An Overseas Love Turns Life Upside Down

With Valentine's day around the corner AngloInfo has been running a series called Lovepats. It's all about those expats among us who moved overseas for love. And so when I was asked to contribute my story I was happy to oblige.....

Anyone who has moved overseas to be with a partner will know that it turns your life upside down - and inside out. You'll already know it's not the easiest thing in the world to do...... but many of us do it anyway. Here's my story......

"Sixteen years after our chat room meeting we are still together. We are married. We have a family together. We are still planning for the future, even though we still don’t have it all mapped out. But neither of us is under any illusion that our journey to this point has been an easy one........."

to read more go to AngloInfo's Overseas Love Turns Life Upside Down and Inside Out

Expat Life: Loving and Leaving Where You Live

I have just finished reading Global Mama by Melissa Dalton-Bradford (you can find a review here) and all the way through the book I was struck by the sense of 'home'; her family's ability to set down roots wherever they ended up living. They didn't just live physically in new countries, new places, new houses; they lived with their heart and soul and I had the feeling that every place they left meant leaving a little part of themselves there. Truly global living.

Reading Dalton-Bradford's account of living in Norway and the cultural differences they experienced when the family made a move to Paris made me think about my own sense of home.

I take for granted now that I live in the Netherlands, that I live in a Dutch house, in a Dutch street surrounded by locals. But what does that actually mean? It's the little things around us that make somewhere unique to live. It's the secret corners, the special items of furniture or memorabilia that travel with us, it's the normality of our days in a place. It's the waves from neighbours, the familiar faces scraping ice from the cars parked in the street in winter.

As each day passes in a house, in a town, in a country we take everything around us more and more for granted. Nothing seems particularly special anymore because we see, touch or pass it every day. Only by leaving a place do we see it's true place in our heart. Only by moving on do we appreciate all the little things that make a place special, make a place our home. And when you are not constantly on the move it is easy to forget all that.

Reading Global Mom reminded me that I was busy with a Love Where We Live journal at one point but never finished capturing the place I call home. A journal about where you live is never really finished of course - things change, you redecorate, you renew, you refresh rooms - and more importantly every day you live in a home you make new memories. But I was busy capturing the essence of the place I call home. I was busy with photos of the room we gather to eat, where we scrub our teeth, where the children play.

What makes a home a real home though is not the wallpaper, the curtains you've meticulously chosen to match the sofa, nor the well thought out shade of the woodwork's paint, but the people you share your home with.

Home is made special by the things you do together - the Friday night rituals, the lazy Sunday morning breakfasts, the ordinariness of the morning rush out of the front door. What do festive holidays look like in your home? How would all that change if you lived somewhere else? Expat life is certainly about change - from the minor to the major, from the little day to day things to life changing events. And in all that our home is the foundation, it holds things that are familiar and dear to us. It holds things that capture our memories, whether we realise it or not.

There are things scattered around my Dutch home that I brought with me from England and every time they catch my eye I am cast back to a previous life, even if for only a brief moment.

There are even special memories in the choosing of a house - the memories of picking the house that we currently live in have emotions intrinsically entwined around them. We bought a home for our future. We bought a place we could make our own, put our stamp on. Then, back in 2002, there were two of us. Now there are five of us. We have grown our family in this house. As my Love Where We Live journal reminds me the house I live in, the place I call home is special because:

"We are growing into beautiful people here."

Each day we are growing as a family, and this home is the place where my three sons have grown from babies into toddlers and are growing into school-going boys. It's their base, the place they feel safe and secure. And whilst I was reading Global Mom, it became clear to me that this house we live in is a shell for our family, for our lives, but what goes on inside will be the same wherever we should lay down roots, whichever house, street, town or country we should live in. We will take something of this place with us when we eventually move, not the physical stuff, but the emotional and cultural parts of life here in the Netherlands.

Moving away from this Dutch street, this town, or even this country wouldn't take away the memories, the love that has encased us in our home over the last twelve years, the people we have become living our Dutch life.

Imagine tomorrow having to leave the place you currently call home -  what little part of you would you leave behind? What would you take with you from the life you have lead there to your new home?

It strikes me that the furniture would all be replaceable, there'd be no tears shed about leaving the carpets we spent time deliberating over behind, but the moments we have spent getting on with life in our home would be irreplaceable, unique. These moments are currently the daily occurrences that seem so average, so ordinary and uninteresting -  the day to day that hardly seems worth noting in a beautiful journal. But I am off to do just that - because I know one day I will realise the value of all these family moments that make up day to day life in our average Dutch home in a Dutch street, in the middle of the Netherlands. I will come to realise that we have lived in this house with our hearts and our souls. And I will also realise that we will leave a little of ourselves in this home when we leave it.

Expat Life Means Throwing Your Plans Out the Window

It won't be news to anyone but life doesn't always turn out like you expect it to. If someone had told my seventeen year old self that I would end up living in the Netherlands with a Dutch husband and three children who are way more Dutch than they ever will be British, I would never have believed them. I would have been intrigued, but convinced? I don't think so.

Whilst I was making plans for my future, fresh out of university with a degree in European Studies, someone, somewhere was sniggering saying, "Well, I doubt you'll be needing any of that - maybe you should have tried learning Dutch. That's a language you will be using daily when you are 27." But how was I to know?

Expat life is planned for some, it sneaks up on others. Either way, it probably means life as you envisioned it doesn't quite become a reality. Expat life changes things - and sometimes that means a huge adjustment. Expat life can throw a spanner in the works. All the things you imagined for yourself in life can turn out so differently, in the blink of an expat eye.

It's a feeling I touched upon in a chapter I wrote about my Dutch wedding in the Dutched Up!: Rocking the Clogs Expat Style anthology. I had visions when I was younger of me trying on wedding dresses with my best friend at my side. I always figured my mother would also be a part of that build up to my wedding day. Together we'd be sipping bubbly while trawling through a range of dresses to find the perfect one for my big day.

My final choice of wedding dress

The reality was very different. Both my best friend and my mother were in England and I was here in the Netherlands. I actually put off looking for a dress for a while, and I guess it should have been one of the first things on my mind. At the time it wasn't a conscious decision to keep putting the visit to the bridal shop off, but looking back, I understand why I was more reluctant than I should have been to try wedding dresses on. It's the little things that suddenly slap you in the face and make you realise that expat life means sacrificing some things to gain others.

Having my first child was another reminder of how expat life changes things. In a non-expat life I had visions of my mother waiting outside the delivery room, eager to see her grandchild. I guess I figured I would have her to lean on, as the voice of experience, whilst I was pregnant in a different country. The reality was a million miles from the ideal. If I look back now I can't say whether there would have been more interest in my children from my mother had I not left England. It's a question I will never have the answer to, but I do know that my expat life changed our relationship for the worse. And I can't change that.

When you opt for an expat life things change. It is inevitable. I wouldn't change my decision to move overseas for all the tea in China, or all the fish 'n' chips back in England. But maybe, I could have been more prepared for the changes that expat life brings about. I don't mean the daily, practical things; I had envisaged those. I mean how expat life changes how the little things turn out, how it challenges the plans and visions you had for yourself, how it strains relationships with those left behind. How it puts turns in the road you hadn't seen coming.

To thrive as an expat I've needed to throw everything I saw for my future self out the window, and start with a clean slate. Make my plans from scratch. I've had to deal with the unexpected, and recover from being blindsided many times. Expat life means a pay off. That is the only certainty.

But I'm glad I've had the chance to find my way through my expat life. The journey was worth it.

Love Makes the World Go Round & Moves Us Around the World

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, the day of love and romance, at least it is if you go in for all that cards, flowers and romantic dinners malarkey (can you tell I might be past all that, what with three children and a vague recollection of the last time my husband and I were out alone?) In any case, it seems the perfect timing for a Multicultural Kid Blogs carnival on the topic of love.

I remember my first (and last) love triangle like it was yesterday, rather than the thirty five years ago it actually was. It was early primary school, in Warrington in Cheshire in the North of England. My class was forced lovingly created Valentine's cards for each other. The recipient of each child's creation was a free choice and before we left school that Valentine's Day, our handcrafted cards were distributed amongst the class.

Horror of horrors I took two cards home with me. I was guilt ridden. Tears rolled. I felt awful for the boy who had given me a card but had not received one from me in return. I went home and immediately began making another card so I could give it to him the next school day. I was oblivious to the fact that he probably went home and thought nothing more of it. The unfairness of it all ruined Valentine's Day for that little five year old me. (Sensitive? Me?)

These days of course this situation is avoided with the idea of fairness and exclusiveness, as Aisha Ashraf tells in her piece about Valentine's cards in her children's school in Canada for Global Living Magazine. But in my day, you lived with the guilt and the disappointment, and surprise surprise I got over it and survived the many more Valentine's Days that followed.

Photo Credit: Nithya Ramanujam

So, back to love. Love is not the same around the world. It means different things to different people, to different cultures. Love takes different forms. Love is expressed in different ways, shown by different acts depending on the culture of where you live and who you are showing the love you feel to.

Varya writes about what love means to her and how she teaches her children to show love on her blog The Creative World of Varya. Rina Mae (Finding Dutchland) describes how her husband expressed his love for her in her blog post When in Rome. Jaime of Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails shows her children love through her 10 Simple Ways to Spend Quality Time with Young Kids. Leanna, of All Done Monkey, highlights that sometimes we have to be creative with how we show our love for someone else in her post Monkey Kisses and Dinosaur Hugs.

In the Netherlands, I love you is expressed by the words, "Ik hou van jou" (spoken as "ik how von yow") and Valentine's day is relatively low key. There are cards in the shops but that is about the extent of it. Are the Dutch a romantic lot? Not particularly. They certainly don't have a reputation for romance, in fact according to CNN's World's most romantic nationalities the Dutch don't even hit the top ten. The British don't feature either. You are in luck though, if romance is your thing, if you are with someone from Spain, Argentina, Italy, France or Brazil. Maria Babin, the Trilingual Mama, writes all about je t'aime in her post "Love Makes the World Go Around in Paris" and discovers it's not a phrase flung around in France's capital.

But is romance really about love? Of course not, at least I don't think so. There can be romance and no love. There can be love and no romance. Love is more solid. It's a foundation. Sara Ager (A Hotchpotch Hijabi in Italy) highlights that love can be most powerful when it's low key in her blog post, "10 Things I've Learnt About Love in the Real World".

"Love is what makes the world go round; love is what keeps us moving around the world."

Photo Credit: Ben Earwicker

Long lasting love isn't about fireworks and sparks, for me it's more about the solid foundation of a couple. The first building blocks of a family. Love is what makes the world go round; love is what keeps us moving around the world - growing our multicultural families. I'm an expat because of love. I live in the Netherlands because of love. I have a beautiful little family because of love.

I'm just one of many who has crossed both country and cultural boundaries for love.

Like Aisha Ashraf who reflects on her ten year wedding anniversary on her blog Expatlog.com, with a beautiful piece called "What price a woman's heart?" She counts her blessings that her husband refused to adhere to religious, social and cultural expectations around marriage. She highlights that sometimes marriage has nothing to do with love.

Olga Mecking, The European Mama, shares her intercultural love story in her piece called, "And Not Because He’s German: My Take On Intercultural Relationships" and highlights that love looks past cultural differences to the man or woman beneath.

And of course sometimes we use the word love to describe our passion about other things in our lives; our interests, our careers, our hobbies. Thereza Howling writes about the importance of Loving What You Do on her blog A Path of Light. And I couldn't agree more - you should love what you do, and do what you love. The alternative is slowly withering away inside.

Whatever love means to you, however it is shown in your life there is little doubt that without it the world would be a greyer, lonelier, less passionate place to inhabit!

We would love to hear from you what love means to you and your family - how is love expressed in the country you call home? How do you say 'I love you' in the languages you speak? Have you made a life change for love - be it for a person, a job, a hobby?