I was born in the North of the Netherlands were most people
speak some German and in general, the Dutch also speak English. At home we
just spoke Dutch but we had family members that spoke a  dialect, one side of the
family spoke Gronings and the other side Drents. With my parents we spent our holidays
in Germany or in countries where German was understood. And in my childhood I
was usually more than happy to go to the bakery with some money in my pocket
and a new learned sentence in German to buy something in the bakery. At later
age my German language grew off course by meeting nice German boys, writing
letters about things that teenagers talk about.

At that point my English was
not more than high-school level, and it stayed like that until I decided to
travel to Ireland for my work as an artist. I was drawing landscapes and
getting to know the Irish coastline, and my English became better and better.
In my thirties I married a mad Irishman…. I even started thinking in English, we
used to discuss a lot of esoteric subjects, nature and crafts.

We moved to
France, and had two beautiful boys. This bi-lingual family, placed themselves in a
third, completely unknown language.... 
Hard times for the children, they spoke Dutch and English at home, and
at school they were confronted with another language, and they could not express
themselves. The French country people do not speak any other language than
their own…. Now my boys are 11 and 14 years old, and they are fine with the
three languages that they speak on a  daily basis. I often feel like I am a walking
dictionary, translating from one language to the other, after questions of my children. And my sons have become very creative mixing the languages, or
similar sounding words that have different meanings, words to make our particular jokes that only we can understand.

Speaking
more than one language has enriched our lives.