Sprung At Last

Five years ago, in researching colleges, I discovered some interesting tidbits. One was that many Dutch universities teach courses in English these days. The other was that, if you’re a Dutch citizen, they’re dirt cheap, and you get a government stipend while you study. I wouldn’t have given it all that much thought except for an article in The Economist that I read around that time, discussing the fact that the Dutch government is so generous with benefits like this that they were starting to take steps to disallow dual citizenships.

It wasn’t clear to me whether or not the new rules would apply to The Child, but since it did make sense to try to ensure that she try to maintain her dual nationality at least until her education was taken care of, I contacted the Dutch consulate, who contacted The Foreigner, who within a few days had located all the documents and official stamps required of him. A few months later, The Child and I flew to the nearest Dutch consulate, in San Francisco, to deliver our portion of the documents, as required, in person.

A few months after that, The Child had a second passport, locked in a drawer, where it remained until I looked at it one day early last February and realized two things: first, that it was going to expire with in the year, and second, that The Child and I would need to fly to either San Francisco or Los Angeles to get it renewed, unless of course I wanted to fly to the East Coast.

I emailed The Foreigner, and let him know, so that he could get the documents and I could plan the trip.

I received no reply.

 

 

The Foreigner visited The Child twice after his return to The Netherlands. On the first trip, he came straight from the airport to my crummy apartment to see her, bringing toddler legos for her and my favorite Dutch candy for me. After she had been put to bed, he casually mentioned that he’d not yet booked a hotel.

I wished him good luck finding one.

The following year, he visited again, this time with a bicycle for The Child – now three – and more candy for me, but also with his new Dutch girlfriend. I allowed them to pick up The Child from daycare each day, as long as she was returned to me at a specified time each night. One evening The Foreigner asked for her U.S. passport so they could take a day trip to Canada, but before his plane ever landed I had given her passport to my coworker, who locked it in her desk drawer, promising to keep it safe from The Foreigner’s sweet-talking and my changes of heart.

He did not return her on time that evening; I called his hotel and learned he’d checked out hours earlier.

By the time he did return her, the police were at my apartment, taking information. They asked him questions, then told me plainly they weren’t satisfied with his answers.

Before leaving, the officer in charge said: I can’t tell you what to do, ma’am, but it’s important that you know what the police will and won’t do. One thing we don’t do is enforce visitation agreements. If someone wanted visitation enforced, they’d have to go to a judge, but, for example, if they came to the police station and showed us papers, we wouldn’t enforce that. I want to be sure you understand that, do you? Regardless of what anyone else might try to get you to believe.

I nodded and thanked him and did not deliver the child to daycare the next day.

The Foreigner showed up at daycare and made a scene, but left without seeing her again that day, or for the eleven years since.

 

Divorces don’t take very long when one party is willing to lose everything; The Foreigner’s need to return home was so urgent and focused that we actually breezed through the process fairly quickly. Mediating an agreement felt like a long time, but five hours to agree to the terms of custody isn’t actually long at all. The mediator split us up between two rooms, and spent most of her time in his, while I sat alone, flipping through a few People magazines and thinking how much more fun they were when Princess Diana was still alive.

There were two key items he was stuck on. The first was child support, which he’d discovered wasn’t an arbitrary amount that he just sent when he felt like it, but was actually an amount determined by a statutory formula, written into a binding agreement that was enforceable overseas. The other was The Child’s Dutch passport, about which he fought, apparently, long and hard. Everything depended on me signing off, immediately, on those papers, but I refused to sign and the mediator didn’t really ask me to: she just let me know it was a sticking point for him. Finally, I said, fine, tell him if he pays the child support on time and correctly every month for the first year, I’ll agree to cooperate in obtaining a Dutch passport.

I was surprised that he accepted that agreement. I was surprised when the child support was paid regularly for exactly a year.

I was surprised that at the end of that year, I was not presented with papers to sign to renew The Child’s Dutch passport.