HubExpat Stories

Today we're bringing you a slightly different format on the HubExpat Stories blog. Our guest: Tess, a French expat in the Netherlands and host of the podcast Girls In Expat. We spent a long time thinking about the best way to introduce her journey, and the answer turned out to be obvious: why not use the format she knows best? The interview. Except today, it isn't her voice you'll be listening to, it's her words you'll be reading. Leaving France, Building a New Life Tess open

Four daughters, several countries and a career rebuilt more than once. Today, Lena is a psychologist and school counselor based in The Hague. From the outside, her story might look like one of resilience: moving to multiple countries, raising four children, studying, starting over professionally, and eventually created her own practice. But that is only part of it. There were also wrong decisions and wrong people. Times when she doubted herself, felt stuck, or simply had no

This is Kelly's story. An American mom of two daughters who left everything behind to follow her husband to the Netherlands. She thought she was heading toward an adventure. She didn't know she would first lose herself along the way. Behind the beautiful photos and the dream of living abroad, she went through something that so many experience in silence. Today, she has the courage to talk about it — with raw, deeply human honesty.

Five years ago, I closed the door of our Parisian apartment, my heart beating with a mix of apprehension and excitement. Destination: The Hague. For our family, it was the adventure we had been dreaming of for years, a professional opportunity for my husband, a new playground for our children, and for me, a leap into the unknown. What I didn’t know yet was that this new life would shatter my certainties, only to allow me to build something much bigger.