I Thought Moving My Kids To Germany Would Be Good For Us. I Didn't Expect It To Feel Like This

<div class="content-list-component text"><p>The morning before my oldest child’s first day of school in Berlin, I found myself wrestling with a roll of gold construction paper, a glue stick, and a creeping sense of panic.</p><p>I was trying to assemble a Schultüte – a giant paper cone traditionally filled with candy, school supplies, and tiny gifts – because I had somehow missed that every German child receives one at the Einschulung, a welcome-to-school ceremony that is a rite of passage here.</p><p>I’d heard of the cones before, but when my son’s teacher handed him one at preschool graduation, I assumed that was it. It wasn’t until the night before the ceremony that I realised that was a bonus cone. The <em>real</em> Schultüte was still to come.</p><p>I ran to a massive craft store by my apartment and asked the store clerk where I could find the all-important Schultüte. He pointed to a big display and said, “We’ve been sold out for a week.”</p><p>I panic-bought construction paper and decorative pom-pom balls. My husband used his glue gun to make a giant cone and we filled it with school supplies – including 20 pencils with my son’s name written on each one, as per his teacher’s instructions – and candies.</p><p>I’d used a stencil to neatly write his name and the year on the outside of the cone, but the marker bled. The result was that it looked kind of like the graffiti we see every day as we pass remnants of the Berlin Wall. I hoped he thought it was cool instead of the mistake it really was.</p><p>At the ceremony, surrounded by other kids holding elaborately themed cones perfectly crafted in some far-off factory – one in the shape of a dinosaur that was the size of my 3-year-old, another with a stuffed animal attached to the side – I hoped he wasn’t embarrassed by his homemade one.</p><p>Watching him onstage, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’