First things first though after having had a few questions about this........
The midsummer celebrations have past and many wonder why I was at home doing some felting ( see here ) instead of celebrating.
Well Midsummer is one of the few times when my family and I feel we are outsiders, just like christmas eve for example. These are the holidays that most people spend with their families and/or closest friends and truth said..... we lack both. At least here in Sweden we do.
The family part is hard because most of them are still living in, or have just moved back to the Netherlands. The only family I have here is my dad and a sister ( the latter doesn't want to have anything to do with me....) Not much to build a great Midsummer celebration with.
When it comes to friends, well that's a different story. We do have friends of course,even if there are not that many. Some we can even call close friends, but...... most of them celebrate with their own family/friends and we don't want to impose ourselves.
For the past few years we have tried to engage ourselves in the celebrations by helping binding the wreaths for maypole and taking part in the ceremony of raising that very pole, but after all that is done, we as a family are standing there alone, because we are still "outsiders", a feeling of not belonging makes itself painfully clear.
This makes that we no longer go downtown to take part in this whole celebration, knowing that this of course doesn't make it better, but we skip the feeling of feeling like an outsider, not fitting in in the picture.
At home we can see and hear our neighbours with their gathered offspring dancing around their own little maypole having loads of fun together and we wish we could have that as well
Now don't get me wrong, I do not write this so everybody has to feel sorry for us.
I am fully aware that this is something we call concequence. It is one of the consequences of a choice we made ourselves. The choice to leave everything we had back in the Netherlands and move to this beautiful country we now call home. But not all consequences are positive ones. The ones that have read my or my husbands scribbles in the past know what I am talking about. But we patiently wait for our kids to grow up and hopefully getting their own little families ....... and then we can have a Midsummer celebration with family and maybe som friends.
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| wreathbinding |
Another thing that I find very strange, and in some ways very desturbing, is that everybody here seems to feel that it is absolutely normal that 15 year old girls, or boys fot that matter, leave home to go study somewhere far away. This is quite a normal thing here in Sweden, obviously, but definitely not something I am accustomed to. Coming from a country with a substantially different educational system, where kids don't leave the parental home until they go to University or Högskola, because everything else is in the near vicinity, makes it hard to grab when my "little girl" of 15 years young is going to leave home for the city of Uppsala to study. It goes completely against my feelings to let her go, but I know I must. To love is to let go. But in this case it scares the hell out of me.
To tell me then that "That's life" doesn't make things better. It has not been life for my whole life but all of a sudden I am confronted with the fact that this is what life looks like over here. I need comforting words telling me that she is going to be fine and going to make it on her own in that big city. I need to hear that nothing bad is going to happen, but............ looking at daily life, daily headlines in the newspapers on how our society is developing gives me the creeps. Letting my 15 year old daughter go out alone in that society is not just a cup of tea for me. And I don't understand how it can be a cup of tea for any other parent, but when I look and listen around, nobody seems to be making it into a big thing.
Am I an overprotecting parent, I don't think so actually. Please enlighten me.
