Creeping In

When we first moved back, a lot of people were curious about our kids and how they identify themselves: do they feel more Dutch (after all they were born here and lived here the first 7, 5 and 2 years of their lives) or American? My answer was a resounding ‘American.’ Five years is a really long time in kid-terms. And they were still so little when we moved. Obviously my eldest was the most ‘Dutch’ of the three, and my daughter, starting kindergarten that fall, had the most adorable Dutch accent when she spoke English. My youngest had just started talking and quickly learned that people didn’t understand his Dutch words. For him, The Netherlands was where we went on vacation, where Oma and Opa lived, nothing more.

So yes, this move was hard for them, and a huge change. It didn’t feel like coming home; not at all. We’re a few months further in now and it’s still rough at times, but I see them settling, I see them finding their way, and that makes me happy. And in the same breath, a little sad. They are slowly, while still 100% completely themselves, becoming more Dutch, less American. I see it in how my youngest writes his cursive capitals. In how my eldest casually uses the word ‘chill’ while speaking Dutch. The silly songs they pick up from school and sing at the top of their lungs. The way they complain about the weather. The increased Chocolate Sprinkle consumption. The classic Dutch kid experiences that I cannot relate to at all, or don’t know anything about. What? Mama? You mean you don’t know about…..?? Nope.

I don’t think they are aware of it. Which is good. As parents we alone are privy to this view, from outside yet so very close by, of our children’s development. What a privilege, and how painful, to be so aware of each new phase they enter and the old ones left behind. It’s a constant state of rejoicing and mourning all mixed up in one. This is common to everyone, but a move like we have made brings extra change, more obvious change, based on a new cultural experience that they are adapting to.

I just recently wrote to a friend considering a potential move overseas with kids for her husband’s job and I encouraged her that we end up where we are supposed to be, or more precisely, WHO we are supposed to be no matter where we live. This was the realization, when I finally, after two years of struggling, learned to accept and trust this, that allowed me to feel okay about moving back to the Netherlands. Basically, I was giving myself way too much credit for my kids’ formation. We make the choices we make now, in their best interests and to the best of our ability, but really, as long as the basis is there for them (love, support, and then letting them go) they will thrive and becoming their own incredible people, no matter where we are. Dutch or American, they will become fully themselves, and I look forward to having front row seats as the show continues.

Winter’s Last Hurrah

The birds are starting to chirp at 6:30 and it is light when my eldest leaves on his bike at 7:30. These are things I have been anticipating eagerly for some time now. I am happy to be heading into spring; in my opinion the best season in the Netherlands.

But first The Russian Bear was let lose on us. This is a cold front that comes down from Siberia to the North East and brings unusually dry, cold air and the chance of ice skating with it. Sadly, this time around the wind that delivered the cold never abated, and it came so late in the season that the ice had difficulty forming and there were very few places – even in the North and East – where safe skating could be found.

But as luck would have it, a shallow lake near us froze over beautifully (well, part of it) and a short window of skating opened up for us from Thursday last week to early Sunday morning. The saying here goes als het kan dan moet het ‘if you can, you must’ and my love of Dutch ice skating is only slightly tainted by this pressure to get out and find the ice and then skate on it a lot until it leaves. Sometimes I get a little weary of it. But mostly not.

The day they found it!

The family that skates together…. (photo Fine Fischer-Maijers)

Lots of windsurfers on skates and ice sailors

The whole gang… except our family in England

Mom trying to keep up. It’s the story of my life these days. (photo Fine Fischer-Maijers)

And when the kids are done skating there is always this…

…And this

We also enjoyed a few days of traditional ice fun on our villages ‘Polderbaan’, a flooded field that is organized by the local skating club. There was ‘Ringsteken’, where one skater pushes another holding a long stick and tries to get the stick through a ring as they skate under it, and ‘Priksleeen,’ races on wooden sleds with metal runners and two sticks with nails in them to push yourself with (surprisingly hard to control, but our years of expert driveway sledding at my parents’ house paid off for our family).

Storm

My table is shaking as I type. There is another ‘wind event’ of sorts today. Force 10, I heard, but judging from the spray that is flying off the lake and coming in through the cracks of our upstairs dormer window, some gusts feel even stronger. Also, my toilet shook while I was sitting on it this morning. I kid you not. They should put that on the Beaufort Wind Scale. Shaking toilets.

Earlier, Sam and his friend decided to try to ride their bikes to school anyway. The wind wasn’t at its peak yet, but I was glad Maarten offered to accompany them through the open polder section. It was a side wind, and Sam fell over once and his friend twice. They made it just fine. This is what is called Building Character.

At the peak of the storm the wind pushed huge waves up over the dike and water filled our yard. It was intimidating and impressive.

Now the worst has passed, and the sun even peaked through before the rain started, just to add a little more wetness to our already sopping wet situation. I heard after that gusts reached 70 mph.

Not a Fan

Amos, it turns out, really hates, I mean like abhors, the wind and wet. Which means, as he lets us know on a daily basis, that he is decidedly not a fan of Dutch fall and winter. Spring won’t be any better, but I haven’t mentioned that to him yet. If we let him snooze in his favorite chair all day he tends to get restless and meow a lot at night. So out he goes. It doesn’t mean he has to like it, though.

Fragile

I’ve been feeling fragile for awhile now. A month or so.  I keep so busy navigating the needs and worries of my high-sensitive kids that I sometimes forget to attend to my own sensitivities. They came by it honestly, after all. So things have been kind of rough, with lots of over-thinking and worrying and doubting. I keep trying to unearth my adventurous youthful self that moved halfway around the world without a second thought. But age seems to have made me aware of so much more and I find myself having third, fourth, and fifth thoughts on a regular basis.

I recently started a new series that reflects this fragile feeling. I dropped all stark winter designs and even the joyful light in the darkness Christmas themes that I normally love. Now, as the leaves fall and are blown into sodden piles; with winter only just approaching, I chose the quiet hope and fragile beauty that spring brings. The impossible reality of new life growing from seemingly dead wood. Vulnerable blossoms bursting open after a long spell of cold, dark sleep and showering us for a moment with extravagant, frilly, bright beauty before getting down to the serious work of producing fruit. Those pinks, and that yellow, they have been a delight to work with and, most importantly, they make me happy. And in that tiny seed of happiness perspectives and expectations shift, making room for even more happiness.

Sometime after Christmas, when the winter starts to wear us down and we wonder if it will ever end, these little beauties will come back from the printer and provide a glimpse of hope, a reassurance that Spring will come again. Until then I’m going to go ahead and keep them close, look at them often, and remember.

 

Adaptation

I have written before about juggling two cultures and all the traditions and holidays that come with that. Fourteen years in I feel like I am starting to get the hang of it.

Halloween was the first big US holiday that we have been back in  the Netherlands for, and so I knew it would be an emotional one for the kids. Oh who am I kidding, it was emotional for all of us. We LOVED trick or treating in our little village of Somers with friends and neighbors. That very first year we were there the kids were over the moon to finally be able to experience real Halloween and the excitement never wore off.

Because of this I wanted to compensate more than I perhaps normally would. I have found that the best formula for combating homesickness is not always to try to imitate what we miss, what we had, but rather to honor and celebrate the occasion in a whole new way. It cuts out the pain of comparison and gives us the freedom to try something new that we might otherwise never experience.

And so instead of attempting trick or treating we stayed home and threw a spooktacular Halloween feast for our family. Spider webs, candles and flickering ghosts hung around the room went a long way towards creating the perfect atmosphere. Everyone was such good sports: they all crammed into our tiny living room for dinner (with a pretty complete representation of body parts) and enjoyed an outside fire and a game of nighttime tag as well.

We all went to bed feeling happy, content and exhausted. It was a huge success.

Thanks Fine Fischer for so many of the lovely photos!

The Bike Chronicles IV :: Wind

Wind. A calm day with no movement in the air is a rare thing here. It seems there is always at least a breeze, often a stiff breeze or light wind, and just as regularly a strong wind bordering on a light gale. Strong gales are not uncommon. And contrary to the fickle, gusty mountain winds, waking to wind here in the Netherlands generally means it will be a constant companion throughout the day. Never ceasing. And so we find ourselves just as often as not riding bikes with the wind. Gentle breezes that keep us cool and stir up the heavy, humid air. Light winds that trick us and make for an unexpectedly tiring ride. Side winds strong enough to buffet front tires and cause accidental swerving. Tail winds that push us in a hurry as we sit up tall, our backs acting as a sail. Head winds that bow us over our handlebars, hunkered down and grinding hard. Typical Dutch bikes don’t have gears, or three at most (for stiff breezes, strong winds and full-on gales, I suppose, as the only steep grades to be found in most parts of the country are dikes). And so we lean in, making ourselves small, and toil away. Legs burning, resigned to a slow, steady pace and a sweaty back upon arrival. Wind directions often shift throughout the day, so lucky folks might get a tailwind both ways. But that hardly ever happens. Double headwinds are much more common. A sort of Murphy’s Law for windy bike riding. This morning dawned with a heavy wind out of the West, which means today’s biking will be accompanied by a strong side wind. If I’m lucky it will shift just enough on the return ride to give me a little push in the back as I haul my groceries home. But it probably won’t.

Wat is dat?

Living in a foreign country, even after years, increases ones observation skills. I find myself chuckling at odd things I notice while in line at the supermarket, riding my bike through busy city streets or the open countryside, waiting to pick up my kids at school, or looking out my front window. Things pop out at me that natives might see so often they simply stop noticing them. Occasionally, when I come across such things, I’ll post them here so that foreigners can take a stab at guessing exactly what they are looking at, or what it is used for, and natives can rediscover the beauty and uniqueness and – sometimes – hilarious absurdity of dutch life.

Creative Juices

 

I have a hard time calling myself an artist. For the longest time, and still, on bad days, I believed that artists had magical creative juices flowing through them, filling them up and spilling out into beautiful works of art that took little or no effort. I thought that to be an artist meant you can’t help but create, a sort of inner urge that can’t be stopped. Some people, few, I think, have this. The rest of us work really hard at it.

I go days, sometimes weeks or months, without much of a creative urge. It is just gone. Usually along with any real motivation to make my bed or vacuum the living room rug. But then I have good days, lots of them, when I manage to create an atmosphere and structure in my day that promotes well being and creativity. I nibble a piece of dark chocolate while sipping a cup of coffee after a morning run and I sit down right then and there with paper and pencil. I make creativity a priority and get a few really productive hours in first thing in the morning. For that brief moment, it does flow, it really does. My heart soars, then, and I can hardly stop grinning. This makes me an artist. I feel like an artist. But those other moments? The ones when I don’t feel it but I sit down anyway and draw some crappy pictures in my sketchbook, when I’ve nothing to show at the end of it but some crumpled up papers and a little black cloud of frustration above my head? Those moments make me an artist too.

I am not and never will be a prolific, free-flowing, easy-going artist. But I will be – I already am – an artist. Anxious, insecure, and uptight, with great effort and mixed results, but still, an artist.

 

The Bike Chronicles III :: Amsterdam

Last week my father in law and I spent a day biking around Amsterdam.  It’s always a wonderful adventure. Amsterdam, outside of the few streets and squares near Central Station that cater to the millions of tourists with chintzy souvenirs covered in a haze of pungent smoke, is a beautiful, vibrant city that never fails to make me happy. I remember my first visit with my new boyfriend Maarten in 2000. He had studied and lived there and was eager to show me his stomping grounds. We picked up his rickety old bike that looked like it had been fished out of a canal and he put me on his handlebars. Looking back he was obviously testing my mettle. I guess I passed because we are still together and I loved every bit of that day, except maybe the sore bum. Anyway, since then I have had many biking adventures in Amsterdam and even now there are always moments when fear makes my heart skip a beat and adrenaline tingles in my white-knuckled fingers as they grip my handlebars. It isn’t for the faint of heart, especially not when trying to keep up with a local. Here are some special biking rules Amsterdammers seem to follow that make riding there extra, umm, exciting (I would say that these all apply, to some extent, to all bigger cities here, but I’ve heard from Dutch folks that Amsterdam truly is known for it’s unique biking culture)

1. Go with the flow. You go, they go, we all go, just work with it and don’t get in anyone’s way. This might very well be the Golden Rule of Biking in Amsterdam and I could possibly just leave it at this. But I won’t..

2. Red lights are a reminder to look both ways when you cross the street, no more. ( I am constantly being left behind by my loved ones at red lights.)

3. Bikes have the right of way unless cars take the right of way, then cars have the right of way.

4. Cross tram lines at enough of an angle to avoid getting your tire stuck in them, but be sure to do so with seemingly no effort or thought – don’t look up from your phone.

5. Obviously don’t wear a bike helmet except maybe if you are a bike courier in which case you might want one because you ride around like someone from Amsterdam but then even faster. Even then, though…

6. Watch out for pesky tourists that ride slow and stop suddenly for photos. If one is in your way ring your bell and yell something guttural to scare them and make them understand that they did something wrong.

7. With around 30,000 bikes stolen each year, some folks go so far as to uglify their bikes to prevent theft and if you don’t lock it, expect to lose it.

8. By all means go out and enjoy a few drinks with friends at your favorite ‘kroeg’ but keep in mind that technically there is a law in place now against drunk bicycling.