Expat family
Thursday I was unwell.
I don't remember ever having a fever of 40.5 degrees!
I was delirious. [Fun fact: since I'm passionate about K-dramas (I'll talk about it someday, or maybe not), I repeated simple Korean words, which my friend, who is actually Korean, makes fun of me for.]
Anyway, I was so unwell that the emergency doctor came to the house. I mean, the on-call Dutch doctor's car came to my house!
Such an exceptional event that even the neighbors came, alarmed.
I don't remember anything about the visit, between Korean and Dutch, I already had a pounding headache. Result: "It must be viral! Paracetamol!" Why do they bother telling me?! Along with the salty ᎠᎡᎾᏢ (pieces of super salty licorice), in candy trays, in Dutch houses, you find paracetamol pills.
Due to a series of unfortunate coincidences, I was alone withmy little 3-year-old boy.
What do I do?!
I wrote. To my friends. I sent out my SOS message in a bottle.
I don't know about you, but my house is always messy. Or I think it is. "What if someone comes?!" is the motivation that I've always heard in my ears and that drives me to try to bring order to the chaos.
Letting someone into the space of my house, with me dazed and wrinkled and with a screaming child, is not something that puts me at ease. However, it wasn't just the urgency that made me ask for help and accept it.
Life abroad alone is tough. If you're a couple, your partner is your reference point. The world shrinks. If you also have little ones, you'll be their only reference points. The world will seem even smaller.
If you want to survive, live well, and make them live well too, you have to explore and expand this world. Little by little, with many friends and their families, we've become part of each other's lives and traditions.
A few weeks ago, we went to a birthday party, full of kids and adults. And there, in that total chaos, I thought that Jacopo was building his reference points. The same faces playing with him, the same adults taking care of him. And I felt like I was doing the right thing for us as a family. The world isn't just us 4, but there are other people who are part of it.
We built our village.
With this same thought, I entrusted the little one to my friends with whom he played peacefully, in a familiar environment. With the same care, some brought me soup, some knocked for groceries, some wrote to me every day to see how I was doing.
It's something that reconciles me with the word family. This is the one I'm building.
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