Returning to the Country that Changed My Life

The Netherlands first entered my story through an unexpected marriage in Afghanistan. This visit was a chance to write a new chapter.

Amsterdam

I traveled to the Netherlands alone last week. My purpose was twofold. The first was to simply experience the country as a tourist. I love the rural area in Ireland where Gerhard and I live, but sometimes I just want to enjoy the pleasures of a vibrant European city, meander along cobblestone streets, get lost in hidden side streets, and visit restaurants that spark new ideas, smells and tastes.

My second purpose was a desire to come to terms—at least a little—with the past and to reconnect with a family I barely know.

As I have explained in my memoir of Afghanistan, I met and married my first husband, Hans, in Kabul, Afghanistan, while teaching English as a second language in the Peace Corps.

Hans was born and raised in the Netherlands, and his parents and three younger brothers all lived there at the time. A few months after we met, Hans needed to visit Holland for business purposes and invited me to go with him. Since I had accrued some vacation days by then, I was able to say yes.

From the first time I set foot in the country, I fell in love with the beauty of the narrow brick buildings, with their gabled rooflines and intricate designs, as well as with the network of canals along which houseboats of every size and shape are moored.

There is a vibrancy in the country that is palpable, with residents from just about every country in the world and a myriad of small businesses where art and design flourish.

A street in Haarlem

The Frozen Fountain—the shop in Amsterdam that was created by my late brother-in-law

But for years, sadness and a sense of wasted time and poor choices have also been connected in my mind to this beautiful country. Which is making it hard now for me to write the simple travelog that I had planned to write.

Hans and I moved to the States after leaving Afghanistan rather than to the Netherlands, and that is where we raised our daughters. But his culture came with him. Thanks to him, I learned to love Indonesian food. (The Netherlands colonized Indonesia and still has close ties with the country.) I also learned to love eating gouda cheese and marmite on toast for breakfast and to dip French fries into mayonnaise rather than catsup.

Hans rarely cooked anything, but he made an absolutely delicious Dutch appeltaart—a deep-dish apple pie—that became my favorite desert.

And for years we had a Dutch birthday calendar hanging on our kitchen wall on which the birthdays of all family members were written. I also learned to understand a bit of written and spoken Dutch, which somehow remains in my memory to this day.

And yet for many complicated reasons, Hans and I grew more separate from his Dutch family. I grew even more estranged as I became stuck in an increasingly unhappy marriage. Thank goodness when my two daughters were teenagers, they were able to visit their Dutch relatives and begin developing a close relationship with them—especially with Hans’ brothers and with Sarah, a lovely cousin who is their age.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized my Dutch family had not given up on me. I moved to Vienna in 2014 after Hans had died from a long illness and was working there in 2018 when my brother-in-law, Dick, accidentally drowned in the sea while on holiday in Brazil. As a result I flew to Holland to attend the funeral and was treated like a member of the family.

Now, eight years after that awful event, I decided to visit the Netherlands again simply because it is a beautiful country that I enjoy very much. I wrote Sarah that I was coming and she began organizing a family reunion that ended up including almost the entire family: Hans’ two remaining brothers (Peter and Robert), four of their children, and three grandchildren. Plus husbands and partners.

The reunion took place at Peter’s apartment in Amsterdam. We had a wonderful evening together, sharing delicious food, many glasses of wine, and stories, photo albums and memories. On the last night of my stay, Sarah and I met at a restaurant in Haarlem and spent four and a half hours sharing even more stories while filling in the gaps of knowledge about all of our family members.

Both evenings left me with the knowledge that I do have family in the Netherlands plus a strong feeling of connection to a country that literally changed my life because of a Dutchman I met and married so many years ago.

I now realize even more than before how much my life has been shaped by four countries in addition to the US: Afghanistan, Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands. I am very grateful to all of them because each one led to the place I now find myself, with a husband and life I love.

So I will stop for now. In the next two weeks, I will write two tourist-oriented posts about Haarlem--the beautiful city in which I stayed and in which I spent most of my time on this holiday.

Haarlem