Even though I didn’t feel Dutch on a 2001 trip to the Netherlands, finding my maiden name, Hoitenga, on tombstones in a Witmarsum cemetery brought me to tears and made my Dutch roots feel real for the first time. Fast forward to a few weeks ago in Aruba. My husband and I briefly met a …
Continue reading Finding My Identity in a Dutch Cemetery – Part 3
In Part 1 of this "identity" story, I wrote about finding a cemetery surrounding a church in Witmarsum, the town where my great grandparents lived in Friesland, The Netherlands. I'd taken along a photo of a distant relative taken outside the church in 1947. I posed for a picture in the same spot. Exciting! Note …
Continue reading Finding My Identity in a Dutch Cemetery – Part 2
I'm off to Aruba this week (see my header, the palm trees beckon), but come along with me on a story I wrote in 2001 about a trip we made to the Netherlands. I've been noticing on my WordPress stats page lately that I've had a steady flow of readers from there (welcome!), and I'm …
When I first read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1970, I cried with relief. Friedan had interviewed suburban housewives and found many were not fulfilled as homemakers. That was me. And like others in these first waves of feminism, I, after some painful soul-searching (chapters 5 and 6 in Caring Lessons), ventured out of …
Write Along with Me 