I was sitting in my cargo bike outside my son’s børnehave (kindergarten) on an especially bitter February morning in Copenhagen, crying over forgetting his Fastelavn costume at home.
Fastelavn, for the uninitiated, is Denmark’s candy-filled, costume-wearing, barrel-smashing children’s tradition, somewhere between Halloween and Carnival. It’s something Danes grow up with; I, on the other hand, can barely spell or pronounce the word, much less summon the explanation my child deserves when he asks what it means.
I’ve been living in Copenhagen with my Danish husband and our 3-year-old son, Aksel, for about eight years. Still, while Halloween is embedded in my childhood memories, this is one of the many Danish traditions that I am still learning in adulthood, while also trying to make it feel magical for Aksel.
Although nothing terrible had happened that morning (Aksel’s teacher had an extra firefighter costume), it confirmed an anxiety I’ve had since he was born: that I’m always a little late to the culture forming my son’s childhood, and that one day he may sense that gap in me too.
Denmark is great for kids, but motherhood takes more than policy
Denmark, in many ways, lives up to its reputation: thoughtful, child-centered, and one of the best countries to raise a family. Childhood here feels less commercialized, less frantic, and less overengineered than in the United States. Its policies are famously family-friendly, from paid maternity leave to free education.
But while Denmark excels in these departments, motherhood, I’ve learned, is sustained by more than policy. It is made of memories, recognition, and all those practical forms of knowledge no one thinks to explain to you until you’re already responsible for a child.
For example, when Aksel was born, I knew nothing about the near-mystical Danish faith in wool, or how to properly dress a child for winter here. For a while, it seemed as though every Danish child was dressed according to some code I had not yet cracked, and candidly, I have yet to master the wool layers.
What made early motherhood hard wasn’t merely fatigue, but fatigue of translation. I was learning how to care for a baby while also learning how to exist in a world that wasn’t yet my own.
That, I think, is one of the least said truths for expats, immigrants, and anyone building a family somewhere foreign: raising a child can awaken your own homesickness in a newly vulnerable way. No efficient system, however generous, can replace that.
Motherhood abroad made every cultural difference feel bigger
Fastelavn exposed this ache, but it’s hardly the only example. Before motherhood, I lived in Copenhagen with curiosity and a degree of detachment, akin to studying abroad. Once I had a child, the stakes changed, as customs were no longer charming details in the background of my life, but part of the emotional world I’m obliged to foster for him.
My Danish is improving, yet far from perfect. Sometimes when Aksel’s classmates at børnehave ask him why his mom doesn’t understand them, I feel embarrassed. I’m still self-conscious about speaking English with him in public, as I don’t want to be immediately identifiable as foreign, as though that might expose me as someone who doesn’t fully know the rules.
At my worst moments, what I fear is not that Aksel will fail to belong here, but that he will sense how hard I have had to work to simulate ease.
I miss the kind of support no system can create
I also miss American spontaneity more than I expected. Danish life runs on planning, with people commonly organizing plans way in advance and referring to weeks by number. I grew up in a town where you might smell barbecue from a neighbor’s yard and wander over to see. My husband often works away, and on the hard solo-parenting days, what I miss most is a culture where I can show up at a neighbor’s door with pizza and say, “Let’s co-parent tonight.”
Motherhood here has seemed like a double education: learning how to raise a child, and how to become the kind of adult this version of family life assumes already exists.
I want my son to belong here, even when I still feel in between
I want Aksel to feel fully at home in Denmark, because this is his home. But I also want him to know that home can be plural and that belonging somewhere should never require a narrowed imagination of the world.
What undid me that morning was not really a forgotten costume but the deeper soreness of trying to make a home for my child while still, in certain corners of myself, searching for it too.
Denmark has given my son many things I cherish. Yet becoming a mother here made me realize even the world’s most family-friendly country cannot substitute for the feeling of home. Children need good systems, and their mothers do too. But mothers also need something less measurable: to feel that their world speaks their first language of comfort.
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