I gave myself one day.

Just one. A birthday trip to Magalies with a friend. Nothing extravagant, nothing planned. Just a single day away from everything, because honestly, that was all I had left to give.

It was 2019. One of the most challenging and difficult years of my life, though I would not have said that out loud at the time. We had gotten married that year, with a four month old daughter, because that is just the kind of year it was. Full and overwhelming and beautiful all at once. I was on maternity leave. 

When I came home, my husband had news.

He had gotten a job. In the Netherlands.

I remember standing there, still carrying the quiet of that day, trying to hold what he was telling me. A job. In Europe. We were moving. And somewhere between that birthday trip to Magalies and standing in our living room in Midrand, the entire shape of our future had changed.

People celebrated with us. They called it exciting. An adventure. A fresh start in Europe. And it was all of those things. It genuinely was.

But nobody mentioned the part that comes alongside the excitement. The part where you land in a country where the sky is a different colour, the silence sounds different, the supermarket is nothing like what you know, and you are standing there with a baby on your hip and a five year old holding your hand, trying very hard to look like someone who has this under control.

I did not have it under control. And it took me a long time to admit that.

The Netherlands on paper versus the Netherlands in real life

On paper, the Netherlands makes sense. It is one of the most expat-friendly countries in Europe. The Dutch have one of the best English proficiencies for non-native speakers in the world, which means the language barrier is lower than in many other European countries. The work-life balance is renowned, the crime rates are low, and the quality of life is genuinely high.

And all of that is true. The Netherlands is a beautiful, functional, well-organised place to build a life.

But there is a gap between knowing those things and feeling them. Between reading about stroopwafels and King's Day and cycling everywhere, and actually standing in the middle of it all, trying to figure out how the rubbish collection works and why your bank card is not accepted everywhere and what exactly a DigiD is and why you cannot seem to get one without already having one.

What I was not prepared for

I was prepared for the practical things. The paperwork, the new address, the different plug sockets. What I was not prepared for was how much of my identity was tied to the place I had left.

In South Africa I knew who I was. I knew how to move through the world, how to read a room, how to show up in a way that felt natural. I had my people. I had my language, my rhythms, my familiarity with the way things worked. Here, I had to figure all of that out again. And the figuring out was exhausting in a way I could not explain to the people around me because from the outside everything looked fine.

The loneliness was the hardest part to admit. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind where you are surrounded by perfectly nice people and still feel like you are slightly outside of everything, watching through glass. Integration is slow. Nobody tells you how slow, or how normal that slowness is.

The grief nobody names

Starting over involves grief. Real grief. Not for a person, but for a version of your life. For the warmth of a South African summer. For the ease of being somewhere you understand and that understands you. For the friends who are now a time zone away. For the version of yourself who knew exactly how to exist in her environment.

But grief for a choice you made yourself can feel hard to justify. You chose this. So you feel like you are not allowed to mourn it.

You are allowed to love where you are and still miss where you were. You are allowed to be grateful for the new life and still feel the weight of what it cost to get here. Those things are not contradictions. They are just what big transitions actually feel like when you are honest about them.

I missed the warmth. Not just the weather, although that too, but the way people showed up for each other at home. The ubuntu of it. The way a stranger would help you without being asked. The way community worked differently, louder, closer. In the Netherlands, people drive on the right side of the road, the houses often have no curtains on the windows, and the social norms are simply different. None of that is wrong. It is just not what you grew up knowing. And your body takes time to adjust to a new normal it did not grow up in.

What actually helped

Time helped. More than I wanted it to, because I wanted a faster fix. But settling into a new place takes longer than anyone tells you and fighting that timeline made everything harder.

Finding community helped. There is a growing South African expat community in the Netherlands and connecting with people who understood both worlds, who had been through the same adjustment, who could laugh with you about the things that took you by surprise, was more valuable than I expected.

Small rituals helped. The things that stayed the same regardless of where I was. Morning walks helps. Clothing that felt familiar and soft. The small anchors that reminded me who I was underneath the adjustment.

And honesty helped. Admitting to myself and to a small number of trusted people that it was hard. That I was not entirely okay. That the fresh start was also a loss and I needed to acknowledge that before I could really begin.

To any woman doing this right now

If you have just arrived, or you are still in the middle of the adjustment, or you have been here a while and some days still feel harder than you expected, I want you to know that is not a sign you made the wrong choice.

It is just a sign that you are human and humans are not designed to transplant easily. Especially not when they arrive with a baby in arms and a small child in tow and a husband starting a new job and an entirely new life to build from scratch.

Give yourself more time than you think you need. More grace than you would give anyone else. More permission to be in progress rather than already arrived.

The tulips will come. The cycling will make sense. The Dutch directness will start to feel like honesty rather than rudeness. You will find your people. You will build your village, even if it looks different from the one you left.

And one day you will stand somewhere in this flat, beautiful, grey-and-then-suddenly-golden country and realise it has become yours. Not instead of where you came from. Alongside it.