A Crisis of Doubt
The kids loved Texas. Did I make a mistake by leaving the U.S.?
I hadn’t really thought it through when I arranged the kids’ trip to Texas. My youngest asked to visit my sister in Houston. They hadn’t seen each other for years. But there are no direct flights from Stockholm and dealing with a layover takes some maturity, so I sent my eldest along, too.
They were gone for a week and, as is their custom, they ghosted me the entire time. But my sister sent a steady stream of images from their time in Houston and Austin, as well. There were my children, smiling from ear to ear, bathed in sparkling tropical sunlight, surrounded by their cousins.
My sister is gorgeous and loving and fun. Her husband is a philanthropist and a great guy. Life is pretty good over there. They’re in high cotton. Their lakeside house is big, because everything in Texas is big and also because my sister and her husband have eight kids between them. They have a fantastic garden where they are growing tomatoes, cucumbers and beans. There is a pool, a waterfall slide and a hot tub. My children gorged themselves on Tex-Mex and swam almost every day. They drove around in enormous SUVs with the radio turned way up, which is their idea of heaven. They went ice skating in the middle of a mall, waded in a natural spring and visited a butterfly exhibit. Every day was a blast.
I spent that week here, in the frozen tundra, listening to myself breathe. When both kids asked to stay longer, I was terrified, because America is very, very good at this kind of life and my children were being seduced. No, I said, I would lose money on the ticket. But that wasn’t the real reason. I was experiencing the most powerful feeling of vulnerability I’ve felt since I moved to Sweden five years ago. I came here to save my babies from America’s guns and bad food and stress and all the rest of it. But now they were back there, and falling in love.
It was a long week. June is the most perfect month in Stockholm. It’s as good as it gets. But my beautiful apartment from 1901 felt stuffy and antiquated. Out of nowhere, it felt weird to go to the grocery store dragging my little shopping cart behind me, like an old person. I was irritated to see people wearing puffer vests in the heart of summer. And I was annoyed by all the stony-faced Swedish toddlers who wouldn’t smile back at me.
All of a sudden, I was sick of Sweden. I had a sudden hunger for the cheap plastic crap that you can throw away tomorrow. For the all-you-can-eat buffet. For free matches at the gas station, free refills at the diner, for buy-one-get-one free. I missed the spirit of generosity that America had, and I was hungering for some waste, some excess. Too much ain’t enough, as they say in Texas. That, to me, is America. But there’s nothing like that here. There’s really not any kind of crazy splurge. Everything is restrained, orderly, reasonable.
Did I make a mistake?
Before my children boarded that flight north across the Atlantic in 2019, I’d thought that the greatest gift I could give them (besides my whole heart, of course) was an EU passport. That gives them the right to live in any and all of the EU’s 27 member states. They are American born, so they have the right to live there, as well. With the U.S. on one hand and the whole of the EU on the other, once they are educated, the world will be their oyster. This was my thinking. But I did not question my assumptions. I believed that Europe was clearly superior to the U.S. on quality of life and on a whole bunch of other measures, as I wrote about here:
American Capitalism and Me
I moved 26 times before I was 40. That’s a lot of moving, but it’s what Americans do. The average American moves 11.7 times over a lifetime, according to American Community Survey data. I doubled the average and then some. I was looking for something.
But what do my children believe?
I never questioned myself on any of it and that seems astonishing now. In the summer of 2018, on vacation, we sailed to the Swedish West Coast town of Marstrand. Everything and everyone was dazzling. That evening, in a restaurant in the harbor, my husband and I made the decision to explore moving to Sweden. Nine months later, when the kids were accepted into a good school in Stockholm, the idea moved from fantasy to reality. Now fully committed, we jumped into preparing the house for sale and offloading our mountain of stuff and making our plans. Throughout the whole months-long ordeal of getting ready to leave, I was 100% certain that I was doing the right thing. My intuition had hissed at me to go, so I started packing. My certainty drove me.
Yesterday, my kids flew home from Houston. The night before, I had cried all night. I picked them up at the airport and they came out of customs, sunburned and exhausted and happy. We’re usually very easy together, but at the airport, I felt wary. I knew a curtain had been lifted and I didn’t know what they would make of what it had revealed. They had now seen what they lost when we moved here. Or, more properly, what I have taken away from them. They had lost the Good America. The fun place. The easy living.
They know now and what happens next will be up to them. They’re almost grown and I’ve done my best and that’s it. I’ve shown them another world from the Northeastern U.S. that they grew up in. It’s a big, beautiful world and I want them to taste every corner. They will choose whether to live here or there, or both, or neither and I will support them no matter what. But as for me, I’ve made my decision. As the Swedish national anthem goes, “Yes, I want to live, I want to die in the North.”
I really enjoyed reading this. I have been traveling Europe for the past 6 months but am from the middle of the United States. I have fallen in love with Europe for sure but I miss the States dearly somedays. I miss the smiles, the waves, kindness, and people’s hopefulness (even if our country feels like it’s collapsing). I have realized that there is no perfect place to live or a perfect society. I think certain countries in Europe and both the United States get romanticized a lot but each place has its own set of problems and yes- some are bigger than others.
Oh totally, people in the U.S. are living in carefully curated bubbles and that's the problem. Nothing touches them until it does. Until something penetrates the bubble. And it's getting harder and harder to avoid the penetration, so they work harder and harder to maintain the illusion. Self-isolation and retreat from spaces that might lead to penetration is the biggest thing I'm witnessing from afar. It's the opposite of what people need to be doing.
I can barely stand to witness how many people I know back in the U.S. continue to willfully keep their blinders on. They plug their ears and squeeze their eyes shut at anything that might lead to cognitive dissonance. Almost no one sees the bigger picture or connects the dots when they do have some little taste of distress. They avoid talking to me, or when they do talk to me they tune out whatever I say that's threatening of the worldview they've constructed to feel safe and redirect to whatever mundane little thing is happening in their world. I even sense that some of them reach out to me in the hopes I will give them reassurance that everything is fine, and when they don't get their optimism validated, they ghost me.
From a sociological perspective, it's rather fascinating to witness in real time what 1930s Germany must have been like, but it's also infuriating and terrifying.