Expat Parenting

I love being an expat parent. When I read things like this, or this (link via Raising WEG), or this (via Phantom Scribbler, whose post responding to the story is a must read), I have to say: I love being an expat parent. There is the occasional advantage to outsider status, and in my case it turns out that I really don't care what people think about me. (Believe me, back in D.C. where a lot of my friends were Movers and Shakers, I cared about this sort of thing more than I like to admit.) I don't care if people look at me as I walk down the street with Small Boy in the stroller having a whole conversation with him. I don't care if it's unseemly to let him latch onto my chin in public while I giggle helplessly. I don't care if people think he shouldn't be playing with that straw. (Well, yeah, they were probably right since he did sort of poke himself in the eye with it, but we learned that for ourselves and now we know.) The way I see it, I'm never going to do things like the Swiss moms do them, so why bother trying? It gives me remarkable freedom to follow my instincts. I have parenting books (American and Swiss) and I visit the Mütterberaterin monthly, but in terms of the day to day to day interaction, the way I've decided to be with Small Boy, the kind of mother I want to be - I hesitate to call it my Parenting Philosophy, since I think Parenting Philosophies all too often get turned into sticks used to beat other parents about the head and neck with - I just do what feels natural.

Perhaps I would have been this kind of parent anyway, if we had stayed in the States. Perhaps this freedom to follow my instincts and forget the rest is coming from me and from Small Boy and perhaps I wouldn't feel judged at every turn in the States. It's an unanswerable question since we're raising our son, for the moment, here.

I've tried to ponder this before, without much success, and I suspect I will continue to ponder this without much success until I actually spend a year raising a child in the States. I know that what I read and the lives of real parents are very different things, I know that, but when I read these things I find myself wondering how I would feel doing my thing the way I'm doing it now back in D.C. I know that D.C. is an abberation, but it's my reference point, my home town. And I'm fairly certain that the minute I said "stay at home mom" 95% of the people at a cocktail party fundraiser would deem me Boring and Not Worth Talking To, and I say that as a person who considers D.C. her home town and who would like to live there again one day. But it's a lingering suspicion and, frankly, one of the reasons why for the time being I'm more than happy to stay here despite the occasional bout of Heimweh (homesickness).

Maybe it's not being an expat. Maybe it's just that this is a good place to have a young child. It's quiet and clean and safe and child-friendly and I can act like an adult - go out to lunch or coffee with friends, Small Boy in tow - without being shunned. I am never the only person in the grocery store with a kid, rarely the only person in our neighborhood coffee shop with a kid (Small Boy made a friend with an 11-month old girl last weekend - they shared toys, it was so cute!), often not the only person having lunch with a kid. There are playgroups and story hour (in dialket) at the Tierpark and (in English) at the English bookstore. The public Schwimmbad has a family section with a wading pool and a sandbox and lots of trees so you can keep your young child shaded (it's not cordoned off or anything, I just mean that they've put in a lot of attractions for young children). Maybe it's here that frees me as a parent.

There are times when I hate living out my life between two countries, never quiet getting the Swiss social customs right and slowly forgetting - or rejecting - the American ones, but in this instance I think it's a luxury. R and Small Boy and I are carving out our own space, planting our flag, claiming this territory as ours and setting our own social customs. I like expat parenting. There are no expectations but our own.

(I write all this with the full knowledge that one day, perhaps one day very soon, I will say I hate being an expat parent. But for now I'm finding a real freedom in it.)