Extended background: how I came to be in the Netherlands in the first place....

Oh dear. I just got a message from another old high school friend who found me in Facebook. She asked, how did I come to be in Holland? And of course I realize that my annual Christmas newsletters stopped happening when the kids were little, and the yearly visits back to Ithaca stopped being yearly some time ago as well. If I'm going to get properly networked (which is definitely The Thing To Do in 2009), I'd better give a little more than 5 years of background on this blog...

Can I compress my life since graduation into a few paragraphs? Not very easily, but I'll try.

I graduated from Ithaca High School in 1982, and went off to college in Minnesota, eager to "rebrand" myself a little. I'm not sure how successful that was, but in any case I loved Carleton. I graduated from there in 1986 with a BA in geology and a concentration in Natural History. (My senior thesis for my geology major was about flow and sedimentation in a bend in a river, and my thesis for the natural history minor was about sustainable agriculture and land stewardship. Two topics, both of which appeared to have absolutely no relevance to the rest of my life up until this month, oddly....)

In the summer of 1986, I got married to Graham Pugh, a physics major from Cornell whom I had met during one of my summer vacations. Getting married right out of college was not one of the smartest things I've ever done, but hey. It could have been a lot worse. Graham and I were divorced in 2002 or 2003 and we are now very good friends. He lives in Washington DC, is remarried to a wonderful woman, and works for the US Energy Dept as a climate change expert. Our two kids (Alan, 17, and Mara, 13) live with him and his new wife, and they spend a part of each summer with me (or me with them.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In 1986, shortly after getting married, Graham and I went off to Kenya to work for the Peace Corps. We taught in two different rural schools, incidentally both in the Luo community where Barack Obama's family is from. It was a life-changing experience in many ways. We were glad to get home, and our families were glad to see us in one piece (much skinnier than when we left but still one piece.) This was before cell phones and internet and everything -- it's hard to imagine.

We returned to Ithaca and lived there a while (we bought a small house in Danby). Alan was born in 1991 and we went for the "divide and conquer" plan: I would handle parenting and household and try to do freelance CAD work and writing and Graham would get his masters in Engineering and look for a tech job that paid decently. We ended up a few years later in Portland OR, where Graham started working for Intel. Portland was nice, I eventually made some good friends there, but life was hard. Graham had to work long hours and for a supervisor he didn't get along with at all. Mara was born in 1996. I was exhausted and depressed and suffering from chronic headaches.

In 1998 we moved to Austin, Texas, on assignment for Intel. My headaches got worse and I eventually ended up at the acupuncture clinic of the Academy of Oriental Medicine. There, to my surprise, I actually got relief. And I started to realize that I was exhausted and depressed (those are things you often don't realize you are experiencing while you are experiencing them....) I decided to enroll in acupuncture school, because I wanted to know how it worked. That was great -- I learned a lot and made new friends who knew me as Emily and not as wife-mother-of-two-housekeeper. But I only completed a year before we moved again.

Graham got a new assignment in Belgium. We were there for three years. It was really hard for me -- no school, no colleagues, no friends, and lots of housekeeping. But I found some small courses to take, in England, that were alternative-health related. I also took a trip to China with friends from the acupuncture school in Texas -- my first time "on my own" without child responsibilities in ... oh... 10 years. That trip made me realize that I needed to take care of my own needs a little better. After returning to Belgium, I arranged to rent a practice room in a nearby town, find a nanny and a housekeeper and actually "be me" for a few hours a day.

Being me turned out to be an interesting adventure. You can read more about it on my website, www.innerfireworks.com. In a nutshell: I started trusting more in my intuition, and weird and exciting stuff started happening. I liked the changes I was experiencing, but Graham didn't. I can't really blame him -- it's not what he signed up for. But I didn't want to go back to the way it was before. So. We separated. Intel wanted him to go back to the US, and I thought/felt: not again. I can't move again. I finally had a little idea about who I was and a circle of friends who supported me in that, and I knew/felt I needed to stay. And I also knew I was in no position to take good care of the kids (still being exhausted and depressed most of the time) so Graham and I arranged for him to take the kids back to the US. Whew. That was a hard paragraph to write.

So, there I was, in 2003, 39 years old, divorced, depressed, and certifiably wacko. I had just channeled a 60,000 word manuscript on self-discovery and spirituality (yes, still unpublished, but I'm going to get around to it!) I was living alone in Belgium without any clear idea why, just a bunch of intuitive impulses. It was rough. But luckily one of those intuitive impulses sent me off to a summer Shiatsu course. That's where I met Paulus. Paulus was living in Utrecht, the Netherlands. We did the long distance relationship thing for a while (until his car died) and then I decided to move again. We got married in 2004. Maybe it isn't so smart to get married to someone you've only known for a year -- but we've been together 5 years now and we're both really happy. No regrets at all.

And in Utrecht, I met another alternative healer who was able to figure out why I was so tired and depressed and prone to headaches: apparently I'm hypersensitive to environmental toxins. Now, as long as I keep on top of things and don't let the pseudo-estrogens or the benzenes or heavy metals build up in my system, I am full of energy and good spirits. Plus my immune system is great -- I got a cold last week but it was the first time in over 4 years.

And now you're pretty much up to date.

Paulus and I moved all my stuff from Belgium to Utrecht in 2004, to the house he had been sharing with Willy (his previous partner, who passed away from cancer just before the Shiatsu course where we met.) We moved all his stuff from a separate apartment he had to that house (including many belongings from his mother who had passed away a few years before.) We moved all Willy's artwork and furniture from out of an artist's studio she had been renting. It was horrible, all that moving! And then the owners of the house where we had moved ALL that stuff into, said we couldn't stay there. We had to get out right away, which is a difficult thing to do in Utrecht because of the intense housing shortage. That's how we ended up here on the Groenedijk. But that was 5 years ago, so the painful memories of endless moving boxes and things getting lost and damaged are quite faded, and I think I'm ready to face it again. Especially if we only have to move across town, and we'll be able to keep our current circle of friends.

And now it is time for a fresh post, with the updates on our potential future home in Bunnik.