One step forward, two steps back

My husband Greg Shapiro is a regular contributor to the XPAT Journal, a bi-annual magazine that focusses on the expat community in the Netherlands. Greg moved from the United States to the Netherlands in 1994 and has been living here half his life. He has observed the Dutch from a professional perspective and has earned a decent income making fun of them.

Dutch education has been a recurrent theme in this magazine and Greg has written several columns on the topic. This time he asked for my input.

For two years now, we have been struggling with the Dutch education system. When you have a healthy child that enjoys going to school and has no difficulties with learning, the systems works great. But when a child gets sick, you bump into all kinds of obstacles. As the mother of such a child, I have become quite an ‘expert’ on matters related to education and healthcare in these difficult circumstances.

So Greg and I ended up writing the column together. Which was a lot of fun. We work well together (not only have we been married for 20 years in June, I have also been his manager for most of those years).

But then corona happened…

And then we heard the magazine is ending its existence…

Anyone else out there interested in a duo column perhaps?

10th day, 8th drawing

Our maison de campagne has no bathroom, no toilet.
It has four rooms. Two bedrooms upstairs.
One salle de séjour downstairs on the left side of the front door.
And a kitchen on the right side. There are stairs in the middle and a big barn behind. 
There's an attic with strange noises. I think there are ghosts.


When my stepfather has to travel, my mother and I stay here alone with a gun behind the front door. My mother says she will never use it. So I practice shooting on empty cans. I always miss.


When we are alone my mother hears a horse on the front steps. In the distance a wolf.

7th day, 7th drawing

Marie Louise is posing with her friends behind the tractor. She is wearing a chemise. So are her friends. The chemise has a flower pattern. I didn't have the patience to draw the flowers. A chemise is worn on weekdays, over a shirt perhaps, no tights. A chemise  covers up any bodily shapes. Stains too. When you are a cook, like Marie Louise, you even wear your chemise on Sunday.

Marie Louise would wash herself every day with a cologne soaked wash cloth, at the mirror by her open door. I have never seen her brush her teeth (except with a knife).

My mother would say that people here look like they had fallen from the puppet box.

6th day, 6th drawing

From 1979 until 1983 I lived in France with my mother and stepfather. Somewhere in the centre of rural France, where no highways went, where old people lived on small farms without toilets. 

This is my mother, probably aged 30 years with our neighbors, Monsieur Robert Debelut and his housekeeper Marie Louise, who was an excellent cook and who had wobbling teeth that she cleened with a knife (!). He was stiff from arthritis and would defecate standing up behind the shed. Beautiful blackberries would grow there. His pants would always have dark stains. Marie Louise would give me a piece of stale brioche every day after school that I would feed secretively to her dog on a leach. She emptied the chamber pot on her front stoop. In Summer the smell would mix with the blossoms of the wisteria that grew abuntantly above her door. In the pouch around her neck, my mother kept her pills against anxiety and depression.