withlovesanne-blog

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#2 Childhood memories

I love looking through old photos and hearing my mom tell stories about my siblings and I when we were kids. It seems like your childhood is the most carefree period in your life, where your biggest problem is who you’re inviting to your birthday party without hurting anyone’s feelings. For today’s post, I wanted to share a couple of stories and memories, which I think give a good representation of the happy childhood I had.  

I lived in The Netherlands until I was five years old. Dutch people tend to complain. A lot. It’s too small, too cold and too rainy. Despite all of this, The Netherlands is actually a great place for kids to grow up. I lived in a little town house, with my best friend next door. We had our own tricycles that we could ride out on the street in front of our houses. I spent a lot of my time at my grandparents who lived only a few blocks away. They would take me to the park across the street, with a plastic bag filled to the top with leftover bread. I fed the ducks, and my grandfather yelled at me because I wasn't able to swing by myself yet. I was four. My dad took me on the back of his bike, and we visited the cows, horses and sheep. Both of my parents had jobs, but they went on little trips with me as often as they could. They once decided to take me to a very beautiful, very expensive, zoo. This, of course, was a big deal. The car was packed with bags filled with juice boxes, crackers and sandwiches because we obviously weren't going to waste our money on the food there. Too expensive. They showed me the elephants, the giraffes, the polar bears, the tigers, the lions, the flamingos, you name it. However, I wasn't amused. This was up until the point where we passed a little pond, where I suddenly lit up because... there were ducks. After this experience, my parents never really took me to the zoo anymore. The park was easier. Much closer, and a lot less expensive.

When I was five, my family and I moved to the United States. The only bad memory I have from the States is the Early Childhood Centre where I cried nonstop for the first three months. Overall not a very good experience. But besides that, the years I spent in America were pretty close to perfect. We lived in a beautiful house with a much bigger front- and backyard than in The Netherlands. Our house was easy to recognise. It was the only house where the front yard was covered in bicycles and other toys, and where the grass was yellow instead of green. My mom wanted a minivan but my dad wanted a Jeep. So naturally, we got both. For four years, the only music that was played in both of these cars, was a Sesame Street cassette tape. My parents thought it was cute at first, and a great way for the youngest to learn the alphabet. Turns out four years of ‘Row row row your boat’ in a screaming Elmo voice was pretty rough.

I went to a public school where I dressed up for Halloween, made Valentine’s Day cards, had school trips to the pumpkin patch, made ‘why I love my mom’ cards for Mother’s Day and ‘why I love my dad’ cards for Father’s Day. Outside of school my friends and I found lots of ways to keep ourselves occupied. We climbed trees in the nearby park, caught caterpillars in our special bug catching kit and tested which of the boys were brave enough to take a peek at the haunted house near the back of the park. We played with my little ponies, Polly pockets and littlest pet shop. During the summer, we swam in our neighbours’ pool and swung on the rope swing in my friend’s backyard. She had the biggest backyard I had ever seen. I was jealous of not only her garden and her collection of American Girl Dolls, but also of her room, which had three bright pink walls, and one wall with unicorns, rainbows and a white castle. I begged my mom for that same wall for four years straight.

During the weekends, my family and I would ride our bikes into town. We all had our own helmets, and it was clear that we picked them out ourselves. Mine was pink like my friend’s walls, with daisies and bees. My younger sister had one that was Sesame Street themed. Our bike rides brought us to either Cosí, where my siblings and I always ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, or Barnes & Nobles, where my parents drank coffee as we ran around in between the children’s books. On days that my parents felt extra adventurous, we drove the minivan, with our Sesame Street music, to ‘the Billy Goat Trail’. We hiked, looked at the waterfalls and had picnics. On other days, a trip to ‘Turtle Park’ was more than enough.

We lived next door to a family with two boys. They were a couple years older, but we spent a lot of time with them. The youngest of the two liked to have a little fun every once in a while, and I was an easy target. The day before our first St. Patricks Day in the States, he told me a story that kept me awake for nights on end. It was about leprechauns. He said they lived in the fence that separated our two houses, and that I had to be extremely careful, because if the leprechaun bit me, there would be serious consequences. I didn’t quite believe him at first, until a rumour at school spread about a girl that had been bitten by a leprechaun during recess. There were apparently several witnesses, so it was hard for me not to believe this story to be true. I never liked St. Patricks Day after that.

I feel lucky to have such loving and supportive parents who were always there for me and created a safe home for our family, wherever we were. I feel lucky to have grown up with caring, but also slightly annoying, siblings. I feel lucky to be able to look back on the warm and happy childhood they gave me. 

With love, 

Sanne

[withlovesanne-blog]

#1 Growing up a TCK

Hi, my name is Sanne! This is my first blog post, however it’s not a ‘get to know me’ type of post. Still, the topic of this first post is not completely irrelevant if you want to know more about me and my life. I wanted to write my first blog post about being a so-called third culture kid (TCK). Third culture kids spend a majority of their developmental years in a country with a different culture from their parents�� and from what is named on their passport. I’m one of those kids. 

I was born in the Netherlands; a tiny country known for its tulips, rainy days and bicycles. I grew up in a little town house and spent my time sitting on the back of my dad’s bike to go visit the cows. When I was five years old, my parents took 12 suitcases and three kids, one of them being a screaming 3-month old baby, on an 8-hour flight to Washington Dulles International Airport. Although my siblings and I were young, it still wasn't easy. Let's start with me; a five-year old girl with pigtails and a hello kitty backpack being dropped off at the ‘Early Childhood Center’ screaming the words ‘why are you doing this to me’ to her mom, who then decided never to bring her daughter to school again. My dad was then brave enough to step in and take over my mom’s job of bringing their little five-year old to school. The screaming stopped after three months. My younger brother handled things differently. Instead of choosing for the panic mode and blaming everything on our parents, like I did, he decided to handle things more calmly, by just not speaking at all and seeing what happens. Patience is key, after all. Six months after he started preschool his teachers started showing concerns over the fact that he still hadn’t spoken a single word since he had arrived. My mother asked him what was wrong, to which he replied that the other children didn’t speak Dutch yet, but that there was no need to worry because he was sure they would learn eventually. Several weeks later, he was picked up from school with a big smile on his face. He explained that the children at school were finally starting to speak Dutch, not knowing that it was him who was starting to understand the English language. Our time in the United States consisted of eating mac & cheese at the mall, swimming in our neighbours’ pool, riding bikes into town, trips to the pumpkin patch during the fall, and getting to pick out the biggest chocolate chip cookie at Starbucks. After four years, it was time to go back to the Netherlands. 

You’d think going back to your passport country is easy. I thought so at least. It’s where I'm from, so shouldn't it be easier to go back? Isn’t it where I ‘belong’? It appeared that spending four years in the United States made us a little more American and a little less Dutch. Instead of taking the big yellow school bus, we rode our bikes through the rain. Instead of bringing a big lunchbox to school or getting lunch in the cafeteria, our water bottles and sandwiches were stuffed in our backpacks, resulting into sandwiches as flat as paper because they were stuffed in between our books, and a wet backpack because my new pony-themed water bottle leaked. The school library was half the size of the library we were used to, and worst of all, Junie B. Jones and the Magic Treehouse were nowhere to be found. Knowing all the U.S. states was suddenly very unimportant, and being able to spell Mississippi wasn't something the other kids were impressed by either. Overall, it was quite a disaster. But like everything else, it just needed time. A year later, my siblings and I rode our bikes to school, soccer practice and dance class, knew all the provinces in The Netherlands instead of all the U.S. states and played out on the streets until the street lights turned on, meaning it was time to go inside. 

Time passed and it was time to move on again. The flight was a little bit longer this time; 10 hours to be exact. The final destination: Beijing, China. Back when I lived in the United States, I was obsessed with the Magic Schoolbus books. My personal favourite was the one where they went to China. Although I enjoyed that book more than any other book, I made a promise to myself that I would never ever go to China. Look where that got me. I looked through my old emails the other day and found an email I sent to one of my best friends back in the Netherlands, about four hours after we had arrived. It was clear that I wasn’t exactly excited to be there. I hated everything. I hated the food, even though my parents took us to restaurants where we could eat pizza and lasagna. I said the food still tasted different because they got their ingredients from somewhere else. I hated that everything was in Chinese and not in Dutch. So inconvenient. I hated the shops, I claimed the H&M there was obviously very different, and not as good as in The Netherlands. Basically, I looked for a way to hate everything Beijing had to offer and got annoyed with my parents when they told me I was overreacting, which I obviously was, and I knew it. Again, time was all I needed, and I eventually started to enjoy my life in the beautiful, but polluted Beijing. My siblings and I went to an incredible international school where they had more facilities than all of our old schools together. The teachers and the other students were from all over the world. But naturally, I missed my old school and friends too, and never really appreciated what I had back then. I think that moving around the world has given me so many incredible experiences, but because I always missed the country I lived in before, I never truly appreciated what I had until I moved away again. 

I now live back in The Netherlands, and have adjusted to rainy bike rides every morning. Moving every couple of years has been a big challenge and definitely hasn't made my life any easier. I’ve grown up saying goodbyes and am always missing people and places. Having said that, I think my siblings and I have had a childhood like no other, and are extremely lucky to have such a broad knowledge of the world around us. 

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” - Miriam Adeney

With love, 

Sanne