I’m checking myself how much I need of everything, every time I go to the grocery store. Years past, I would go to the S Market in Lievestuore three to four times in a two-week summer visit to buy groceries for our stay at the mökki. When merely visiting, two weeks felt so…sufficient. These last two weeks in our Haukkala row house, feels like it’s flying by, and on my last grocery run, I found myself analyzing how much toilet paper we need for our time left, like leaving extra toilet paper would be so stupid or something. It highlights a shift in mentality on the same amount of time though.
We will return to Minnesota almost 49 weeks after we left, but we will actually move back into our home in Duluth, 362 days after we backed out of the driveway to catch our flights to Helsinki in Minneapolis last July. While our Finnish stay ends, our journey really comes about as close as you can get to an exact year, once we’ll be settled back in our house in Duluth. Three days shy of exactly.
I think if you go back and read this blog in its entirety, it might be repetitive in places. It’s probably inevitable in a year of synthesizing life that some things will be rehashed, so I’m trying not to be repetitive here while still being insightful and reflective of the whole shebang.
If what my family and I did this year sounds really cool and enviable, I think it was probably actually less so than you think. If you think it sounds horrible, it was probably actually more awesome than you think. Regardless of whether you could or couldn’t theoretically do what we just did, the actual details of doing it are pretty involved. It’s not like going on vacation for year. Not by a long shot.
The cultural and emotional adjustment of it all fills this blog, and pretty much tries to represent at least my experience if not my family's. But for all its upsides, challenges still saturated the entire thing, and I’m not sure I have fully exposed that. So, if you’re thinking, “I’m going to do that too,” I aim to shed some light on what has been challenging, particularly for my wife, Mimmu, before you quit your job and buy a ticket to Helsinki, at least.
When you are the alien adult parent without native language skills, you become sort of a semi-useless appendage. I am a doer by nature, so that’s not enjoyable. I like to roll up my sleeves and get done what needs to get done. So when the intricate work to allow me to stay here is word soup government forms, I’ve not been too helpful, and that sucks. I know this also frustrated Mimmu as logistics largely landed on her shoulders. I think all of it was doable for me, but would’ve taken much longer with way more potential setbacks, misses, and penalties. For all the love I've given Finland for its social welfare, they don't just let you waltz in and take advantage of it without being really clear what your deal is. Even as the spouse of a native citizen, we, err...Mimmu, had to do a lot of leg work just to get me to stay, and still I wasn't receiving social security benefits of a citizen. So if you think you'll show up to valhalla and start loving life without being married to a Finn or paying taxes or both, know that is NOT going to be easy. So marry a Finn first, then be ready for the taxes.
Just getting me residency for an unknown duration was a heavy lift for her, and that’s just one fundamental piece to this whole year working. Once she had a job on top of it, the stress was even greater. She had to manage details of our kids’ school, our apartment rental, home purchase, car purchase, vacation details, Covid testing, doctor and dental visits, tax discrepancies between the US and Finland. Then, more recently, she mostly has taken care of shifting it all back the other way, moving her job to the US, finding Finnish renters for our row house, selling our car; a seemingly endless year of logistical detail that I simply wasn’t terribly helpful with. Looking back, without hiring a Finnish lawyer, I don’t know how one would go about doing what we did without her. I don’t think I would try it.
For all the nice and shiny in this blog, behind the scenes was Mimmu, lifting up and holding our family’s world together so we could experience her homeland, with good people supporting us on both ends. It literally took a village, that, I suppose one could do this all without, but I don’t fancy trying. I haven’t even spoken at length of my parents in Duluth, our friend Montana, my coaching colleagues and staff at St. Scholastica all back in Duluth helping us out; NBC staff and production crew making it work this winter; nor Mimmu’s mom, dad, brother, and sister, and good friend Kike, here in Jyväskylä, who have been inexhaustible in their support. So, beyond marrying a Finn, have a lifetime of great family and friends on each end of the equation is advisable; helpful friends and family in Minneapolis and Helsinki doesn't hurt either.
While a year sounds long, to move here, find her a job, get settled, start living “normally”, then turn around and go back; well, it isn’t a long time at all. In fact, it has turned out to be pretty much a continuous process. Once we got to a point we felt like we were settled and could breathe again, we had to snap to it and do it all over again in the opposite direction. We’re deep into that process currently.
Making it more difficult is that we actually like it here. The momentum isn’t simply in favor of the move back, because instincts feel like we should enjoy what we’ve worked for, at least a little longer. It’s tempting and easier to live here in many practical ways. Not that we don’t want to go back to Duluth. If we didn’t want to, we wouldn’t do it. But it’s not like we’re fleeing a bad situation here. Quite the opposite. It all highlights how impractical this whole journey this year has been. Why would we choose practicality now? Truth is, we as a family, are Duluthians. You don’t just wipe that away.
The takeaway is, anyone thinking this was all roses, romance, and high ideals needs to know the weight of practicality in such an endeavor. It’s been more than a little exhausting, for nobody more than Mimmu. But I think it’s been equally or more rewarding too.
Underneath, or maybe more accurately, underwriting, all the impracticality, was financial and professional stress. Doing this all would certainly be easier for someone more affluent. This is not to poor-us this story. We have certainly done well enough and even as recent as a few years ago, we may not have had the resources necessary to do this gracefully without putting us potentially in a much more precarious situation than we are in. Mimmu and I are also career people by nature. In a nutshell, it’s expensive to do this both financially and emotionally, and it's challenging professionally to say the least. Without being readily employable as a native passport holder as Mimmu is, and able to land a great job as she did, I don’t know how one would do it without having a decent chunk of disposable income. Then you'd have to theoretically decide if this is what you want to spend it on.
The unique situation with Covid ended up in the end working out professionally for both of us with no guarantee for either of us going into it. We had to approach it with a great amount of faith that things would somehow work out. You can’t measure the stress in that up front. Covid made it all seem more reasonable. I held my breath about my day job nearly the entire time as we weighed where we were, where the world was with the pandemic, where our family values fell on our decisions of what to do and when. I was lucky to have at least some of my commentator work happen remotely from here in the winter, as well as an amazing partnership with my employer and student athletes, that could have disintegrated at any moment depending on timing of numerous decisions, when they were made, and the collective attitudes towards those details. The fact that I am able to go back to my coaching job through all this feels so fortunate. It shows you the grace and care of the people I work with and for. I am lucky, to say the least.
Still, comparisons between living one place and the next are inevitable—especially when your homeland is going through painful, existential political and social issues through a pandemic. This is kind of the backdrop of this blog. Hitting on the practical logistical realities felt necessary before I closed out our trip and this blog. I feel like I now have to try to bookend it with a reduction of this year in its essence.
On the daily experiences, besides language and slight differences in infrastructure, the lives we’ve lived here aren’t vastly different. It’s not terribly exotic compared to life in Duluth. We don’t take rickshaws to open air fish, meat, and produce markets. We don’t have sirens go off a few times a day to face Mecca and kneel. The food isn’t way different. We drive similar--ok, nicer--cars here on the same side of the road as home. We wear similar types of clothing at the same times of the year. My sister’s five years in Istanbul are way cooler from a cultural perspective, so as I’ve suggested before, I’m no familial Marco Polo.
Finland, and all of Scandinavia really, have been a fascination for me most of my life, probably because of the deference paid to the sport I love and have revolved my life around. But I’ve also been a bit of a social scientist by nature, and the more I’ve learned of life here, the more I’ve admired it; never more than looking back on this last year.
The things we love about Duluth and Minnesota are voluminous. Those have never been the focus nor really the point of this blog, so they’ve never been an explicit counterpoint. Our move back should serve as counterpoint plenty.
I think as colorfully and effusive as I’ve painted this year, most Americans might not find much, or maybe anything to like here. I’d guess most Americans would hanker to return far more than we do at this point. As similar as it is to Minnesota life, most Americans would probably feel too foreign to stay.
Through the lens of a pandemic, life by comparison seems like it would feel pretty simple here even in a non-pandemic situation; pretty local. Culture and entertainment feel limited compared to what’s available even in Duluth, let alone Minneapolis or New York and LA. That is for sure colored by my inability to speak Finnish, but Finland's entertainment industry is just a function of its size too. And we Americans are conditioned and accustomed to entertainment driving our lives; at least Americans not working 3 jobs just to get by. So for middle- to upper-middle-class Americans like our family—I think Finland might feel a little sleepy.
This is where I think my experience against the stats of happiness and social welfare for Finns really come to the fore. I don’t get the sense that Finns like me, with sound finances and relative stability professional situations, chase as much as people like us do in America. I don’t know if we Americans even know fully what we’re chasing, but a year here has made it clearer to me that life for a family like ours in Jyväskylä is just calmer than Duluth. I’ve often felt overwhelmed in America, both personally and professionally, and chasing my kids' futures for/with them is a theme that feels toned down at least here, if not kind of moot. Maybe our endless entertainment feeds us the sense that we have endless possibilities and we can't let any of them get away from us. I don't know. I'm just spit-balling here. In America, it often feels overwhelming at best, impossible at worst. Here, it all feels...achievable. It feels like happiness beats achievement, it is achievable, and everyone is in on that secret. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why that is—what parts exactly make up the sum of it—but it feels nice. I wish I could pack it up in my bag and take it home with me and spread it in the place of Covid when I land.
I think that’s my single great reticence upon returning. I honestly don’t know if it's a pandemic revelation I’m constructing for myself or if it’s real. It’s probably a bit of both. But, it should be pointed out, that I am a different person to and in Finland than I am to and in Minnesota. Perhaps with time here, I might find myself feeling pulled as frantically as I have in Minnesota. Many things make it feel like it is real though. For example, behavior norms here around the work day; respect for and amount of vacation Finns actually receive and truly use; even nationwide rules by sports organizations that parents can’t yell at youth sports games. So much less boils my blood here. In fact, my blood doesn’t boil here. MSNBC and Fox News aren’t competing for the temperature of my blood. It causes me to wonder what it would be like if THEY were against the rules there, just like yelling at kids playing sports is here. It all comes back to sensibilities that show up in every day life here. When Finland tests high in happiness, I think these things are symptoms of where Finland has ended up with their values. If you’re an American and never experience it, you’ll never know nor see the difference. And maybe that’s for the best? Like the Dude said, how you gonna keep Bunny Lebowski on the farm once she’s seen Carl Hungus?
Those things—those quality-of-life things--and how they manifest themselves in how you feel every morning when you wake up and when you go to bed every night, might seem like details. Really, they’re probably the whole shootin’ match. That is what I have to reconcile as we move back, and maybe what I’ll be aiming for more of in the way I live stateside.
Says the guy who chooses to practice two professions at once and travels to New York and back every week in the winter.
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