Disaster averted

One of the great and unexpected joys of moving to the Lowlands has been watching De Jongens make new friends and settle into their new school "home". My happiness has been amplified because I know that a little over a year ago, their greatest fear about leaving the safety of the only house and schoolyard they had ever known was that they would be friendless loners for years to come. 

In their minds, they were certain to be banished to the bleakest corner of the new school's badlands by the sinister playground incumbents.  For De Jongens, the potential for rejection was terrifyingly and understandably real.  Of course, I knew that would never happen ...it wouldn't ....would it?? I willed away the self-doubt, that despised and destructive companion of the inexperienced ex-pat, which never discriminates between adult and child. Our children will make new friends; we are making the right decision; they will benefit from this experience. They will. Our whole family will. Won't they? Won't we? Maybe. I think so. I'm pretty sure. Yes, of course they will. Wait . . . maybe not . . . no . . . possibly . . . probably. Yes . . . yes . . .  yes . . . YES. 

Yes.

De Jongens didn't always share the breezy confidence that Ned and I pretended we felt.

Indeed in the lead up to our arrival in the Lowlands, De Jongens saw the threat of ostracisation in a foreign land as adequate justification for parental torture.  To achieve this they employed a sanity-defying combination of histrionics, verbal abuse, paranoia and the recently-recognised (by me) Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Grote Jongen in particular gave new meaning to the term "Dutch Resistance" by insisting with boring (albeit heartbreaking) regularity that he faced certain social ruin, and therefore would simply not be getting on the plane to "damAmsterdam".

In comparison, Kleine Jongen said nothing as we prepared for the move, stoically internalising his own disaster scenario in a way that his busy and preoccupied parents completely failed to notice at the time. Only months later, from a position of steady self-assuredness did he confess to having been terrified. He learned the hard way that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets the grease. We learned that a hitherto unrecognised level of retrospective parental guilt was possible.

Yet, after only one day at their new school, they both came home with a long list of neo-mates, some of whom were instantly nominated as potential "best friends", while others were simply noted as candidates for future birthday party invitations. During subsequent weeks, the title of New Best Friend was freely awarded and regularly modified, in a delightful display of flexi-camaraderie. New names were bandied about the dinner table each night, with the primary selection criteria appearing to be a willingness to kick a ball during break times and wield a game controller after school. Shared linguistic abilities appeared irrelevant, proving the old adage that all people smile in the same language.

Sometime around the end of week 2, Grote Jongen casually announced that he would quite like to stay until the end of Grade 12, so June 2017, and furthermore he might stay here by himself if we returned to Australia before he was ready to join us.  At that point, Ned Nederlander and I exchanged an incredulous glance, each knowing that the other was weighing up the pros and cons of either running away from home or mounting a legal action against our own children. Both seemed perfectly reasonable and justifiable options.

During the year that has followed, both boys have experienced bouts of excitement, invincibility and exhilaration. In between times they have also endured the usual emotional bumps and stumbles and the ongoing realignment of the playground and sporting arena politics that mark any journey through adolescence. I'm guessing it's the same in any country in the world; resilience training at its best. 

At the same time, and somewhat unexpectedly, Ned and I have endured some resilience training and realignments of our own; some truly tectonic adjustments of our domestic arena as De Jongens have insisted on growing up and becoming the independent souls that we always claimed we wanted them to be. It's been an unexpected challenge, this task of producing grounded young men whilst living on the opposite side of the world to those who know us all best. Emotional bumps and stumbles indeed!

Like De Jongens, Ned and I have relied on friends to help us adjust to our strange new world. Old friends who know us well, and new friends who are quickly learning, have imparted encouragement, advice, sympathy, ridicule, dismissiveness, diversions and wine in just about the right proportions. Thank you all.

Next week, several new families will walk into the foyer at our  school, just as our family did a year ago. No doubt their collective hearts will be thumping, just as ours were. I will be encouraging our boys to seek them out and still their thumping hearts.  

Paying it forward has never seemed so apt.