We didn’t know where this year would lead. And I really mean that. Throughout this adventure, friends and family on all sides have inquired on our long game, and our honest answers have always been, we didn’t know.
Covid shut downs in America started late last summer and drove multiple other factors to varying degrees to stay longer in Finland. Our children’s schooling and health and welfare seems like where we always started. But Mimmu’s job/career—she arrived here unemployed—my employment, and how Covid was being dealt with in America and here, all factored in as well. The long game wasn’t visible to us for most of the year.
Practical matters then drove everyday life. Mortgage rates made buying over renting a no-brainer. Kids got into a school, they made friends and joined sports teams. Mimmu loves her job. Roots took hold. More things entered the picture.
Finland hasn’t been a total Covid haven either. The maskless, Covid-case-less Finland we landed in with our face masks and shields last July felt like sweet relief at a time when reasonable folks at home were pretty concerned with and outright scared of the rapid rise and weak response to the disease by the federal government, while Finland comparatively, was Covid flat-lined and living pretty normally. It felt really easy to stay put once here. In many ways that hasn’t changed even though in regards to Covid, both Finland and America have.
Throughout history, humans have adapted to mass adversities like pandemics. Finland’s cases did rise this fall and winter. We eventually ended up in the masked world. While cases and deaths were always a shadow of what friends and family back in Duluth dealt with, we still had a few Covid tests to be sure our family’s sniffles and sore throats weren’t the virus. We’ve been here through Finland’s Covid-worst. It’s impossible to say how that might feel in comparison to being in Duluth through the same period. Suffice to say it still feels like a good move even if weathering the pandemic was the only measure of our time here, which it was not. But in that respect, we’ve emerged pretty well, though not yet vaccinated.
While friends back home in America have had to live through the exasperation of politicized mask mandates and the country has endured a whopping, sobering loss of life (I’d like everyone who never forgets 9/11 to never forget this year either when voting in the future), America has the resources and industry to turn it around quickly too. Vaccines.
All the adults in my family in the US are vaccinated. Mimmu and I are not. Helsinkians our age seem to be through first doses, which makes sense. Helsinki stands out as Finland’s biggest Covid concern. Finland has high vaccination rates to availability, but we haven’t gotten to the sub-50 year-old group in Jyväskylä yet, though we’re expecting it any day now.
All this against an impending mask drop and opening-up announced in Minnesota today as well as the college I work at following suit soon. It kind of feels surreal, like it can’t really be happening. It feels so…sudden. But it is happening. And we’re going back to live in Duluth, hopefully vaccinated by then.
When you start walking on a trail into an unfamiliar forest for the first time, you don’t know where it will lead you. That understandably unnerves a lot of people. I’ve always loved the feel of doing that though. I have a strong sense of direction and rarely feel “lost” in new territory. Looking back, I’ve done a lot of that this year, literally and figuratively. My whole family has figuratively. I’ve discovered the trails all around here that were new and exciting last August. As the snow has melted, I’ve gone out and found trails I travelled last fall. A winter of skiing and spatial awareness, puts them in a different, much more familiar context now. I can’t assume my children have the same instincts, but they seem to have adjusted and navigated life here pretty well too.
That’s what this whole thing has really done for us. Finland—Jyväskylä specifically—will never feel the same to our family after this year. Like the trails I’ve revisited after a year of building familiarity, every trip back here for the rest of our lives will feel a bit like coming home. For our Finnish-citizen children, that’s valuable beyond measure and expression.
We have so many people on both ends to thank for it. We might have been able to pull this whole thing off without any of them, but it would have been a totally different experience; probably much more lonely, stressful and financially destabilizing. It was all those things plenty as it was. Having great friends and family really have been the key to doing this even somewhat gracefully.
On this end, Finland as a society is famous for its social welfare, but along with that comes learning a complex system of rules and laws, and navigating a bureaucracy neither of us had adult experience with. Mimmu has been exceedingly diligent and patient with all of it, but will be the first to tell you how helpful everyone has been. Government workers in America get a bad rap. “Going postal” is a colloquialism that feeds negative imagery of disgruntled, unhappy, unhelpful government paper pushers that kind of prevails as an attitude towards government work. Finland’s bureaucracy, for our experience, is nothing of the sort. We can probably thank wages, vacation, and general standard of life for that. Our general tone of deference with them, being completely foreign and feeling at their mercy through all of it, might have helped the interactions too. Finns may object at this assessment, and our experience cannot be construed as universally true, but I posit that one’s expectations are formed by their experiences. Our experience with Finnish bureaucracy, though not perfect, has certainly been favorable.
I can assure you it still wasn’t easy—actually, Mimmu, the only fluid Finnish-speaking adult in the matter, can. We’d better get something for what have largely been her efforts to make us feel like a Finnish family for the first time in our collective lives. Plus, once connected and inside the system, it is all electronic and slick—like a small, maneuverable, tech savvy nation might be by now. You don’t need multiple IDs and passwords when working with Finnish infrastructure. Once you get into the system—which is still daunting—it’s pretty seamless. When you move for example, your address changes in one place and it gets updated everywhere. You don’t need to do any change of address forms with the post office. The social security update will update everyone else system wide so the next billing statement gets sent to your new address automatically, from everyone billing you; the library, the hospital, your home and car insurance. It all requires a Finnish bank account and everything is tied to that account, which might make Big Brother theorists uneasy, but it certainly smooths things out and eliminates frustration. But paying invoices is nearly universally the same experience across the country with any vendor. It’s kind of amazing, really.
Even with all those details in place now and smooth sailing here, the fact remains; the kids miss their home in Duluth. We all do. Not so much that Mimmu and I couldn’t fathom staying here. We absolutely could; not only fathom staying, but actually stay. And we almost did, but for entirely different reasons than we stayed for in the first place back in July.
Since Taavi was born and we got his Finnish passport, we dreamed about coming for a year to Finland while the kids were still in elementary school so they could be Finns—to feel Finnish, speak the language, navigate life here comfortably. We never knew how we were going to do it, nor put a plan in place to. Now that we’ve done it, I can tell you, without a pandemic, we never would have. It’s just too damn scary and exhausting. But in a pandemic, your goal posts move. And here we are.
The pandemic was a perfect storm of forces that brought it about. First, we had the plane tickets, bought pre-Covid, for a month stay last July and August—the longest planned visit to that time. A lot of factors then lined up to make it a reasonable—not easy—decision, once we got a clear picture of how Covid would grind things to a near halt last fall and winter in the US.
We hear a lot about silver linings coming out of the pandemic. Not downplaying the devastation to so many things—least of all, the loss of life—our year here certainly qualifies as one. We’ve missed American family, friends, and colleagues, but we’ve also missed Finnish ones too. Many we still haven’t gotten together with due to the pandemic. It underscores how proximity during the height of the pandemic mattered less than our instincts might have us believe. We are currently in a race with vaccinations and our return flights to see many Finnish friends for the first time since we arrived here nearly a year ago. We’ve seen and experienced far less than we would have liked to with a whole year in Finland because of the pandemic. It wasn’t our dream year in Finland, but beggars can’t be choosers.
The most unexpected surprise on this trail in the woods has been Mimmu’s career. We are thrilled and almost have to pinch ourselves with the direction it took the last 7 months here. This became the single stickiest point in a return to the US. We never could have anticipated that last July.
Many we know have wondered about our long range plans. The truth is, we never really had any concrete ones. We were always aware of a range of outcomes, but could never settle on one because the very things that led to this move have remained fluid throughout. We are employed with wonderful employers that will continue to employ us as we go back to Duluth. We’ve tackled what has felt right at each crossroads and allowed those factors to end up what they would be. We continue with that attitude today. It’s going to work out that we can do it in Duluth for now, which we are both more than thankful for. We both love our jobs. But at the same time, the pandemic has instilled in us a sense that nothing is certain. We are happy to have a Finnish employer and a place here as well.
Meanwhile, all the details we faced on settling here, re-emerge in some form as we head back the opposite direction across the Atlantic. We have been lucky to do this in ways too numerous and detailed to discuss. We’ve also had to make our own luck by heading onto a trail we didn’t really know, with confidence we’d find our way out when we needed to. Miraculously, we’ve navigated well enough that we prepare to leave here largely unscathed in any major negative way.
Now, everything here is flipped from when we decided to stay. The novelties of a new life in a foreign country have worn off. I find myself driving our wagon down the highway into downtown, with no novelty at all. It has become, simply, my life. And as excited as I am to return to the life we’ve lived the last 13 years, I’m going to miss a lot from this one—most of it highlighted in the lines already written on this site in prior posts. To make it tougher, we still have all the details of getting a renter for our place here, what to do with the car, residence status, health insurance, FIFA paperwork, what stays and what comes with, what do we sell, and on and on. Mimmu is a total, longsuffering champ in that regard.
Minnesotans are famous for the long good bye. When we visit and it’s getting time to go, the long goodbye starts with something like, “Well…I suppose…” as in we should probably get going. That’s a sign to all Minnesotans that the long good bye has begun.
But nobody moves quickly. If you’re the host, you don’t want to rush the process because the guest might feel they’re being pushed to leave. If you’re the guest, you don’t want the host to think you’re trying the get the heck outta there. So, you’d better start extricating yourself early if you really have other engagements.
Right after the “Well…” signal, we introduce a new, parting topic to soften the abruptness of a sudden departure. As we’d trail off on perhaps the third or fourth tangent off the first topic, we usually signal again with a, “well, early morning tomorrow,” or, “I ‘spose the dogs are hungry…” then drift off into what we’re doing at work, or something really funny about the dogs, to soften the departure further. This might even happen a few more times, while jackets are fetched, put on, multiple rounds of hugs. And finally you get out the door. “Bye!” “See you!” “Call me if you need night crawlers!” “Watch out for the mailbox there backing out! I really need to fix that!” “Watch for the neighbor boy down the street! He never looks before zipping put onto the street on his skateboard !”
Everyone involved knew you’re going to get out the door, but the long good bye feels good. Like you care. Everyone knows how to do it. Because they’ve been a part of it since birth.
To Finland, we’ve said, “well…”. We have our plane tickets to Minnesota. The long goodbye has begun.
Unlike the sort of open-ended real thing, we know the day and time the door opens and we step through and wave good bye. Unlike the endless possibilities colored by an on-going, uncertain outcome, everything starts to have that end-of-a-tale feel to it now, with a relative empty sadness. Iita got a little tearful in the car after her last practice, having thanked her JYP teammates and coaches for her year of hockey here. The finality wasn’t lost on her at 10 years old. Taavi's Salibandy playing—a sport where he truly found himself—will cease too. We all feel it with every Turunen gathering. With Covid way down and vaccinations way up, we are lining up some of those visits with Finnish friends we haven’t had yet. Funny. When your stay is open ended, you think there’s time. But time is ticking now that we’ve triggered the long good bye. There are only so many tangents left.
Every day is now just a topic change on the pathway to the hugs and the tears and the waves that are inevitable. And the reflective drive home that makes us feel a little empty inside.
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