How to Be a Family by Dan Kois

Author:Dan Kois
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Alia:

I understood why Dan was sometimes down on the Netherlands. Most notably, school was really rough on Lyra, and we had a hard time making meaningful connections with Dutch people. (It was super fun to meet expats, but that seemed like not the point of the trip.) I recognize that winters there, with their cold and short days, probably sucked.

If we were trying to actually live in the Netherlands long term, these things would have presented serious problems. But in the short term, I kind of loved the place! I never stopped being charmed by the narrow streets, the canals, the central squares, and the fact that it was full of seventeenth-century buildings instead of McMansions. I adored the biking, even biking in the rain. (I didn’t even mind biking home from Ikea carrying a giant backpack full of plates.) I liked walking to the bakery and the cheese shop and the Thursday/Saturday markets, and I liked buying (and drinking!) cheap French wine. I loved not having to drive my kids anywhere, both because I personally didn’t have to spend hours in the car and because it really created independence in them. They were forced to learn how to get places and then navigate those places without adult supervision. And it freed me up to pursue more of my own interests, like the time that I biked by myself to Mauritshuis in Den Haag to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, since no one else in the family was interested in seeing it. (This was stupid of them. We lived in Vermeer’s hometown. Of course you should go see Girl with a Pearl Earring.)

Beyond these specific benefits of Delft, I liked living in Europe, with its near-infinite travel possibilities and its efficient, thorough, and affordable transportation systems. We didn’t jet off (train off?) to Paris or Berlin or Milan every weekend, but we did take the train to Vienna and fly to London on seventy-five euro tickets. The fact that we could even consider doing so gave Europe a kind of fizzy energy that I haven’t felt in other places. Like many Americans my age, I grew up studying the history and cultures and languages and literature of Western Europe. Having all of that so near me was very intoxicating.

As the trip reached its midpoint, I had mixed feelings about being away. On one hand, I personally had loved exploring our new temporary homes in Wellington and Delft, especially given that I was on a substantially reduced work schedule. And there were a lot of things about it that I think the girls enjoyed too. On the other hand, I often felt frustrated that the girls were not always as game as I wanted them to be. One goal of this trip had been to make them more worldly, but they were not as eager to explore new places or meet new people as I was. I had trouble getting them to care about the shops of Cuba Street or the palace where William of Orange was shot or whatever.

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