“Everybody was expecting you” (My Swiss Life, post 2)
(These “My Swiss Life” post are not, strictly speaking, chronological, but for anybody interested, post one can be found here.)
SB had a hockey tournament yesterday, in the blinding cold, that I had to miss. I was at the Geneva Writers’ Conference (more about that in another post). It’s only the second match I’ve ever had to miss – the only other one I missed was when SB got his concussion – so I was feeling a bit superstitious about missing this, but the conference ran most of the day on Sunday; it’s only held every two years and is far too good an opportunity for an English-language writer in Switzerland to pass up, so there I was in Geneva while SB was playing in Bern.
Earlier in the week, it looked like the tournament might have to be cancelled. We, as the home team for this set of games, were responsible for coming up with two time-keepers and two referees and as of Thursday evening we were short one referee (or Schiri in Swiss – pronounced “she-ree” and short for Schiedsrichter and one of my favorite Swiss words). Thursday night we parents received a scathing e-mail from the program head – not SB’s coach, who stayed diplomatically above the fray, but the head of the program, whose job it is to make a fray when a fray must be made – that somebody better step up and volunteer to be the second Schiri or the tournament would have to be cancelled and that would be a shame for the kids and a true embarrassment for the prestigious SCB Future program. Surely not all of you have some other obligation on Sunday, right??
I would have stepped up – I teach in the hockey school, after all, and can certainly handle reffing a Bambini match and I really do want to do my part – but I had the conference and I headed off to Geneva hoping somebody would volunteer. I didn’t receive any angry emails canceling the tournament for Sunday, so I assumed the match was on – in spite of temperatures hovering at minus 15 Celcius – but on Sunday I sent off a quick SMS to R asking “So SB’s tourney is on? Tell him mama says good luck” and received this in reply:
“They are doing warmup now and will start soon. Having coffee with the others. Everybody was expecting you.”
I smiled – everybody had been expecting me. That’s where I’ve finally gotten to in my Swiss life. I have people expecting me. I’ve written before about how most of these people probably will not become friends outside of the hockey context – though possibly two or three families might – but that’s also okay. I remember my mother and the other hockey moms, winter friends, stadium friends, the way they sat together and drank their bad coffee from styrofoam cups and I think: this is good too, this locational fellowship, this contextual friendship. When I show up at SB’s practices and games, I’m welcomed, I have people to sit with and chat with, I am part of the crowd – no longer hovering around the edges – and when I don’t show up, people ask where I am. That feels like a huge thing. It’s a good thing in my life, and if it is bound my the time and space of hockey seasons and ice stadiums that’s fine. I think we all have contextual friends – work colleagues we enjoy but somehow never socialize with outside of the office, the people in our yoga or boxing classes we see every week but rarely if ever meet for lunch. And those people occupy important places in our lives, they anchor us, they make us feel as though we belong. They add texture and dimension to our lives and I’d been missing that for a long time and now, thanks to the Small Boy and his love of all things hockey (which is, at heart, thanks to me for enrolling him in the first place all those years ago), I’ve got it. And when I’m not there, people notice.
It’s a little thing, being expected. Except that it’s not really so little at all is it?
(And if you’re wondering, SB’s team won all three games and SB scored three goals.)
Filed under Switzerland, expats, hockey | Comment (1)My Swiss Life (Part I)
I’ve been trying to write about what I’m calling my New Swiss Life for at least a month now but I’m suffering from perfection syndrome, trying so hard to express myself so perfectly that I end up not expressing myself at all – so I’m just going to start. I expect this to be an ongoing story – I can’t possibly say everything in a single blog post and there is a lot to be said because for a blogger who’s an expat, I haven’t been writing much about Switzerland or culture clashes or integration lately. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, because I’m (yes, finally) applying for Swiss citizenship, so maybe it’s time to start thinking out loud.
I moved to Switzerland in December of 2000 and for a variety of reasons that in retrospect R and I both agree were not good enough reasons, we lived in a small village near Bern even though he was at the time working in Zürich. (The price and availability of housing in Zürich was certainly one of the reasons.) I was taking intensive German lessons four hours a day five days a week; if you throw in my commute and studying time, my German classes consumed a good six and a half hours a day, but R was, that whole first year, gone thirteen hours a day. We were in a small village, I didn’t know anybody, there was not another native English speaker in my German class (for which I am very grateful – it did wonders for my German to be forced to try to make friends and small talk in German – but it certainly limits the speed and ease with which you can form friendships when, for example, you can’t even speak in the past tense), R was gone a lot, and even in the best of circumstances I am shy and reserved and not terribly good at making friends. That whole first year was miserable. Sometimes, even now, R will say to me with a sort of amazement that he can’t believe I didn’t leave him and go back to the U.S. during that first year or eighteen months. Sometimes, even now, I will think with a sort of amazement the same thing. I was miserable that first year.
The thing about learning standard German in Switzerland is that the Swiss don’t speak standard German, they speak Swiss and the two are not the same. If I had it to do all again, if I could have peeked into a magic ball and seen the way my life here has played out, the things I’m involved in, the things that matter most to me now, I would not have enrolled in a standard German course, I would have gone straight into a Schweizerdeutsch course and managed the written German later. Because not being able to speak Swiss is a real stumbling block in trying to build a Swiss life. My standard German, thanks to all those intensive lessons, is very good but it marks me instantly as an outsider no matter how long I have been here. Oh the Swiss understand me and I, at last, understand the Swiss but my German is a constant reminder of my foreignness, a little division between us, a stumbling block to overcome. A small one, perhaps, but it is there, a little hitch, a little hiccup.
The Swiss have a reputation for being reserved, hard to get to know; I myself have called the Swiss “a tough nut to crack” (you can read the comments on this post, especially those from Gretchen, for some more insight into this) and I think there is some truth to this (though I also am in the middle of seeing how very untrue it is) but I also think that half of it is simply the language and I finally understand the Swiss – not just linguistically, but emotionally – on this point. German and Swiss are not interchangeable and speaking German is not an approximation of speaking Swiss. I wish R had insisted on this point (but R is funny, and to this day thinks I did it the right way by mastering standard written German). But I wish I had done it differently; I would, if I could, go back and do it differently but I can’t, of course, so I am trying to make up for lost time and working hard to pick up Swiss. I don’t want to speak German anymore. And I think those first few years would have been so much easier if I had learned Swiss from the start. I get it now, the Swiss love of their dialekt, I really do.
I didn’t have Swiss friends, other than the Swiss spouses or partners of my English-speaking friends, for years. R’s job situation when we first moved here – working in Zurich but living outside Bern – didn’t help, because it made socializing with his work colleagues difficult, although of course now with the benefit of hindsight I can see all the ways we might have made that easier. And because if you talk to expats living in Switzerland you’ll hear the “Swiss are so reserved” line a good ninety percent of the time, it’s easy to fall into believing this and giving up; to not explore if there aren’t just little cultural differences you have to pick up on and adapt to; to not wonder what about your own personality and behavior are contributing to the situation. Yes, the Swiss are reserved but I am shy and self-conscious in German. And if I am honest with myself, I am shy and self-conscious in English. I grew up in a house where my parents did not socialize and learning how to do this – how to invite people over to dinner just for the sake of inviting people over to dinner – has been hard for me. It was, when I remind myself, hard in English. It was hard back home. At some point, it became clear that I was using the old Swiss reserve schtick as an excuse and that I needed to do some heavy lifting.
And so I started lifting. And my life now, ten years on, is so different. “Bloom where you’re planted,” Australian Friend likes to say and yes, yes, yes to this. It has taken ten years, but I am blooming.
The One With The Turkey
For the past several years, I’ve almost let Thanksgiving go by without a celebration. For the past several years, I’ve almost given up on Thanksgiving and then, in a last moment fit of determination, I make last minute invitations to Expat Thanksgiving. I recognize, in that moment of decision, that if I let it go this year I will let it go forever and the boys will grow up without Thanksgiving. That most American of holidays. As expats, so much falls aside, so many cultural touchstones pass our kids by no matter how conscientiously we try to pass them on. Thanksgiving, it seems, is my line in the sand. I think I can let it go, but when the moment is upon me I know that I can’t, that I musn’t.
So I threw out last minute invitations, made the last minute scramble for a turkey. R’s family has a long, long-standing relationship with the butcher in the small village we lived in when I first moved to Switzerland – a relationship that spans two generations of butchers and two generations of customers – so we turned to Small Village Butcher for our turkey order and he got us a turkey. Oh boy, did he get us a turkey. An eleven kilo turkey. That’s an American-sized turkey and I’m here to tell you: American-sized turkeys do not fit in European-sized ovens. No, no they do not. The turkey did not fit in our oven. We’ve had some close calls before, but in ten years of varied and sundry families hosting Expat Thanksgiving this is the first time we couldn’t fit the bird in the oven. I suppose it was bound to happen one of these years.
The butcher roasted the turkey for us on Sunday (that sound you just heard was the collective gasp of my Swiss and German readership, followed by exclamations of: he roasted the turkey for them on a Sunday? Mein Gott!) and R went to pick it up in a catering hot-box and when he arrived home with it and brought it inside everybody stood around in the kitchen exclaiming and taking pictures and exclaiming. An eleven kilo turkey is … impressive. Daunting, even. We did our best, pressed second servings on everybody and sent people home with leftovers and still have three containers of turkey in the refrigerator. Eleven kilos of turkey is a lot of turkey.
My mother always made a turkey tetrazzini with Thanksgiving leftovers, and I’m going to have to root around and see if I have her recipe somewhere, because I’ve got a lot of leftovers. And because my mother’s turkey tetrazzini was outstanding. As was her apple pie, which I made again this year. As it was baking, when the house smelled like pie and I had the warm anticipation of expecting guests for Thanksgiving, I saw a rainbow out my kitchen window.
It’s a good thing to hold on to traditions. A little better even, I think, when you have to fight for them a bit.
Filed under Bloodlines, expats | Comments (3)The first grade in Switzerland
From what I understand from my friends with school-aged children in the States (and from reading blogs), in the US, Kindergarten is the new first grade. Kindergarten is not, as I understand it, the way we experienced it when we were kids. There is less free play, and more sitting still, and the actual work of learning the ABCs. Some Kindergarteners come home with homework, even if does only take 10 minutes twice a week. The amount of time allotted to doing whatever you want with whichever classmates strike your fancy at the time seems to be limited, though from my distant perspective it seems to vary wildly from place to place. Certainly today’s Kindergarten does not seem to be a place where socialization and play are the priorities and hey, if you walk out of here writing your own name that’s pretty much a bonus.
US Kindergarten sounds a lot like the Swiss first grade. Small Boy did not have what we adults would recognize as “work” in Kindergarten. Fine motor skills and pencil control were trained through art projects rather than writing. Oh, the art projects. Cutting and pasting and drawing and sewing and weaving and carving and once, for this past Mother’s Day gift, etching a design into a rock with a stylus. Language skills and memory were covered in song and rhyme and story time. The rest of the time, they played. The children were largely free to choose what they wanted to do and with whom, although if Small Boy and Best Friend sat at the drawing table four days in a row they were encouraged, on the fifth day, to maybe do something else with somebody else. There was time to play outside every day, unless it was pouring rain (snow was fine), and judging from the knees of the Small Boy’s pants there was a great deal of wrestling and tackling involved. There was structure in the day, in terms of time blocks, but within the structure there was a great deal of freedom.
Towards the end of Small Boy’s second year of Kindergarten the children who would enter school the following year started practicing the type of work they might be presented with in school. The older kids (Kindergarten classes are mixed between the 5 year olds in their first year of Kindergarten and the 6 year olds in their second) gradually started having to sit still more; art projects became less paint whatever you want and more do here what the instructions are telling you. They did start practicing writing letters and yes, every single one of them could write their names. They took home a little bit of homework, and they visited the school building. Fridays, when the first year kids don’t come to Kindergarten, were almost, almost like school.
And now, Small Boy is starting his sixth week of school. He is fully settled in now, but the first week was rough. I could tell from his behavior at home – reacting badly to situations much more quickly than usual, arguing with me, breaking down in tears when I told him no to something (I no longer remember what – probably if he could watch TV). His behavior at school that first week was fine, no reports from the teacher, no notes home, but that is typical Small Boy: he works very hard to hold it together in places like school or hockey training (the trainers are strict, and I’ve seen them give kids 10 minute go sit on the bench penalties for what seem like minor infractions, but never the Small Boy)* and then he comes home and lets go. So I could tell, that first week, that the new routine – sitting still for 90 minutes before recess – was a lot for him.
The work so far is basic: they are learning letters and numbers, starting to read. There is homework three days a week (Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays), and it never takes very long; they do most of the work in class. So far the homework has only been in either math or German. The subjects covered in the first grade are German, Math, Nature-Mitwelt-Mench (natural and social sciences – right now the theme is Water), Art (drawing, textiles, and woodworking), and Music. He has a fifteen minute recess every day and Sport (P.E.) three times a week. He’s in school five mornings and one afternoon a week, plus every other Thursday.
Every student has a homework notebook in which the teacher writes down the assignments on the left hand page; there is a column where I am supposed to record how long it took Small Boy to do the assignment. I think this is a great idea – it gives the teacher an idea of how hard or easy the work might be for a child (if a kid got every problem right but took 90 minutes to do it, that’s something the teacher needs to know) and it also trains the parents in the idea that they need to be attentive to their child’s homework practices. This might be second nature for some parents and not for others; this way the parents are slowly learning to be involved and it’s done in what seems to me a non-judgmental way. I’m curious what other people think about this, but I sort of love this idea.
The right hand page is for communications between the teacher and the parents. Here on the page in the picture, the teacher wrote a note to remind us that class pictures would be taken on Monday (Mo: Photograf) and that by Wednesday at the latest Small Boy needed to have a toothbrush (Mi: Zahnbürste) because the dental hygienist was coming that day. Progress is noted on a weekly basis: sunshine, sun with a cloud or two, or clouds. (You’ll notice Small Boy got the sunshine. He’s had all sunshines except for one teeny tiny cloud last week because somehow we forgot to do one problem on a homework set. We just skipped right over it, didn’t even see it somehow. Both of us! The teacher told him if Small Boy keeps doing as he’s been doing, he’ll erase the cloud next week.) Clouds seem to be given for not paying attention, talking in class, and not doing your work. Each week, a parent has to sign that week’s page.
Can I just tell you I LOVE the homework notebook? Seriously. Best idea ever.
What does school look like where you live? If you’re an expat, and your kids are in the local schools, are you happy with them? I have to say, although I’ve been known to complain about the, um, limited hours shall we call them?, I can also see some real upsides to the Swiss schools. More on that in another post.
* I approve of this approach, by the way. Hockey is an extremely physical sport with a great deal of contact, and the kids need to learn early that the apparent aggression in hockey is actually quite controlled – there are rules, after all, about what’s a legal check and what is not. There are rules against fighting. If somebody deals you an honest blow, you can’t turn around and whack them for it and you can’t take it personally. The honest check is part of the game, and if you can’t get checked without losing your temper you won’t be playing hockey for long because no coach is going to want to deal with that. I approve of the trainers nipping temper in the bud, calling out every bad hit, and issuing penalties. A kid simply cannot engage in a contact sport without mastering some self-control.
Filed under Small Boy, Switzerland, expats | Comments (7)Being a foreigner in Switzerland has made me paranoid: Exhibit A
The Small Boy came home from school yesterday with a letter requesting parental permission for him to be part of a study on motivation and motivational problems faced by primary school students. If we allowed the Small Boy to participate, he would be asked some questions in October and the same set of questions in the spring. They gave a few examples of the type of questions that might be asked (“How do you think the following sentence applies to yourself: Compared to other students my age, I am good at homework” for example), and they seemed harmless enough.
However. Parents who agreed to let their children participate in the study were asked to fill out a survey – well, I was asked to fill out the survey, as the letter requested that the caregiver who spends the most time with the child complete the survey – and I wasn’t so comfortable with the questions being asked. There were questions about how I discipline Small Boy (the person filling out the questionnaire was directed to give answers that applied only to the child who brought the survey home), whether I know his friends, if I praise him when he does something well, if he stays out later than he’s allowed, if he goes off without me knowing where or with whom, if I play with him regularly, ask about his day at school, and so on. I wasn’t thrilled with a lot of the questions, but I might have gone ahead and done it if they hadn’t also asked for the following: what language is spoken in the home, how long I have lived in Switzerland, the nationality on my passport, and how long the child in question has lived in Switzerland. And so help me, the first thought that popped into my head was how somebody was going to use this survey to complain about how foreigners parent their children and no way was I filling that thing out.
I hate thinking thoughts like that. I hate that I wondered if every kid in the Small Boy’s class got that survey, or just the ones with foreign roots (oh, I plan on bringing it up in casual conversation with a full on Swiss mom when I get the chance). I hate that as a former social scientist myself, I still doubt the motivations behind this survey. I hate that I often wonder if my children are being judged because of me.
Am I the only one, fellow expats, or do you have moments like this too?
Filed under expats | Comments (4)Homework
We have the Small Boy’s first grade class schedule – called the Studenplan – and classroom assignment. There are two first grade classes here in the village, and SB will be with the teacher he wanted (he wanted this teacher based on the second-hand information that a friend’s brother likes this teacher) and is staying together with his entire Kindergarten class minus one child who for some odd reason is the only one from his Kindergarten class going to the other teacher, which strikes me as awfully unfair for this particular child. (The life, it’s all about the unfairness right now.)
The first grade curriculum looks like this: he’ll have German (reading, writing, literature – this is the same as a US first grader having an English class); math; “Natur-Mensch-Mitwelt,” which I’m assuming is basically social studies with some physical sciences thrown in; P.E., which they just call Sport here; art (including textile work), and music. There’s still a lot of down time – he only goes to school five mornings and two afternoons a week – though I confess I have no idea what the Swiss homework situation looks like in the first grade. I’m willing to find that out as we go along and if there isn’t a lot of homework all the better since he’ll have hockey practice twice a week and an extra “class” outside of school, from me.
I’m looking through first grade curriculums this summer – at the moment I’m reading What Your First Grader Needs to Know - to figure out what U.S. history Small Boy would get in the first grade, if he were going to the first grade in the U.S. and I’m going to put together a little extra class for him outside of school. I hope to be able to expose him to the highlights primarily through stories, especially in the early grades, so that it doesn’t feel like I’m sitting at the kitchen table tutoring him. Neither of us take to that particularly well, but he learns remarkably well - and I pass along information fairly well – in the context of a walk, outing, or adventure. But him sitting there listening to me tell him Something Important? Not so much. I can imagine if I took him on vacation to Boston, for example, he would have a blast and eat up all the stories and learn ten times more about the Revolution than if I tried consciously to sit down and teach him about it. So I’m hoping for some good children’s books to lay the ground work.
Sooooo, American readers of young children, here’s where you come in. What should a first grader learn about US history? What are some good age appropriate books or movies? What did your first grader learn? (I’m thinking specifically US history here. I’m perfectly happy to have Small Boy learn world history in the depth and order the Swiss kids do. It’s just the U.S. stuff that he obviously won’t get here that I’m interested in.)
Aaand, expat parents of children of all ages, I’m looking for your advice too. Did you teach your kids about your home country? How? How much? How often? Which subjects were the most important to you? (For example, given time constraints, did you teach the literature of your native country on top of what they were getting in the local school?) Did you present it clearly as learning about where you came from, or did you just try to sneak it in in the form of stories and vacations? When did you start, and how long were you able to keep it up? Did your kids rebel against this extra workload? I’m looking for information galore here, so please feel free to pass a link to this post along to your expat friends.
Thanks.
And spare a thought for the Small Boy, who is about to be confronted with another of life’s little unfairnesses: he has to learn the history of two countries.
Filed under Culture clash, Small Boy, expats | Comments (10)Home is the place where, when you have to go there
I have a friend who works in Alexandria, Egypt. She used to live in Switzerland but moved several years ago. She actually left Switzerland when I was pregnant with the Small Boy, so it’s been quite some time. We have seen each other a few times since then, when she has been in Switzerland on a vacation or taking care of some business that she still has here; we email a few times a year but we are both poor correspondents and time and distance have weakened our friendship.
I sent her an email last week, not knowing what if any internet access she might have, simply saying I hope things were calm by her and that she stays safe. I haven’t heard anything back. Her employer maintains a Facebook page, which they updated on January 24th to say that they would be closed the following day. It hasn’t been updated since. I can well imagine that she only had internet access through work in the first place. It would meet her needs – she is a fairly unplugged person – and she moves often enough that I can imagine she wouldn’t bother with the hassle of finding a service provider as long as she knew she could use computers at work on her private time. So if she’s not going in to work, she is probably unplugged. I am not overly concerned about her physical safety, it’s not as if I fear for her actual life, but I am worried about how she is doing and if her neighborhood is calm or not.
I sent out a request for information on Twitter – does anybody have any information about the foreign staff of this employer? Through the miracle of re-tweeting, somebody actually associated with the place, albeit in a loose way, sent me a message that US staff are being sent home. Which brings me after a long introduction to the point: this friend of mine is a US citizen but hasn’t lived in the US for fifteen years. If she shows up at the airport or Embassy wishing to be evacuated, she’s got her passport and they’ll take care of her (and it’s scenarios like this that make R say, “Sometimes a US passport is a handy thing to have”), but where will she go? She lives in Egypt. Prior to that she lived in Asia and South-East Asia, and prior to that she lived in Switzerland. Prior to that, she lived in the Netherlands. To my knowledge, the last time she was in the US was simply to attend a job fair that landed her the Alexandria job.
There are expats like me, who either through marriage or long-term employment form a bond with the new country. If I had to get evacuated from an emergency zone I’d wave my US passport for all it was worth, and then make my way, with the boys, back to Switzerland. We’d try to get passportless R to be allowed to come with, on the basis of being the father of two minor US citizens, but we’ve already agreed that if push comes to shove I’d cut him and his Swiss passport lose to get the boys to safety and he’d follow when he could. (The US is simply better equipped to evacuate its citizens than Switzerland, and even R with all his pride in his Swiss military admits it.) But then there are expats like my friend who move a lot, following jobs or adventure or change or whatever it is that calls a person to move countries every few years. She’s got the passport, and if she wants to leave – which is an open question, actually – she’ll be taken care of, but then what? I sometimes envy her expat adventures and the amazing vacations she has taken all over South-East Asia, the freedom to change jobs and countries when she feels like it, but then what? After all the exploring and the traveling, now, when she might get evacuated – to where? To whom?
How rooted are you? (This might apply especially to my expat readers, but not exclusively). A line from Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” comes to mind:
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there
They have to take you in.”
I’m wondering what my friend will do, where she will go, who will take her in. And remembering that the ties that sometimes feel like they are holding me back are also the ties that root me, that link me to the world, that give me a safe place from which to venture forth and a port to which I can return.
Filed under expats | Comments (8)