and help me with turns of phrase.

All right, enough of the personal journey. So what is Dutch and what are Dutch speakers actually like? Please allow me some stereotypes. (The Dutch weirdly love to be stereotyped and even roasted, as evidenced by their great passion for this book, which treats Dutch culture with antipathy and is incredibly insulting, in my opinion. Dutch people think it’s hilarious.)

Linguistically, Dutch has an even harsher back-of-the-throat “g” sound than German and a rolled “r,” but it’s delivered with such a sonorousness that it sometimes sounds to me like a Romance language (it is not; it’s Germanic, with the same grammar as German but tons of English and French vocabulary crossover). When my dear friend from college who now lives in Germany visited for the Netherlands for the first time, she said that Dutch sounded to her like German with a Texas twang — big wide roomy extended vowel sounds, punctuated with very precisely delivered consonants. This, to me, is a lovely analogue with Dutch culture: I have often thought that the Dutch have the structured orderliness of the Germans (which deeply pleases my German heart) with the joie de vivre of the French. They eat dinner at 6pm, put their children to bed at 8 — rust, regelmaat, en reinheid (rest, routine, and cleanliness) being the values — but love their good cheeses, their garden parties, their cozy warm spaces, their long relaxed vacations.

But the application of Dutch that I love the most, that I positively revere, is the way that Dutch people speak to children. It is perhaps more about culture than language per se, and yet as I have learned more Dutch, I’ve come to recognize it more and more. There is a specific style, an approach, that most Dutch adults take when they talk to children, and it is marvelous. First of all, they slow way, way down. They speak directly to the child they are addressing, as if no one else existed in the world. Their tone becomes caring, bright, patient, and above all, genuine. Nowhere in their speech is there a “you should have” or a “someday you’ll learn that.” It is as if in each of these conversations, the adult has taken it on themselves to do the important work of interpreting the world for the child — with zero pedantry or didacticism, and with no agenda. The sole goal seems to be to offer some perspective as if they were speaking with a peer…except slower, more thoughtful, more intentional. There is a sort of, “oh, come over here, sit next to me, there is something interesting, this is how it works, and here’s what you can expect” tone to it. No preamble — “now I will give you a lesson in x or y.” It doesn’t drone on. There is an expectation that children will pay attention, talk back, ask questions. And it is frankly incredible how well kids respond to this. Even when the adult is trying to stop a behavior or redirect a child, you would never suspect that that’s what’s happening.

Last week Michael and I took Orri with us to the optometrist. Both of us adults were trying on glasses, and the shop was relatively busy. Orri went to the rack of expensive sunglasses, and, not understanding that they were locked onto the rack, began yanking hard to try to get them off so he could try them. I started to call a “wait, stop!” correction across the store, but the sales clerk who was helping us — a young woman — walked calmly over to him, knelt down, and began to explain with zero correction exactly how the glasses were locked on, and then got her keys to show him how the lock mechanism works. She ignored us, the buyers, and all the other people in the shop, to take the time in that bright, calm, “I’m going to share this with you” voice to walk him through it. No drama, no lecture, just an opportunity to show him something.

Later, in his young-child-obsessed-with-gold mode, Orri decided that he’d like to buy one of those cheap golden glasses chains. He stood at the counter, painstakingly counting out 10 euros worth of his coins, trying to add up the amount and getting a little lost midway and just generally taking a lot of time to pay. I felt highly conscious of other people in the store, even of the fact that we needed to pay for our glasses and get home, but resisted the urge to hurry him. The sales clerk stood at the counter with him, helping him count, and then took an extended time explaining and showing him how the chain works, how the money goes in the register, how the chain goes in a little sack. And he, of course, responded, warming to her attention like a flower to the sun, expecting to be treated like a whole person, expecting to be given as much time as he needs, very much wanting to understand how things work.

This is what I mean when I say that he is Dutch: like other Dutch kids, maybe even moreso, he expects to be given the time of day, to be welcomed everywhere he goes, to be talked to and invited to engage by that bright, calm, “I’ve got this, we’ve got this together, you and I” kind of voice. He gets it at school, at swim, at football, at aftercare. It is not that Dutch adults are never tired or cross. But the default mode is warm, kind, extended engagement, not correction. No teasing, no jokes that go over his head, no dog-whistling of one’s adult authority to other adults in the room. The other adults might as well not be there. There is just the adult and the child, moving together at child speed.

I could write another 2,000 words on how I feel about this: how it often makes me tear up with gratitude, this deep level of engagement with my children, this profound patience. How I feel guilty and hopelessly flawed as a parent by comparison, rushing my children through their days and imposing an adult pace on them and often seeking to correct or curb them instead of stopping to meet them exactly where they are. (And in my own defense, I will say that I am an extremely patient parent who already strives to slow down the world as much as I can for them. But I pale in comparison to this Dutch superpower.)

Observing this adult Dutch style has influenced my parenting tremendously. And yet. There is a way in which I feel like an imposter, like this is something I can now recognize and marvel at, but which I will never get quite right. It feels like a skill handed down from generation to generation, which, somewhat like learning a language later in life, one can never achieve to a native-like level if you yourself are not native. While I believe in a growth mindset, unless you live full-time with Dutch people or are primed young with this way of being, you can only approach as a pretender. My own first family was very kind, my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles generally patient and loving towards us kids. But I experienced most adults around me (not just family, but also teachers, shopkeepers, pastors) as stressed, with too much on their plates, no safety net, juggling to hold the pieces together, moving fast and ever faster, hurrying us through life, trying to pack the lessons in, to crack down on bad behavior. This aspect of life is now on hyperdrive in modern American interactions with kids — we adults can’t see it, it’s the air we breathe. We have naturalized things moving fast, kids needing to keep up with our pace, needing to have full lives. We can’t take on more than what’s already on our over-full plates, so we don’t stop to help random children understand things, generally speaking. We correct them and try to bend them to the world we’re/they’re in. And while this is obviously a gross stereotype, too, it’s not a criticism. Stressed adults mean stressed children. It’s not American adults’ jobs as individual people to break from the entire culture and share something that we ourselves weren’t necessarily taught how to do. It’s nigh impossible. The best we could do, which is a lot to ask most days, is to pretend.

And so I watch these Dutch adult/child interactions, and I try to get that calm, bright, sincere, patient voice in my head. I observe the speed, the intentionality of those interactions. I try to catch myself when my urge is to correct, and channel that urge into a slow, direct, warm style of engagement. I try to scrub the “hurry up” and the “stop” and the “should” from even my undertones, and approach those moments like there is something interesting to share. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, it really works.

The Thousand Small Frictions of Expat Life

I call us expats, despite the difficulties with the term, because we are voluntary, mobile immigrants. We aren’t refugees (which is not to say that there weren’t aspects of American life that we were fleeing). We’ve had the great fortune to be able to choose where we live, so far; under what basic conditions; and for how long we stay. Even in Maine I was a Texas expat, far from my roots, uncertain for years about how to make enduring friendships, curiously observing the local ways that weren’t my own.

In the Netherlands, we are expats more formally. Even still, the displacement isn’t as tremendous as going to, say, Malaysia, or the Amazon, or Senegal. We are white people in a dominantly-white country. Most people around me can speak English as a lingua franca (unbelievably well), and many of the cultural assumptions and values are at least familiar – another rationality-loving Western democracy that shares intellectual and political roots with the US. Reading today about the vaccine hoarding that European and North American countries (except for Mexico) are doing, the cultural gaps seem even less pronounced.

And yet. The experience of being an expat is to dance with a thousand small frictions of everyday life, all the time, and sometimes with much bigger ones. Thanks to Google Translate and the internet, these frictions are numbered in the thousands rather than the millions – but I suspect that there may be a universal element to the quality of displacement (for voluntary migrants) across time and place.

When you arrive in a new country, the small frictions feel enormous. In NL, you need a social security number (burgerservicenummer) to do anything (not to mention a visa) – to get a bank account, to get a phone number, to get electricity and water, to enroll your children in school, to get housing. The interdependencies of these systems quickly send you down circular chains that feel unresolvable. Like: you can’t get a bank account until you have a phone number for confirmation codes, but you can’t get a phone number without a local bank account for auto payments. Etc., etc. Rinse, repeat.

At times I’ve wondered why I’m so tired at the end of the day, 2 kids and an emotionally-intensive job notwithstanding. I have come to realize that it’s partly this immigrant friction, a kind of ever-blowing headwind, that is invisibly dragging on my system. It’s a privilege, to be sure, but it requires a layer of constant awareness — a resistance training of sorts.

Sometimes the awareness is passive, like continuously scanning for implicit social rules that you might unknowingly be violating (like unwritten bike rules that you’re just supposed to know). Sometimes it’s quite active, like when I served recently as the “jackets and shoes mother” (de jas- en schoenenmoeder) at Orri’s school. In offering to help a child take off her bike clothes, I struggled with how to say “snowsuit” in Dutch. The girl was confounded by my attempts to reference her puffy snowsuit, and ultimately just opted to deal with the situation herself, wearing a 4-year-old expression along the lines of, I can’t even believe this imbecile mom, can no one procure any competent parental help around here?

So far, after 2.5 years of living abroad (not counting 4 months in London when I was in college), I like the results that this friction brings. It’s tiring. One does often wind up feeling stupid or ashamed. But the cumulative effect is that you start to look at yourself as either a very capable child or a generally benevolent alien, who must choose (daily) to embrace her own unwitting imbecility. Every day, you again must forgive yourself for your beginner’s state of being.

There is so much grace in having to say, to others and to yourself, “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. Now I do. Thank you for telling me nicely that I completely f’ed that thing up. Next time, I will try to do it better.” Or – and this is pretty next-level stuff – “thank you for explaining that thing to me. Although I am a foreigner, I still disagree with your interpretation of the rules, and I know enough at this point to believe that what you’re saying is not accurate. I will continue to do it the way I was doing it before.”

It is a beautiful thing to seize that grace. The compulsory rightness of adult life, at least as I’d always experienced it in my native land, had blocked that grace for me and made it inaccessible. To be a beginner is to be a fool, to take risks, to be shot down, to try again, to be wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong until you finally figure it out and get it less wrong. Michael always says that one reason that adult language-learners struggle is that they face seriously social inhibitions that children don’t. Little kids are absolutely fine getting it wrong until they figure it out. They mostly don’t shut down or stop trying due to shame. Which I have to remind myself, yet again, when confusing makkelijk and mogelijk for the 1,100th time.

Beyond language learning, this principle applies to other domains of disruption, too. It is not overstating things to say that getting to learn about a culture by being a part of it, by being “normed” by the locals around you, by being forced to take risks and apologize for failures and keep showing up again, is a sacred privilege. I could never quite manage that state of grace for myself in America. But here, away from home, as an international expat migrant foreigner, it is this texture of everyday friction that defines so much of the quality of our lives. For these daily lessons in personhood, for this chance to be a beginner, I am grateful.

An Immigrant Psychology

I’ve been trying to write in this blog for months. Post after post, the sentiments seem true and not true, the analysis on pointe and yet not incisive enough. Subjects that a year ago I might’ve been able to treat in my standardly-word-weighty way at 1,000 or 2,000 words, now I can no longer pin down without meandering trails into complex histories, competing theories, caveats and counter examples.

Why? It’s not that the task of writing qua writing has changed, or that I as a writer have (d)evolved so profoundly. Instead it seems that I’m marking some unspoken stage of the expat trajectory, a developmental moment in immigrant psychology. The formula goes something like:

significant geographic change + cultural and linguistic disruption + enough time
=
settling + the formation of a more persistent migrant self + more nuanced understanding

It’s not that I no longer see the differences between American and Dutch culture. It’s that my experience of those differences is ever less black-and-white, more technicolor, less romanticized. It’s getting harder to explain the differences without drawing out complexities in ways that, when I reflect back on what I’ve written, seem overburdened, TMI, either downright boring or hopelessly high-horsey. (Like, “as you can see from my treatise on the ‘managed chaos’ model of the Dutch healthcare system, capitalistic models of medical care can be effectively regulated, but individual perspective must also make a concomitant shift away from radical exceptionalism to non-consumer-based expectations about care,” blah blah blah blah blah. I’ve tried to keep it from getting that bad, but…nevertheless.)

Reaching this moment in my developmental journey as an immigrant is what I wanted. I wanted the level of integration that would allow me to set aside the rose-colored glasses and apply a clearer lens to this adopted country. I wanted the same for my relationship with America — to see my homeland more gently, perhaps, but also more clearly, without the polarizing love and hate that constantly attracted and repelled. Perhaps the next important step would be to move somewhere outside of western culture, to truly shake ourselves loose, but that is not on our horizon for now. For now, this is our horizon:

Both the pandemic and the American racial reckoning have accelerated our clearer-eyed view. We will never be Dutch, but we have now lived through the Dutch version of the pandemic crucible (at least, the first year of it). Importantly, we have not lived through the American version. We have had 2 short stints of lockdown, worn masks (as adults) only in limited indoor contexts, mostly retained our freedom of movement and activity, and now will likely not have access to a Covid vaccine for months.

We have also largely missed the American racial reckoning of 2020. No matter how closely you pay attention, there is no way to live it from afar, no chance to go back and relive it later. Both fires (pandemic and reckoning) have forged American culture in ways we didn’t experience first-hand. This is true even though I am still, to borrow a phrase from my friend Jones, “commuting my soul” to America, given my work with US-based nonprofits.

I mentioned recently to an American friend the real fear that we are already so different that to return to America now would be like trying to fit back into the wild outfits you used to wear in your 20s (back before 2 pregnancies and 2 extra decades of gravity). “Of course you could still reintegrate. It hasn’t been too long!” she sweetly, cheerily pronounced. Technically we have only been away 19 months, or really 2.5 years if you count the 2017-2018 year we spent in northeast Holland. However, given all that 2020 wrought, in Human Years, it feels like we’ve been away for half a decade or more. Reintegration seems like a strange, inexplicable, almost inconceivable thing to contemplate.

Here’s an example. (Trigger warning, Americans: It involves masks). We haven’t seen most of our extended family for almost 2 years. We are eager to get back to the US for a visit but are awaiting vaccine progress on both sides of the Atlantic. For now, my strong sense is that perhaps we shouldn’t visit until masks are no longer necessary, because I cannot imagine putting a mask on my 4-year-old for an hour, much less for an entire plane ride or extended family visits.

Why not? This must sound crazy to my US people. I’m not aware of any American children that don’t wear a mask in daycare or school all day. Further, in my US social circles, masks have become so synonymous with “caring about other people” and non-masking with “every person for themselves” ideologies that I’ve seen people’s eyes widen in horror when I express that we’re not pro-masks for kids. (To be clear, if the government or school told us that kids need to mask, we would absolutely toe that line.)

But this is how we’ve been living: My younger son has never been in a mask. Only this month has the 11-year-old been required to wear a mask in the hallways at school — never in the classroom or outdoors, just when moving around the school buildings. Teachers have just begun to wear them. As with America, masks are controversial and divisive here too, especially adult masking behavior. When the primary school required parents to start wearing masks on the playground at drop-off and pick-up, our parents’ Whatsapp group imploded due to some parents refusing to mask and others insisting on it (we’re with the latter).

But the prevailing cultural value in NL has been that masks are bad for young children. They prevent kids from having normal social interactions with peers and teachers, from perceiving facial expressions, from having the freedom of childhood that is a dominant Dutch value. That, coupled with the deep-seated Dutch attitude that with most illnesses, it’s better to get sick and build natural immunity than to protect your immune system (especially for children), leads to an attitude that masks might be okay for adults, but they do more harm than good to kids.

This may seem like an irresponsible position. We Americans are, I’ve come to see, incredibly quick to moralize and to police each other’s morality (on both the right and the left). We can sometimes be unwilling to consider certain uncomfortable truths: like the idea that even science gets refracted through the prism of culture, or that to achieve true social welfare benefits like universal healthcare or public preschool, we might have to give up some personal freedoms like the right to homeschool or to choose whether to vaccinate our children.

When you live in a giant country like the US with a mainstream language and culture that gets exported to so much of the world, it can be incredibly hard to see the tradeoffs and the shades of gray. In many places in America, you don’t regularly encounter immigrants, travelers, outsiders, people outside your social class, the borderlands of other places just outside your door. And when your media (of any political persuasion) constantly reinforces the story of America as if it is the story of the whole world, it can be really difficult to get a clear view out of the nest down to the sweeping expanse of world below.

And so this is what feels increasingly hard to describe, and increasingly impossible to imagine reintegrating into. We are changing, and we cannot unsee what we have seen. We haven’t gotten a sweeping view of the whole world, but a deep, extended experience of other landscapes (NL, but also Germany and Belgium, which are both a stone’s throw away). The longer we stay, the more these landscapes comes into focus, and the more that returning to the nest seems inconceivable.

As our Canadian neighbors who’ve been here 15 years assure us, one does eventually grow accustomed to the marvelous crumbling castles and the charming half-timbered houses in sweeping river valleys and the gothic gargoyles and twisting church spires. As with anything exotic, it eventually becomes mundane. Things morph from a revelation, a permanent vacation, to just the way things are. Then does the home you’ve left behind become the exotic thing, or does one just accumulate exoticisms that all eventually resolve into normalities?

In the developmental trajectory of our lives as immigrants, this I am curious to find out.

On Bravery & Fear

Today is Sint Michael’s Dag, Michaelmas, which is the holiday of bravery and courage in the anthroposophical/Waldorf/Steiner world. We’ve plunged into that world more than I’d ever expected, as Orri is now attending a public Waldorf primary school, and we’re learning about its rhythms, rituals, holidays, traditions. It is a gorgeous philosophy in all kinds of ways, especially the intersections between Steinerian ideas about what children need and general Dutch notions of childhood, which feel at once ultra-nurturing and innocent and also all about bravery, independence, and encountering the wider world.

Today, on Sint Michael’s Feestje, Orri’s class will go to the forest. They will be given a task, a small act of bravery, to accomplish. They will be expected to summon their deep courage.

Last year, at his Steiner preschool, the Sint Michael’s Feestje task was presented by an old, witchy-looking woman sitting at the end of a long corridor of branches in a dark, overhung corner. No one told the children in advance that there was going to be a task. There was no anxiety built up by anticipation. We just gathered as families, and it became clear that the old woman at the end of the tunnel was polishing apples – beautiful red apples. Each child must walk the tunnel alone to hold out their hand and to receive their apple. No one gave the children a pep talk. No one told them that they didn’t have to do it if they were afraid. One by one, children began to walk through the opening and down the corridor of branches, clearly summoning their bravery, approaching the witch. One by one, each child returned with their apple, smiling, savoring the fruits of their quest. Some children cried, and parents comforted them. No one either forced them or gave them a way out. Three-year-old Orri was pretty intimidated. In the end, 9-year-old Iver held his hand and walked with him to the witch and back again. They both got their apple.

Although Sint Michael’s Feestje is not a standard Dutch holiday, practices requiring kids to summon courage abound here. Older kids and teenagers often engage in a “dropping:”

“…in which groups of children, generally pre-teenagers, are deposited in a forest and expected to find their way back to base. It is meant to be challenging, and they often stagger in at 2 or 3 in the morning.”  

Notably: At night, in the dark, in small groups of kids. No adults, no cell phones. And it goes on as long as it takes.

There is also the practice of smaller children carrying lit candles in ceremonies and of older children jumping over fires as a rite of passage. And there’s a summer tradition of sleepaway camps where children are given pallets and building materials and expected to construct a house for themselves to sleep in.

To American eyes, this might all seem like neglect or cruelty or at least unnecessary risk. It might sound like ignoring children’s fears or pushing them too far, too fast, too soon. At Iver’s school, there’s a camping trip for all children at year-end. If it were a Dutch school, no one would question it, and no one would opt out. But because it’s an international school with families from many different cultures, the school handbook states explicitly: “Please DO NOT allow your child to refrain from participating. All children must join for this important activity.” In other words, do not pre-program fear or anxiety with your children. Do not tell them that because they’re uncomfortable or afraid, they can opt out. This is the expectation. They can do hard, potentially scary, things.

This is one thing I have come to love about Dutch culture: There is a general absence of fear, especially when it comes to kids and childhood, and a deep belief in the capacities of children. These people believe in teaching through experience and in giving ample space for kids to expand. No one telegraphs fear to them. No stranger danger, no “you’re not ready yet.” None of that insidious “safety first” culture that tells kids they should avoid risks, play it safe, stay close to home, that gasps dramatically when a child falls down, that hovers around playground equipment ready to catch a falling child. Just as importantly, no one judges parents for encouraging their kids to be independent. It is assumed that parents’ and schools’ and aftercare programs’ and camps’ jobs are to raise adults, citizens, high-functioning humans – not long-term dependents.

No one here is talking about a wave of anxiety related to the pandemic. Kids aren’t experiencing it, probably because adults generally aren’t either. In general, adult anxiety becomes children’s anxiety – what we grownups absorb from the culture at large or our own histories, we bring into our own homes and schools. What we bring into our homes and schools, our children take on as their own.

Let me be clear: I am not blaming parents from other cultures where fear predominates. In the US in particular, there are complex truths underlying the deep culture of fear. Truths like that Black American parents telegraph fear to their children in an attempt to keep them alive in a country that actively seeks to kill them. And that gun violence in the US is a profoundly terrifying, real epidemic. As a Dutch expat writer living in the US wrote in an incredible essay called Safer at Home:

“The United States excels at making people believe that its systemic failures are their individual shortcomings.”

Certainly I could not resist this fear when we lived in the US, try as I might. Just when I’d feel like I was achieving escape velocity from my own fear, someone would stop at the end of my driveway and tell me I was being unsafe by running to the bathroom while my child played alone in our front yard. Or someone else would tell me I was being unsafe because my 3-year-old was biking very fast down the street. Or I’d hear another parent brightly singsong “safety first!” to their intrepid, curious toddler doing something normal, and the fear motivating all of us suddenly felt inescapable. The result always felt to me like this (again from Safer at Home):

“I’ve begun to recognize the pall of that fear veiling my friends, draining them like a Dementor.”

And so why, the conventional thinking goes, would we willing expose our beloved children to risks? Why would we not foster the fear that might keep them safe? (And to my American friends and family parenting kids of color, I am not speaking to you, because I cannot know what your experience is. I am speaking to relatively safe white middle-class people who have been terrorized into “safety” by the culture of fear around them.)

Risks are where children learn where their limits are and what they are capable of. Terrifying as risks are, especially to the adults watching on, the risks are what we’re supposed to help our children face during their years with us. Living in this culture, increasingly I can see that our job with kids is not to map out the risks for them, nor to give them a plan. It’s not to forcefully coach them and demand that they do something. Oftentimes, the less talking, the better. (Quite a lesson for me. I am a word witch, and I love little as much as the “right words,” copious amounts of them.) Instead, our job is to stand behind our children, to breathe the wind of our confidence into their sails, to stay steady and to trust in their capacity and to stand back as they walk the long corridor – to retrieve their apple or to slay their dragon.

I wish that I’d known this in my early years of parenting. I wish that I’d been able to believe in it. My younger son, now 4, has spent more than half his life in the Netherlands, and he seems perfectly capable of doing whatever he so chooses with a sureness that impresses me. He has been steeped in confidence, despite his American parents.

Meanwhile my older son, American boy that he still is, is imminently capable yet very anxious – steeped as he was in the decades-long pandemic of American anxiety. Our anxiety state. I worry now sometimes that I stood over his crib, breathing my new-parent phantasms of worry into his tiny spirit. Ten years later, he is not debilitated, but he avoids risks that he is clearly more-than-ready for. And he is just as worried about other adults’ responses to his risk-taking as he is about what might happen to him. “This isn’t America,” I have to say to him. “No adult is going to tell you that you’re too young to do something. No one will demand to know where your parents are. You can ask anyone for help if you need it.” He understands this. But still. Old habits, the tenor of your own culture, die hard. I have hope for him still that he will take ever more age-appropriate risks – that there might still be a dropping or a house-building summer camp in his future. That the fear absorbed by his mother from her own culture will be something that he can transcend.

Why bravery? Because our species needs it now more than ever. The months and years ahead are going to test all of us, pandemic or no. We already feel stretched, many to the breaking point. But we are flexible, capable and resilient, more than we know. More than ever, we need to know our own capacities as we stare down the terror. We need to stand behind each other, breathing confidence into each other’s sails, staying steady, as we take frightened but purposeful steps into the dark forest, in search of apples or of dragons.

The Great Return

Friends have been asking for details about our return to school here. What has it been like, how has it gone? Is it all kids in masks, temperature checks, universal testing, kids socially distancing from each other? (Spoiler alert: No. Context first, specifics second.)

The Netherlands is not Sweden in having kept primary schools and restaurants open through the Coronatijd (Corona Time). But nor have we had the level of lockdown of most places in the US and the rest of western Europe. Our borders have not been closed; restaurants largely still do takeout, though no dine-in; and wildly, although personal-contact services have been closed, many shops have remained open, despite their non-essential nature.

Here’s what else looks different than how I perceive things to be in other places:

• • People go outside a LOT, which is encouraged, and more or less seem to maintain the 1.5m-afstand (physical distance), though sometimes I’m surprised at people absentmindedly forgetting to stand apart. Grocery carts are required in the stores (which people definitely still go in to), in order to force a physical distance between people.
  • Hardly anyone wears masks. The few times I have ventured out to a store with a homemade mask on, people stare wide-eyed and move even further away from me. The Dutch perspective has been articulated to me as, “Masks provide a false sense of security from real threats, which makes people let down their guard when they shouldn’t.” As with bike helmets (which no one here except foreigners wear), the idea is that you face the threat head-on and own the risk — no protection involved. This thinking is still a little mystifying to me, but we’ve largely absorbed it (more on that later). However, when public transport re-opens here on June 1, all passengers and employees will be required to wear masks. I honestly don’t think people really even know where to get masks or how to make them, so the re-opening is going to be interesting. (If any NL-based friends are reading this, my American friend Marianna’s company, based in Maastricht, is making brilliant masks. You should order one. Or seven.)
  • People (including us) generally don’t disinfect their groceries. We occasionally use hand sanitizer and wipes, and we wash our hands more than normal and cough into our elbows. That’s really it, disinfection-wise. I’m almost embarrassed to say this to my American people, who I sense are disinfecting like mad and mentally tracking droplet counts from different types of interactions. (I confess that my reaction to that droplet-count piece, so widely shared among my American beloveds, was bafflement. It read like a recipe for feeding your own Covid anxiety, the way that you’d feed your sourdough.) By comparison, to my liberal American friends, I realize that we might seem rather blithe and irresponsible.

So here is my Coronatijd cultural analysis: It is ever clearer to me that you are what you are surrounded by — functionally, if not fundamentally. Your moods, feelings, behaviors, your mortal sense of safety, are opened up or shut down or filtered through what’s in the air and water around you. In the developed world, it is possible to live in a media environment that keeps you somewhere that you are physically not — which I discovered in the early pandemic weeks, consuming too much American reporting and analysis (and consequently battling what felt like a wall of anxiety and overwhelm). But once I committed to just being here in NL, mentally and physically, with occasional dips into other media coverage, it was remarkably, stunningly easy to settle into the general sense of well-being, of a basic trust and togetherness through this crisis.

This is what that trust and togetherness looks like here, on the ground: There’s a saying in our city, “haw pin,” from the local language (Mestreechs, which is decidedly not Dutch). It means “hold on.” In windows across the city, people have displayed Haw Pin posters as a way of saying to each other: We’re in this together, hold on, stay strong, don’t give up, we will get through this together. People write it in chalk on brick walls. Or this particular message, which I loved so much:

“Samen komen wij deze Coronatijd wel door.”
“Together we will come through this Corona time.”

Some neighbors here started an email listserv, which our neighborhood has never had. The first message explained the big banner in a window near our house: “Welcome home to Huub! Huub is 83 and has recovered from Coronavirus and is coming home from the hospital!”

I can’t really, responsibly compare our experience being in the Netherlands during Coronatijd to what it’s like on the ground anywhere else. But I am profoundly grateful for what it has not been for us: not full of fear; not so restrictive (perhaps because we are already dislocated, used to working from home and living in Zoom and having our kids home a lot without much help); not deeply divisive; not without local and national leadership. We are relying on hospital capacity, all-inclusive health insurance, and a strong social safety net. We’re skeptical about some of the Dutch government’s perspective, like the rationale for re-opening schools, but we basically trust its competence and its commitment to the social contract. We feel, as much as is possible amidst a pandemic, relatively safe.

And in this way, I already feel surprisingly not American — rapidly distanced from the self that would’ve been experiencing the Coronatijd in Maine. At the same time, we are still, of course, way too American to be Dutch (constantly doing things that violate unwritten rules and are inexcusably “not normal”). In between worlds, which is what it means to be a (voluntary) immigrant, an expat type. We always would’ve been so, just by coming here, but the Coronatijd has hastened and magnified the degree of in-between-ness.

So. The Great Return to school. (Made you wait far too long for the school return details, didn’t I? Thought this might not make sense without the above context.)

As I write this, Iver is next to me on the couch working on a poetry assignment, while Orri is at daycare and Michael is upstairs working. Primary school (K-6) is back part-time for an unspecified period, every other day at school and alternating days online, to allow for 50% of students on campus at any one time. Daycare is full-time, with the acknowledgment that there’s a 0% chance preschoolers can be kept apart from one another or their teachers, so no need to reduce capacity. Some of the specifics:

• • Primary: Part of the decision to re-open primary (but not secondary, roughly ages 11-18) was that families mostly don’t travel far to primary schools, so it doesn’t require fully re-opening public transport. Mostly kids go on bikes or walk, with a few schools — like Iver’s international school — that have populations traveling farther by car. In lots of cases, kids can go alone, which is a cultural value: kids’ independence and the ability to move about solo in the world as citizens. For Iver, we bike together the 3 minutes to the corner nearest school, where he splits off and goes alone the rest of the way. (This is purely for togetherness purposes — he bikes home alone each day, and would probably prefer to go both ways solo.) Younger primary kids are dropped off a bit away from school and escorted onto the campus by school staff. Kids are expected to go straight to their classrooms one-by-one, rather than playing and lining up on the playground to enter in a group. We hear that there is a lot of handwashing during the day, and kids grouped 2 to a desk cluster instead of 4. Kids and teachers aren’t wearing masks or gloves. The (science-informed but controversial) belief here is that kids are not super-spreaders, so the real risk is to teachers and staff, who have the option to remain teaching online with an in-person replacement for the classroom. Parents don’t have to send their children to school — although homeschool is basically illegal here, the truancy officers won’t fine parents who are worried about their kids’ health and decide to keep them home (at least for a few more weeks).
  • Daycare: All kids are returning, though of course parents can choose to keep them home. Instead of all entering the kinderopvang at once, parents and kids wait on dots outside the classroom for their turn to enter, one at a time. Hand-sanitizing is mandatory for parents. Kids are delivered swiftly to their teachers, who are supposed to swoop them up and take them for a “cozy handwash,” a one-on-one greeting + health ritual (pretty sure that handwashing wasn’t a big thing at the daycare prior to Coronatijd, as the general Dutch philosophy is that germs help your immune system grow stronger, so the more, the sooner, the better). The swift goodbye would’ve been quite difficult for us six months ago, when long goodbye/transition rituals were still critical for Orri. I feel for families trying to negotiate that in this moment. The minimal interaction between parents and teachers does feel a little sad, as I’m wishing for greater connection about our kid’s experience and needs. But the part we’re the most confounded by is the new requirement that sick children (cough, runny nose, fever, any of the above) must stay home, as it seems that most little kids exhibit some of these symptoms rather constantly. The daycare acknowledged the inherent flaw in the logic — while before, a cold or even a fever certainly weren’t cause for keeping your kid home, the new national rules are the new rules…even though they believe that kids mostly don’t spread Coronavirus. This is the new normal. For now.

So that’s what it looks like, in practice. A little chaotic — who’s in school and who’s home today, and for what hours? But decidedly less disruptive than a return to school might be elsewhere, because our quarantined state was also not so stark as it has been in many places.

Our job now seems to be to attempt to establish a new normal, for however long the school situation is like this. Could be another week — after that, kids might go back full-time — or through the end of the school year (July 1), or longer. So far, I’ve found no summer camp options for Iver that are planning to open. No one is even talking or, it seems, really thinking about what might happen come fall. The time horizon feels close, at human scale: weeks, a month, but not longer.

“Together we will come through this Corona time.”

Disclaimer: Somehow I feel concerned that my US-based people will find this whole perspective intolerable. My previous attempts on social media to offer some Coronatijd view from outside America have indicated that it can be hard for Americans to hear right now. Things are so polarized in the US that non-mask-wearers are cast as selfish, immoral people; those who are working hard to extend the quarantine, bearing all the personal costs, get called sheep and told to stop ruining the economy. These are false dichotomies. But it’s so, so hard to see that when you’re on the inside of it, pitted against each other in a zero-sum system that serves the interests of the few on the backs of the many.  I am writing this to whisper gently, softly in your ear, if you are open to hearing it:

I am sorry that it is this way where you are. It does not have to be like this. You, and humanity, deserve more trust, more togetherness, a different way. Please do not let the fear overtake you. You are not alone. Haw pin. We may be apart in all kinds of ways, but the underlying truth is that we are in this together.

Coronavirus & Complexity

Here, we are doing what much of the world is doing — sacking out, settling in for the long haul, sussing out the new normal. I’m trying to take each week as if it is part of the way of the future, knowing that we might be in this phase for this for a long time, possibly multiple rounds of social distancing. In other words, each week is not just a patch to make it to the next week, but the new way itself.

There’s a lot of emotional terrain to be explored in living abroad during a pandemic. There’s the relationship with one’s host country — which has mostly manifested for me as gratitude to the Netherlands’ willingness to be top-down about protecting people, cancelling schools, closing restaurants, saying “this is a priority and it’s not going to be easy, but we need to save lives.” The prime minister addressed the country for the first time in 40 years. Ultimately, NL is taking this seriously, though in its very Dutch way, there is also the general sense that people’s immune systems will ultimately win out, that we want a herd immunity approach, just little by little rather than as an all-at-once assault. Unlike all the countries around us, the borders are not closed. Public transport is running. Multiple people at once can go into a grocery store, rather than the one-by-one approach that, for example, Germany is pursuing.

I’m grateful too for the healthcare system, which if you have not lived with either the American healthcare system or that of a developing country, you might not be able to deeply appreciate. Never here have I worried about general access to care (although any overwhelmed healthcare system, even a well-provisioned one, will buckle under pandemic conditions). Never here have we worried that we’d be de-prioritized behind someone who can pay, or that losing our jobs would mean losing our healthcare, or that crushing medical debt would drag our family down for life or even generations.

Beyond the relatively minor adjustments required of us as a family — figuring out how to all be home together full-time, structuring a new schedule, trying to get both kids’ disparate needs met, trying to make sure each adult gets enough work time, navigating how to get groceries and keep the kids exercised and manage without direct social interaction — there’s one thing that I am really struggling with: encountering the people in my life who seem unable or unwilling to engage with the complexity of the Coronacrisis, as it’s called here.

There are the terrified Americans that I work with every day (people who I love and deeply relate to in most ways). I understand why they’re terrified — see reasons above, plus a profound lack of leadership from the US federal government. The level of terror seems to be as contagious as Covid itself. I’ve had a bad cough this week but no fever, and multiple friends, clients and colleagues have said anxiously, “We’re worried about you. What are you going to do?? How will you handle it? When will you get tested?” I’m both appreciative of the level of their concern and also a little baffled. We’re all going to get this, right? So if what I have now is Coronavirus or not, does it really matter (at least, until the point that it gets serious)? Which also isn’t to say that I take it lightly. But somehow — perhaps because I’m physically away from my cultural context? — I can refuse to be colonized by the fear and worry. We’ll deal with it if it happens. I’m concerned for my elderly family and concerned for vulnerable people, and I’m trusting our immune systems, our resilience, and our ability to cope (until the signs say otherwise).

By contrast, I have a beloved Dutch friend who believes that isolation measures are a worse cruelty than the virus itself. I can see where she is coming from: Her father recently passed away (prior to the Coronacrisis), and were he still alive, she’d be unable to take him medicine, keep him company, care for him and also for her 3 children who are still at home. But she is unwilling to take this seriously, sending me article after article about dissenting scientists who think we’re overreacting to the pandemic, making what seem to be conservative pro-economy arguments, trying to scare people that the pandemic is really just grounds for authoritarianism to take root. I am having a hard time engaging her in conversation about her beliefs. Really? I think. You want to hold onto your cultural model (that our bodies must get and fight this virus to avoid disruption to the social order) at all costs? If not this toll, what toll would be enough to shake you out of this fantasy that things should just go on as normal? Are you not paying attention to the tens of thousands who are dying? Does it just not matter? I truly love this friend, who in most ways I consider kindred: our general values, beliefs, and approach to parenting and family life are similar. She raised kids in the US and UK for years before returning to NL, so we even share many aspects of our cultural models. But this? Why dig in on what seems to me to be the best of this country: a sense that when it matters for the health and security of the population, you can be top-down in order to create (and support) a great society? Why push back against that?

Other extreme polarities that can’t tolerate each other also feel like anathema to me.

People who are struggling with being home and a slower pace: There are really important and valid reasons for this. Home is not a safe or good place for many people. But for those for whom it is: Can they also not engage the gift of this moment, alongside the tragedy?

Likewise there are people in my life who are all-on-board with the profound transformation that is possible coming out of a profound disruption like this one. I’m hopeful too, deeply so. But I have to draw a line at the blithe refusal to acknowledge the tremendous suffering happening: the deaths and sickness, of course, but the real financial instability and precarity that so many people, probably most people, are navigating right now. The need and the terror. Highly privileged people cannot forge ahead in solidarity towards a better way without looking directly at how much suffering this crisis has already delivered, without feeling the ways that any major change is going to involve tremendous pain and fear for a lot of humanity.

And then…and then. There are my liberal Americans who are leaning hard into doing “the right thing,” behaving in the right socially responsible way, not being individualists by doing this as a sacrifice for the sake of the social good. I appreciate this position tremendously right now too: how people are holding each other accountable. And yet…there is a dogma in the must-stay-home-at-all-costs position that also smacks of the performative goodness I often find intolerable in my own demographic/cohort, my peers and friends. This is the upper-middle-class perspective that everyone should be home — not acknowledging that for blue-collar workers, for example, there’s no real way to actually stay home. Or that for some people, ordering groceries online may be completely out of reach. Or…and this I’m watching closely in myself…owning the fact that our privileged ability to stay home is predicated on being able to order all kinds of things (groceries, plastic easter eggs, medicine) that just magically show up at our door, because a whole chain of someones made themselves vulnerable in order to procure, stock, process, package, and deliver the thing that we just couldn’t live without. We got to avoid putting ourselves and our families on the line — while many, many others did not.

Two weeks ago, a client (who is a friend) broke down in a meeting admitting that every day, she watches her immuno-compromised husband go to work in an Amazon warehouse and wonders if this is the day that will start the end of things.

This week, a pregnant client in the NYC area who works in a medical humanitarian organization said (also in a meeting), weeping, “It’s not just that we all know someone here who’s affected, people locally who have died. It’s that in our line of work, we can’t avoid knowing what’s coming — what the future will be like as Covid spreads through refugee camps, as the world’s most vulnerable people are taken down in huge proportions. We can’t unknow what’s coming.”

Everyone is strapped, everyone is afraid, everyone is struggling and anticipating struggle. I find it hard to muster sympathy for Rand Paul or Boris Johnson, finally affected personally by the kind of situation that even their cruel worldview can’t insulate against.

But I also know, deep in my bones, that a lack of compassion helps no one. No one asked for this. Even the best-prepared, most centralized Covid response would have minimized deaths — not stopped them entirely. In the West, most of us don’t even know, can’t even imagine, what it would really be like to lock down at the level that Singapore and South Korea have, or to be fully quarantined and individually tracked in the way of Wuhan. This disruption we’re facing here is profound, and it could be far, far more intense.

To me, this is the awful amazing equalizing poetry of this time: Try as we might, both/and will keep knocking at our door. Try as any of us might to ignore the deaths, to police others into staying home, to imagine that nirvana is coming, to wallow in our own personal annoyance/difficulty, to pick any one aspect of this crisis and take a hardline position — we will be thwarted. We will call it a hoax and then lose someone we love to Covid. We will gnash our teeth about how awful it is to be forced to be with our children full time, and then find ourselves desperate at the idea of sending them back to school environments that are far too rigid in order to allow us to go back to working inhumane hours every week. We will have social media fights with people venturing out who we believe should be staying home, and then continue to endanger others so that we can live in our middle-class consumerist castles, our children safe and well. We will defend a failed president and failed state while much of the world gets the virus under control and the US with all its vast resources does not. And on and on.

This is the great complexity that I believe we’re being asked to engage.

Come on, humans, I keep feeling. Let’s take our heads out of the sand, let’s put our ideologies on a shelf, let’s acknowledge our very real, fragile mortality. Let’s be accountable to each other and to ourselves. It’s not all relative — there is science, there is expertise, there are solutions that are working. And we are also not fully in control. Terrified people do not make great students — whether they’re terrified of Coronavirus or of isolation or of falling into poverty or of authoritarianism.

But we are all being asked to encompass profound complexity and contradiction right now, to be bigger than we were before. To level-up as a species. We may first need to gnash our teeth from our particular personal and cultural positions. And then we need to look around, open ourselves to other people’s realities, expand our sense of things, see who needs help. I’m saying this to you. But really, every day, most of all, I am saying it to myself.

Settling

I’ve been silent here for awhile, though trying to put together posts on a few things: namely Zwarte Piet, a phenomenon I’m still trying hard to sort out, and the specter of Carnival, which is huge in Maastricht and already quietly polka-thumping its crescendo under the steady pulse of the city, although it’s still more than a month away.

What I’m realizing is that I’ve passed the phase of newcomer noticing, of holding myself at bay as if I’m just an extended visitor, charmed by every tiny part of this experience (although still that is my feeling most days). Instead, we’re all four moving into an era of deeper engagement with the place.

Here’s my second time ferrying our full-size Christmas tree home by bike.

This is what I had wanted and wished for. When we had to leave the Netherlands 18 months ago, some American friends said things like, “Seems like you found your forever place,” because we expressed loving Arnhem and NL so much. Those expressions struck me as odd – the same language that Americans use to talk about adoptable pets finding their “forever home.” (By contrast, Dutch people were flabbergasted that we loved Holland so much. “But America is so exciting!” I heard over and over as I called to cancel various Dutch utilities before we left. “I’d love to live in America!”)

The truth is that it’s possible to highly regard and deeply romanticize any place where you don’t have to attempt to build a long-term life. Greener grass, the dopamine of constant novelty, imagining yourself a different person, all that. The Elizabeth Bishop poem Questions of Travel is never far from my mind (excerpted, emphasis all mine):

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

Oh must we dream our dreams and have them too?

We didn’t come back to the Netherlands because we were ready to get married to it. That would’ve amounted to the impulsivity of marrying your study-abroad sweetheart (although I know at least two friends from my college study-abroad program in London who did just that). Michael and I together had had a passionate love affair with the Netherlands, and we wanted to come back to try out Real Life. But we’ve both loved and lost before (homes abroad, that is), spending years longing for other places whose real original magic had been situational, temporary, irreplicable. We knew that this time, we needed to find out more concretely what it’s like to really settle in and integrate into this place, which in some ways is quite different from Arnhem. No single year can really tell you what a lifetime (or even decade-long) commitment might be like.

When you choose to live abroad, you will never be from the place you live, no matter how well you might pass. Particularly if you’re not partnered with a native, there will be some questions that people just can’t answer for you – intimate ways of living that you don’t have access to; places you can’t go; ways you can’t merge. Unlike a marriage, where both parties grow towards each other over time, you might change, but the place will not bend towards you. The adaptation – or failure to adapt – is all yours. My Dutch isn’t coming along nearly as fast as I’d like, but I now know when a Nederlander is being kindly direct with me versus being a jerk (it happens, mercifully rarely); how to take up an appropriate amount of social space without being an obnoxious foreigner (most of the time); what basic and intermediate moves are required in transactions and interactions; and how to navigate many of the institutional relationships that are required.

In other words, I am not from here, but I really live here. I still love living here. And I can also see the place more clearly, including the kinds of things that might grate on me over time (though admittedly, little is grating on me just yet except for loneliness). Most of it has to do with life as an expat: not living in a house that is ours; trying to build a social network with people who are also coming and going (because other expats are generally more likely to want to be friends with us than natives are, especially in the south of NL where we live); navigating the complexities of two intensive tax systems and owning a business in another country; the likelihood that although almost everyone speaks English, I will probably never be able to get a local Dutch nonprofit client.

However, some of what seems likely to grate on me is about cultural differences. It’s small things, like letting go of the fact that my soon-to-be-4-year-old will be taught “computer literacy” in Dutch kindergarten, which begins here at age 4 (far too early for my tastes). Homeschooling is functionally illegal here, so there’s no way out of this one. And…first-world problems, I know.

It’s also the unchecked-prejudice that sometimes comes out of Dutch people’s mouths and catches me by surprise, like when our babysitter called working-class people living in subsidized housing “trailer park people,” or the garbage man told me that people from a nearby neighborhood are “the trashy people.” Or when it has been baldly suggested that people from a certain other faraway country all smell bad. (Note: People the world over nurse their secret prejudices, but in my US milieu, it’s no longer socially acceptable to articulate unfounded, hateful opinions, particularly about vulnerable people.)

It’s the blitheness with which people discuss Zwarte Piet, as if “diversity” were the solution to a tradition that comes from colonialism and slavery. From an American perspective, the relative lateness and reductive terms of the public discourse around ZP is baffling. From a Dutch perspective…they might not let me stay if I criticize the beloved tradition of Piet too harshly. (I hope my future post on this topic can both honor my Dutch friends and also apply a decolonizing perspective to the Piet and Sinterklaas tradition.)

So. We are settling in, and settling down for awhile, putting down roots while trying to avoid the thorny question of a “forever home.” This is it for right now. We still own our home in Maine. Here, we will take it month by month, year by year, but we will endeavor to engage deeply with this place for as long as we get to be here. I hope we can be good citizens, build a community, solidify our Maastricht senses of self, pursue whatever belonging might be possible for our family here. I hope we can move beyond questions of travel to questions of real life, while also drinking in the considerable novelty and magic that this place has to offer.

Healthcare, Managed Chaos

“The Netherlands healthcare is ‘a chaos system’, meaning patients have a great degree of freedom from where to buy their health insurance, to where they get their healthcare service. But the difference between the Netherlands and other countries is that the chaos is managed. Healthcare decisions are being made in a dialogue between the patients and healthcare professionals.”

If you’re interested in healthcare models relative to capitalism, this post is for you. Long personal account first. Analysis second.

For the past month, like our October two years ago in Arnhem, we’ve been dealing with health issues of the everyday (but nevertheless difficult) variety.

Round 1: Michael came down with a case of strep throat. He discovered in the process that there is no test for strep throat here – neither the instant nor the overnight-culture variety. When he went to the emergency clinic over the weekend, they refused him antibiotics (for all of the reasons that antibiotics are bad for you and for the population at large), with the lukewarm reassurance that he would turn a corner in 5-7 days. While the fever was gone by the one-week mark, the glass-in-throat feeling of strep stayed with him a solid 2.5 weeks.

Round 2: Midway through this, I was struck by strep. Having heard that I’d need to exaggerate my symptoms to in order to get antibiotics, I went to the doc prepared to play it big. No need: Between the high fever, pockmarked throat, and full-body rash, I was in and out of our huisartspraktijk (GP) with antibiotics in hand – no exaggeration necessary – within 10 minutes.

Round 3: But then, a week later, on the way to Puerto Rico for a conference, my strep came back again, strong. The doctor at the hotel prescribed a super dose of antibiotics, plus steroids for the swollen throat.

When later I showed our Dutch doctor what the American doc had prescribed, her eyebrows shot up to her hairline: “That’s the strongest possible antibiotic at the highest dose that we can legally prescribe in Holland.”

At the height of our glass-in-throat time, Michael found an over-the-counter strep test that you can buy in the US. While back in the States, I ordered a 25-pack delivered to the hotel and carried it across the ocean with me.

Round 4: Then the big boy woke up with his own glass-in-throat-o-rama. Knowing that the fever and vomiting were probably next, we gave him the strep test and got an almost instant positive. He rode to the doc’s office on the back of my bike, slumped against me.

At the doc, I pulled out the strep test almost triumphantly. Subtext: “Aha! Take that! You think we should wait for antibiotics because maybe it’s a virus! But I’m his mother and I am telling you, you must treat him! Give me the drugs!” Without a trace of condescension, the Dutch doctor laughed and clapped her hands in delight. “What?! How cute!” she proclaimed. “Americans have a home test for streptococcus!”

When I pressed her on why the Dutch don’t have this most ubiquitous, baseline test, she cocked her head thoughtfully. “Really, knowing that it’s strep throat doesn’t change anything for us in terms of protocol,” she said. “We want your body to fight the infection. Antibiotics are bad for everyone individually and for all of us. If you don’t do anything, we know that you’ll feel better within 5-7 days. So unless you have a high fever, we let your body fight the infection.”

The same is true for chicken pox. There’s no vaccine here. When a child contracts chicken pox, the daycare workers post a sign so that everyone can go over to that child’s house for playdates – hoping for an infection, to build natural immunity and to get chicken pox out of the way early.

If you or your kids are sick, unlimited or extremely generous sick-leave policies (with days for adults and additional days for staying home with your sick kids) mean that you can stay home for 5-7 days or more when you need to. This is part of the whole work to live, don’t live to work philosophy.

In addition, school sick policies are beautifully lenient. Is your kid too sick to go to school? Well then, keep them home. Subtext: Use your common sense, do you need a spelled-out policy for every single thing? If it’s just a regular old cold or low fever or earache or lice or something, send them to school anyway. Kids aren’t really going to avoid getting each other sick – that’s a fantasy. Let them build their immune systems.

And indeed, after the doc prescribed a minor antibiotic for Iver, much thanks to his fever + the positive strep test + my advocacy, she asked him cheerily, “So, headed back to school now?” She expected that he’d take a first dose and then get on with a normal day.

To recap, the Dutch healthcare philosophy is: Being allowed – or forced – to fight non-life-threatening infections without medication builds a tremendously strong immune system. In the meantime, while you ail, there is always the ever-present suggestion to “take a paracetamol” (acetaminophen).

In theory, this is awesome. In practice, it’s quite a difference for Americans. Most of us, including me, are used to being treated as healthcare consumers, who expect an answer or a fix or a program for everything that ails us (much thanks to Michael for pointing this out to me). We expect a diagnosis and results; then if we don’t like the answer, we seek second opinions.

Americans are used to coordinating complex webs of our own healthcare. In my demographic, that often means western allopathic care + complementary and alternative medicine + homeopathy and naturopathy. I’ve observed that Americans tend to either: 1) fully trust the medical system and give our care over to docs (as we did in both Michael’s and my first family), OR 2) we’re iconoclastic, mistrusting mainstream medicine and protocols, always after the DIY or alternative approach, in search of the proverbial holistic health. (As adults, Michael is more #1; I’m more #2. We got our healthcare there from amazing, holistic-inclined family and pediatric NPs. And we had two homebirths in the US, which probably puts us squarely in camp #2.)

By contrast, the Dutch do not treat people as healthcare consumers, but as citizens receiving healthcare: individual physiologies, yes, but members of a population. Dutch doctors are the frontline workers in a public-health-first system. They’re not unsympathetic to individuals, and they’re particularly great with kids. But they are not in the business of giving out medicine-on-demand; of making a profit for pharmaceutical companies; or taking orders from insurance companies. I don’t have the sense that they care if you switch providers because you don’t like the diagnosis. For many ailments, there’s not even a diagnosis or a fix or a program. There’s just good old-fashioned time, paracetamol, and come back again if this issue doesn’t resolve on its own.

In the Netherlands, health insurance is private (with a ton of choices), regulated, and mandatory. All of the basic elements, including mental healthcare, are always covered. All children are free; adults pay about $120 USD per month. Coverage is pretty much 100% with no deductibles. When Orri was admitted to the hospital two years ago, we walked out with $0 paid or owed. Same for every doc’s appointment, vaccination, and emergency care visit we’ve ever had.

And although insurance and practitioners operate privately (the capitalism part), the government and centralized regulatory bureaus ensure quality, mandate coverage, and keep costs and waiting times down. It’s not a perfect system, but it has been consistently rated the #1 or #2 healthcare system in Europe for the last 13 years, with the consistently lowest wait times, highest quality outcomes, greatest range and reach of services, and other metrics on the Euro Health Index.

So. Managed chaos. World-class medicine, but without the consumer choice. It can be maddening and painful if you’re used to meds-on-demand, and you definitely have to advocate for yourself and your kids. But the Dutch healthcare system is exactly the kind of institution that gives me hope that if we can’t stop capitalism, we can at least mitigate its profound cruelties (eg outrageous costs of pharmaceuticals and specialists; crushing medical debt that can follow a family for generations; etc.) via regulation and a strong social contract.

This chart on life expectancy against healthcare spend by year really says it all (gratis, Michael). The USA is the red line, and the Netherlands is in the upper middle. Let this sink in for a moment.

In other words: There IS a sane, sustainable, affordable, and humane approach to healthcare. The model exists and is proven. Healthcare consumers may have to give up some things: You don’t always get instant gratification or relief, and you have to agree to work within the system. You have to get the vaccinations – except in extreme cases, you don’t get to opt out of the public health protocols. But what you get in return for giving up some of your personal “rights” and access (which mostly only the wealthy can afford anyway) is something that serves everyone better, more evenly.

Though at times it’s personally hard to swallow (awful strep throat pun, anyone?), on the whole it feels like the way things should be.

Place Love

How many times do we get to fall in love, in one lucky lifetime? In my worldview, a good life involves falling in love deeply and enduringly just a few times — with a lifetime partner or two, child(ren) if we have them, a profession/practice/purpose/cause, and perhaps a place that we decide to settle or at least to revisit often. But this is the view of a constitutional monogamist — some might say that the more you get to fall in love (even when falling out of love is necessarily implied), the better.

Place love (topophilia, a word popularized by John Betjeman and WH Auden) is something that I’m primed for. Like the psychology of securely attached children who are then primed for a lifetime of healthy relationships, I was raised with such a strong sense of place — counter to what most modern American kids experience — that I feel freed somehow to roam in the world, to love deeply and intensely even places that will never be mine. I grew up a German Texan in an area where my family had been for 8 generations (our heimat), wearing holiday dirndls; singing German beer hymns; celebrating Wurstfest, Wasserfest, Wassailfest; swimming at the Schlitterbahn (water park); and knowing all my second and third cousins. We didn’t speak German anymore — my family, like everyone else in the area, had dropped it during World War II — but my Great Grandmother Thelma and Great Great Aunt Helen would still teach me some when I asked. No matter that no one I knew had ever actually been to Germany, nor that our Germanness might be so watered down that it could be taken for a caricature. I grew up seeing life-sized dioramas of my ancestors at the town Heritage Exhibit each year, replaying our “arrival in America” story from 150 years earlier. Authenticity didn’t matter so much as having a solid sense of story and self that was intimately tied to our limestone-and-creekbed homeland. (Michael will also say that he fell in love with me the first time he visited my hometown, when I took him around town showing him where my ancestors were born and the buildings that my great grandfather built and the ancestry mural that my mother helped to commission.) My sisters, cousins and I are the increasingly rare white Americans who’ve had a kind of “ethnic” upbringing, problematic as it may be for me to claim that term. I’ve had all of the perks and none of the costs implicated by outsiderness.

So, what I’m primed for is this: To show up in a place, behold its beauty, attempt to grapple with its complexity, and try to follow the trails to its inner core. Yesterday, on a walking tour of Maastricht, it hit me: I’m falling in love with this place, positively giddy about its beauty, eager to rub up against its complexity, looking for the roads that lead to the inner core.

(City tours are supposed to make you do that, so…I’m a sucker, guilty as charged.)

And the history and longevity of one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands provides so much to grab onto: Maastricht has been at times Celtic, Roman, French, Belgian, German, Spanish, and Dutch. There is visible residue of each of those eras, piled upon eras, everywhere that you look. It’s a deeply Catholic city (60%) and a long-term military stronghold that was really only demilitarized, so to speak, in 2001 — thank you, EU, for the open borders. Oh, and did I mention that the Treaty of Maastricht, signed here in 1992, is what formed the modern EU? 

There’s much more to say, and I’m out of time. Consider this a first installment in place love, with so much more about Maastricht yet to come.