why minimal to the max?

Getting married and having kids changes the way we look at life. Moving to the another country, wrestling with homesickness and with cultural adjustment, among other things, just complicated matters.

At first, I had no consciousness of the value of the /guilder/. Nine years ago, the Dutch were still using the guilder, and to this day, Dutch folks still pine over the loss of the guilder. But that's straying away from the topic. As I said, I had no idea what the value of a guilder was, and because my husband (oh so used to living his bachelor life and spending as he wished) didn't bring me up to date on that, I probably ended up spending a lot more than I should have.

When my first child was born, I found myself buying toys left and right. I ended up making purchases which (now that I look back) weren't at all necessary or wise. The thing is, I was engaged in symptomal buying. Something called: Compensatory gift-giving.

It's a syndrome familiar to migrants. It's the reason why we end up blowing a month's salary on sale items, designer clothing, and lots of other things for family back home as well as for our children.

For me, the buying syndrome came out of the thought that I was making up for the physical absence of my family. Somehow, each toy or thing I bought for my child became a symbol for Lolo or Lola, for Uncle or Aunt.

But that's not the only thing migrants wrestle with. A friend of mine told me about her Chinese neighbour (a wonderful woman, she says) who keeps on cleaning the house the entire day because she "doesn't want the Dutch to think that she was just some prostitute picked up by her husband somewhere".

It's stuff like this that we (migrants from a third world nation) struggle with.

Minimal to the max is me, attempting to document my journey through budgetting, learning to live within my means, and learning to stand up for myself.