Tonight after work, I ventured out to Jamaica, Queens, to visit my work friend, who is out here visiting her family for the next week. Although she is originally from Queens, she’s based in our Amsterdam office and lives there with her husband and three-month-old baby daughter. She’s been there for quite some time and has built a nice life for herself there. They own an apartment, have good jobs, and have a solid social network they’ve built there. She said she cannot imagine ever moving back to New York given the lower cost of living and the higher quality of life in Amsterdam; I can’t really blame her.

I got to meet her daughter tonight at her parents’ house, and then afterwards, she drove me to her favorite Shanghainese spot that is famous for its delicious xiao long bao/soup dumplings. We caught up about work and life in general. And she told me the story about how she and her husband moved to Amsterdam at a similar time when her husband’s friend moved, as well, also with his wife. While my friend made efforts to make new friends with expats and locals and established herself in Amsterdam, her husband’s friend’s wife did not. She made no effort to make friends, didn’t really like her job, and when they both got pregnant at the same time, she had friends to celebrate with, and this woman had no one. While my colleague seems to go with the flow of the ups and downs of her new baby, this colleague’s wife does not, and instead needs to have an extremely strict, regimented schedule for her baby. She’s clearly miserable.

“You kind of create the life you want,” my friend said over soup dumplings and cumin beef. “Like if you want to make friends, you have to put yourself out there and do it. And if you want to be a working mom who has a life outside of work and being a mom and wife, then you have to make the effort and create that life that you want. You can’t just expect it to happen for you the way she did. With me, I still have hangouts with expats throughout the day and my book club. I don’t care that I have an infant at home; I still need a life and an identity outside of work and home. Don’t we all kind of want that to some degree?” She noted to me that her American friends both in Amsterdam and in New York seem to lack that balance, that it seems to be a common thread among American moms in general that being a mom has to take up all your time and energy and leave you with no time or desire or energy to do anything else. “It’s another reason I love it here,” she said. She has more perspective there, and more inspiration to be a better and more well-rounded person.

Everything she says seems so simple, but when push comes to shove, I see so little “balance” in the people I know and interact with on a day to day basis.

I need to spend more time with people like her.