family

December and memories

Posted on by karenkleinwort

December has always had a special meaning for us.

For me, as a child, like so many others, because of Christmas. And because of my mum’s birthday right after the holidays. Later, I got together with my husband in that month – after a pub crawl with friends in our college in England. That was exactly 30 years ago. Five years later, we got married, also in the last month of the year. His mom’s birthday is in December. As a Mexican, that month is special anyhow, with the Dia de Guadalupe, the deeply worshiped virgin, and lots of “posada” celebrations in the weeks up to xmas eve.

That not being enough, our two sons were born in December and at the beginning of January. So, when the two of them grew up, the end of the year was also a stressful time, thinking about presents for two occasions, xmas dinner, and on which side of the Atlantic to celebrate the holidays. It was also a joyful time, with kids unwrapping the latest Lego Star Wars spacecraft and forgetting the world around them assembling it, enjoying a good meal, catching up with family and friends. As with every family, things are not always like they seem in glossy magazines or instagram posts, but there might be some tensions, misunderstandings, old wounds that have not healed.

December is definitely a busy time, and lots of people reminisce about the months that lie behind them. Some people send out letters, summarizing what they or their family did during the year; less and less, though. In modern times, Spotify sends you your “wrapped” telling you your most streamed artists, genres and “musical age”, and social media presents you your supposed “highlights”. All that is very self-centered, typical for the times we live in. But sometimes one can laugh about it with others and create moments of connection – my “musical age” is 21, my oldest son’s supposedly 60.

Memories and truth are two different things

Memories and truth are two different things. But for oneself, a memory of a moment is the truth. That memory might change over time. Three years ago, we celebrated the last Christmas as a family of four together. The year that followed will stay in all our memories as something disruptive, a huge change; hurtful, sad, to others maybe also liberating. My husband decided to separate, after more than 22 years of marriage. Since then, he and I go through both our lives on separate ways. We will always be bound through the years we spent together, with different memories, him and me, about those times, as we looked at events from our personal perspective. We are connected through the children we brought up, we are their parents, that will never change.

2023 was, without a doubt, the toughest year of my life. I am very grateful that 2024 looked more positive, and 2025 brighter, as I have been dealing with the consequences of that decision and action. That was hard work, and it will continue. Once one accepts such a break-up and has digested the most immediate blows, one can start, little by little, building something new for oneself, however that looks like.

2023 was also the year my mother-in-law died – suddenly, unexpected, gone. She passed away in December, a week before her birthday. She was a very important person to our family, logically for my husband, but also for me, and she was a beloved grandmother for my two sons. Her death was a great loss to all of us.

There is this saying: “We die twice: First, when we cease to be; second, when we are forgotten.” My mom-in-law had a lot of family and friends, and she will be remembered a long time, I am sure. The Mexican tradition of Dia de Muertos will help as well; putting up an altar at your house, with a photo of your loved ones that parted and their favorite food or drink or something they liked. There would be a tequila for her, maybe some liquorice (she liked the German sweet Lakritz, very unusual for a Mexican), a book of poetry. I have a lot of memories of her. She will live on, in my heart, for many, many years.

So, with these experiences, December and xmas have gotten even more meaningful to me than they already were. They also taught me to appreciate life, every single day, and be grateful for all the good things I have. There are a lot, and my memories are part of them. So are my plans for the future, and my deeds in the present.

La vida loca, aka “the crazy shit”

Posted on by karenkleinwort

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Again this summer, I realized what an un-normal, out of the ordinary life we are living.

My friend whom I helped a bit with her move, she just talked about “the crazy shit” after a while. We also called it “la vida loca”, but what she this summer and we last summer had to go through had nothing to do with the Ricky Martin song.

What I am talking about is a transatlantic move with a family of four. Ending the life you led at some place on this globe for several years, packing up everything, saying good-bye to friends. End of that story that was called “Berlin” (in her case) or “Mexico City” (in ours). She had lived in the German capital for 5.5 years, we in the Mexican for 5. Our kids spent very formative years of their lives in CDMX – our oldest from 11 to 16, our youngest from 8 to 13. No surprise, child #1 found it an extremely bad idea of parents to move at that stage in his life. He had made such good friends, he felt at home there, he wanted to continue with his life there. Period. Nothing else. For sure not start all over again, as he had done before – when he was 11 (and 7 and 2). He still remembered how it was the last time, and knows how it is, when you are the new one.

As a family, we have been living “la vida loca” for basically 18 years. My husband and I moved from Hamburg to Mexico City when he started his first job after finishing his PhD and I left mine, close to 8 months pregnant with our first child. We moved to The Hague, when child #1 was 2 years old; to Vienna, with child #2 on board, he then 4 years old. And back to Mexico in 2013. My oldest has a longer CV than some 50-year-old German who has lived in the same town all his life, done an apprenticeship and kept on working for that employer.

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What comes on top for us and my friend, is that she and me, we are not married to Germans. But a person from a different country, even different continent, definitely different culture. Which makes the whole “expat experience” far more complicated. Because, “expat” jumps pretty short when compared to that situation. We have Latin American parents in law, a bank account in a developing country, and children in Mexican and Argentinian schools. When I left Germany at the end of 2001, I learned that privileges I would have enjoyed if I had stayed in Germany did not apply to me, as I was living abroad. For example, the time I stayed at home taking care of my first-born was not recognized by the German retirement system, as I did not “educate him in Germany or a EU country”. That he, someday, might live and work in Germany (which he can, among other things, as I always spoke German to him) and pay for retired people’s pension, is totally irrelevant in that respect.

Okay, as a picture is worth a thousand words, here come a few pages…

I have sold or gotten rid of about 3 cars, fridges, TV sets, and xboxes or play stations or whatever these things are called. And yes, we have sets for both – Mexican and German outlets – for our computers, etc. Yes, this is us:

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And yes, our kids have two passports, two birth certificates, their parents are experts in consular affairs and all the paper work one needs to do when applying for a German birth certificate in Mexico or a Mexican in The Netherlands. My husband and I got married in the UK, as back then, in 2000, we had to present far less documents than in Germany (try to get a “Ledigkeitsbescheinigung” or “Auszug aus dem Melderegister” in Mexico; great fun); and he was doing his PhD at the University of London. So, this is symbolic picture number 2:

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And this is one of the most precious things I own. My set of mugs from Penguin Books which I bought when I did my masters at the University of Cambridge. And they moved with me, these mugs: in suitcases (from the UK to Cologne, from Hamburg to Mexico), in containers (from Mexico to The Hague; from Vienna to Mexico), in boxes (from one apartment to the other in Mexico, when we got hit by the 19S earthquake).

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I leave you with two more photos.

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This is the seal that the moving company put on a Hapag-Lloyd container in May 2004, the first time we moved with the Mexican Foreign Service. The last time we moved, last summer, we never saw a seal: the company was CRAP, cero a la izquierda, as they say in Mexico. The move took them more than eight weeks, instead of the usual four to five…

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And yes, a psychologist once said that I am not a piece of “Diplomatengepäck”. Being the trailing spouse, and I am sure being the trailing child of an expat or a diplomat is not easy. Has its challenges. Can suck. Big time. I guess the expat’s or diplomat’s life as well, sometimes, but one assumes that he or she decided for that kind of life at some point. And might chose the exit option if he or she does not want to carry on with it.

But all in all, looking back at nearly 18 years of “la vida loca”, aka “the crazy shit” has been an enriching, interesting, inspiring experience that made all of us grow. I thank my “squad Lara” for this ride! (There is a reason why I did not write this post a year ago, when we just arrived in Berlin…the “conclusion” would have sounded a lot different.)

 

A personal note

Posted on by karenkleinwort

It has been six weeks since I wrote and published the last blog on thedailyimperfections.com. What happened? Life happened. I got the keys to our new apartment and a couple of days later two trucks pulled up outside the building with nearly all our belongings, i.e. 38 cubic meters.

By that time we had stayed for twelve weeks with my husband’s mother, i.e. my mum-in-law. We had basically lived out of five suitcases – one for each of our clothes, and one for shoes. That was what we had taken with us on the plane when we moved from Vienna to Mexico City at the end of July. And actually, during those twelve weeks, we had hardly been missing those 38 cubic meters. It is both impressive and embarrassing how much stuff one has.

Impressive, because after twelve weeks, I had forgotten about a lot of things that had surrounded me before. All these books – a lot read, a lot bought with the intention to one day read them; all those clothes and shoes that did not make it as “essential” into our five suitcases and that could dress another two or three families of four easily; all those souvenirs, photographs and handicrafts made by my two boys that document life and growth. The fact that one is struck with a certain element of surprise getting a lot of those things out of the movers’ boxes is partly owed to life just being intense. One usually does not have time to “miss” one’s old life when one is busy trying to establish the most practical elements of one’s new – such as getting one’s kids accepted in a new school, finding an apartment, asking around about car insurance, or making an appointment with the internet service provider.

Embarrassing, because, seriously, one has so many things one does not need – the salad spinner I bought just half a year ago, but after 25 years without a salad spinner, I cannot get used to using one; the old video camera that was overtaken by technological advancement at least twice by now, but is still the format my wedding video was shot on; the Nordic walking poles I never quite had the patience to really learn how to use them.

After four moves with a family during the last twelve years, I have learned that it is usually best if you clear out your things before the movers come. But I have also experienced that usually your time at the place you are going to leave soon is too valuable to spend it with “properly” clearing out your things. So, that task at least has to be continued when unpacking at the new place. That is why I spent the last six weeks opening boxes and putting books, clothes and dinner plates into their new spaces; arranging photographs, mothers’ day postcards and fathers’ day paintings; and throwing out some odd souvenirs that we bought some where, but that never really meant anything to me. Proof for my daily imperfections – the salad spinner is still in a box and the Nordic walking poles are stored, as I could not bring myself to just tossing them or giving them to charity.

What I also did during the last six weeks was sticking the little Jip and Janneke-magnets to our new fridge and putting the Julius Meinl-coffee jar in our kitchen – as the former is a fond memory of our time in The Netherlands, and the later of our years in Austria. Those little things make me feel at home, and looking at them again after a long while, they manage to put a smile on my face. With this achieved, I hope that “life” in the upcoming weeks and months will offer more time for contributions to thedailyimperfections.com.

The big challenge

Posted on by karenkleinwort

I grew up hardly thinking about feminism and gender equality. That debate took place before my time, it seemed.

During high school, girls could take the same courses as boys, and they got at least the same grades, often better. Then, as an apprentice and later at university, it was the same – loads of women attending the lectures on micro- and macroeconomics, a lot of them on top of their classes. They all got good jobs – it was the mid-1990s when we finished, the economy was doing fine all over Western Europe.

When I got my first well-paid position, the story continued – there were about as many women as men among the new recruits at Roland Berger, and also later at Financial Times Deutschland, there was pretty much a gender balance among editors and staff writers. Once you went up the hierarchy, women were scarcer, though.

So, all these years, I experienced that men and women have the same rights and that they can achieve the same if they want to.

This believe drastically changed when I got kids.

It might be a “German reality” much more than it is a Belgian, US-American or Argentine one. That is because until a few years ago (and still nowadays in a lot of cities in Western Germany), finding a day-care for your one-year-old is not easy. Finding one, that is open until 6 or 6:30 in the evening is close to impossible. And how about a creche for a six-month-old baby – forget about it. Germans are still doing quite well financially that the pressure for both parents to go back to work full time right after birth is less heavy than in Chicago or New York. And as Europeans usually run their own households, both husband and wife working AND doing the cleaning, washing, shopping and cooking is very often more than a lot of couples and new-born parents can deal with. In the developing world such as Latin America, professionals have the luxury of much more support at home – a “muchacha” who prepares your dinner, some guy who washes your car, a person with a power-drill and a bag of tools who fixes your broken sink for a few dollars, instead of you spending precious time on DIY during the weekend.

The special German character of this situation gets even more pronounced once children start school – as up until today, a lot of German primaries and even secondary schools finish at mid-day. And classes are usually designed so that students do a substantial part of the understanding and learning outside the classroom. In such a set-up, it comes in very handy for the student to have the support of a well-educated person in the afternoon – either in some after-school institution (those are, again, not always easy to find) or at home. In the latter case, another task for mom or dad.

When I consider all the men and women whom I studied and worked with in the past and who got children some time along the way, most of the men work full-time, while most of the women are employed part-time. The “moms” are occupied more than part-time, though – as in most cases they have assumed the main responsibilities of raising the kids and running the home.

So, on paper, men and women, fathers and mothers have the same rights and are considered equal. Reality shows, however, that even with the same education and similar capabilities, moms and dads very often take on different roles and subsequently have different careers and reach different earning potentials. One of the main challenges of nowadays families is for parents to find the roles that suit them and for couples to negotiate along mom’s and dad’s expectations, desires and necessities. After more than 30 years without them, I am finally leading my very own debates on feminism and gender equality.