photo copyright © Gelya Bogatishcheva
Next month I’ll have been living in Amsterdam for twelve years. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere. Until then my life seemed to have followed a rhythm in sixes, from birth to six years, from six to twelve, twelve to eighteen, then the six university years of moving every six months, and then six years in London. I didn’t come here for love, though I did marry a Dutchman. Actually, I was married to a Dutchman before I lived in Holland. We had a long-distance commuter marriage and that suited me just fine. (One of my exes once called me commitment-phobic, but we won’t go into that.) In any case, Amsterdam/London on alternate weekends went smoothly, until I got pregnant. And the pregnancy worked just fine, mainly on my own, until it was time to almost give birth. It was only logical for me to take my six-months paid maternity leave in Amsterdam, so off I went, 37 weeks pregnant and about to pop.
The Dutchman (he’s called Martijn* but only proper Dutch people can pronounce that, my mum spent years calling him Mar-tidge-en) picked me up in a van and drove me and my boxes and boxes of books from my publishing job back over the channel to his home city. I didn’t pop. It was six weeks before the baby deigned to make an appearance (another six). But by the time I’d crawled through the lonely isolation of a maternity leave in a foreign country, I realised I was going to have to change my plans.
photo copyright © Gelya Bogatishcheva
What kind of a fruitloop would try to bring up a child in London when all the advantages of a happy, relaxed Dutch childhood were staring me in the face? Friends back home who had become mothers were killing themselves trying to get from the crèche to the office on time and back again in the rush hour. There was no let- up of work pressure, and on top of that there was pressure to be the perfect mum. Perfect mums did things like teaching their kids to read and write before they even went to school, when would I have time for that? When I took a look around me I saw that the Dutch have:
- a fantastic, non-fee paying school system
- relaxed parenting styles
- kids playing freely outdoors
- a better work/life balance for parents
- no horrendous public transport issues – you could simply bike everywhere
It was a total no-brainer. And here I am almost twelve years later. I’ve got two children, a son Benjamin and a daughter, Ina, who is two and a half years younger. And my life has stopped moving in sixes. Although in six years’ time, I may be tempted to move again.
*Martijn is pronounced something like Moarr-tey-n. Only the Moarr bit has to be nice and short, not elongated.
