Adjusting my mind to the American way of life

There are so many more stories in the world than mine, so with this post, I am starting my project of sharing stories of other trailing spouses.  I hope to explore a wide variety of experiences over the next weeks and months- from men, women, partners of diplomats, partners of people who work with for-profit and non-profit and faith-based organizations, people who have relocated with children and without, to new homes around the world.  

My friend and neighbor Andrea is a talented artist and devoted mother of two small boys. Before she had children, Andrea worked as a graphic designer for a busy advertising agency in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she describes the work culture as so “insane” that “parents don’t see their kids."  She had difficulty getting pregnant while she worked long hours and completed a Masters degree at night.  After she gave birth, her colleagues expected her to return to perform at the same “workaholic” level as before, but she made the difficult choice to leave the agency and focus on taking care of her baby. Since then she has worked part-time and free-lanced and had a second son.  

Andrea moved to San Francisco in the spring of 2011 for her husband’s job and has not worked beyond taking care of her family, except for occasional free-lancing from home, since they have been here.  She had come to the United States on vacation before and was fully in favor of the move, but has found it much more difficult than she expected to settle in, make friends, be a housewife.  Her efforts to balance her needs to create art and be independent with her kids’ needs for loving parenting, social opportunities, and good food have struck a chord with me. 

We hear so much about work-life balance these days but calling it work-life is so simplistic- the work piece can be about work at a site away from home but also could include working from a home office or studio, or classes we take to help us work at a higher level.  The life piece encompasses multiple dimensions of home, recreation, and children.  Since she arrived in San Francisco, Andrea has been struggling with nearly all of these factors with the added difficulty of doing it in a foreign country.

She loves the city, its beauty and safety and outdoor recreation possibilities.  “There are so many things to do with kids!”  Classes in the extension program of the California College of the Arts have been a lifeline, giving Andrea energy and time away from her home and family to discuss things with adults and exercise her artistic skills.

At the same time, it was a shock from the very first.  Even what seem like simple things are perplexing when you are new in a country- “When I first got here I never knew which vegetables to buy to do a soup.  The taste of the parsnip, the zucchini is different.”  Brands are different also: which cleaning product, which shampoo should she choose from the many options on the store shelves?  

Suddenly she had to cook for and clean up after the whole family on her own.  “In the beginning it was very tough. I came over here with my Brazilian thoughts and I had to adjust my mind to the American way of life: do it yourself.” She found a woman to help with the cleaning but she only comes twice a week, not full-time like in Brazil. “I hate cooking every day.  I never in my life thought I would miss it, but I miss the maid, I miss the nanny, even more than my family and friends.”  

Many of Andrea’s friends are fellow expats, mostly Brazilian, but other nationalities too. “I was expecting to make more friends, to be less alone.”  It’s been hard making friends with American parents at her son’s school. “I always ask people to come here to play and I never got one invitation for a play-date! Most of the time I try to think it’s a cultural thing.” She tries to excuse them but can’t help but feel like some are shallow and insincere.  

Andrea and her family are preparing to move back to Sao Paulo in a few weeks.  Her feelings are bittersweet.  “I would love to have the mindset to stay here but I don’t.  Why stay if it’s not so good for the parents- it’s good for the kids but I need to think about everybody.  I want my kids to look at me and see me happy and productive.  I feel guilty to not be.”

For all that it has been an exhausting and difficult experience to adjust to life in San Francisco, she has a great appreciation for her experiences here and the freedom she has felt.  I asked her if she would move abroad again for her husband’s work- her answer: “totally!”  

Thank you Andrea for being a wonderful welcoming neighbor and friend during the short time we have known each other, and for being being such a strong and graceful example of how to manage the complexities of life as a trailing spouse.  My youngest daughter and I will miss you and your family very much and we wish you well on your return to Brazil.  

home (you struck a nerve)

Please don't tell me I'm not really home until I've lived in a place for nine years. I haven't ever lived in a place for nine solid years, and since I left my parents' house to spend a year in France when I was 16, I've rarely lived in one place longer than a year or two. Home is not about how long I've been somewhere, it's not about whether you are surprised to see me there or if you think I belong, in fact it's not about you at all- it's about how I feel and I've felt at home in many places around the world.  Don't be so bossy and I won't get on your case about being stuck in a rut for having never moved.

I'm home where my bags are.
I'm home where my boxes are, even if they haven't been unpacked yet.
I'm home where my kids are.
I'm home where I know more than one way to get to the grocery store, a gas station, and my kids' school, and how to get home again, all without GPS.
I'm home where I can cook dinner, even for the first time.
I'm home where I can count at least one neighbor as a friend.
I'm home where I know how to say hello to people on the street.
I'm home where I know the name of something that grows nearby.
I'm home where I can go for a long walk and mostly not get lost.
My homes are where my heart is, and there are more than I can count.

the high life II: not happy with how it shapes my kids' view of the world

From afar our expat lifestyle looks like paradise.  We’ve usually lived in a spacious house or apartment in a tropical country. We pay one or two hundred dollars a month for a full-time housekeeper who also cooks dinner.  She cleans every room every day, does the laundry and ironing, buys all the fresh produce, meat, and fish, and manages anyone who comes in for maintenance.  Depending on the country we’ve also had a driver and, for a few months, a nanny.  The kids’ international school has small classes and great facilities with wide green lawns.  We usually have membership at a club or local hotel where there are pools and exercise rooms and playgrounds. We take vacations at resorts we never would be able to afford in our home country.  We attract attention, usually friendly, everywhere we go.

Look a little closer: The nature of my husband’s work means that we’re living in a developing country where the majority of other expats live in upper class neighborhoods.  A European or American, with help from local aides, teaches my children.  The counselors, principals, and other higher-level administrators are European or American and the secretaries, guards, and maintenance people are local.  Likewise when we go to the medical clinic, the doctors are nearly always European or American and the technicians are local.  Local people wait on us, guard us, and clean up after us at hotels, clubs, and resorts, though the manager is often foreign.  

The pattern bothers me.  The leaders and experts in my kids’ world are all foreign to the country in which they live and the local people, whose skin is usually a shade or two darker than ours, appear to have the sole purpose of serving and assisting and following orders.  It’s not like I’m raising my kids to be tyrants who can’t help themselves but it still worries me that they will start to take as normal a world in which they are served and made to feel special just because they are European-Americans.  

Though we’re living in the US right now, driving and cooking and cleaning up after ourselves, I am thinking about how I will handle this when and if we move back abroad again.  What I can do now is point out similar patterns that exist here, are maybe more subtle, but ever-present, and encourage them to show respect to all people they encounter.  Work in progress.

trailing spouse advice: questions for the move

The trailing spouse is often the one who takes the lead on all the home-setting-up tasks while his or her partner works long hours at the office. If you get the chance before you move to make a connection with someone who's in the country or has recently left, take advantage.  In an ideal world your ideal informant will have infinite amounts of free time to answer your every question and will do so impartially.  She'll love the country and will share opinions from a range of her friends so you can get a more complete sense of your new home.  Beware of someone who has nothing positive to say about their staff or the local people. Listen to, but don't act on advice to join clubs until you have had a chance to visit them in person.  The same holds true for schools, as long as there are plenty of choices and your child is guaranteed a space.  If there are only one or two major international schools in the city, start working with the admissions office as soon as you know you will be moving, no matter if it is still a year away.

Ask anything you want that will help you feel calmer about your move but finding answers to the following questions can go a long way towards easing your first days.  Some of these answers may be available in books or on the internet but actually talking to a person who has been through the process can be much more informative and useful:

• How do I hire a housekeeper, cook, gardener, nanny, guard? Where do I find people looking for work, and do you know anyone who's leaving and looking for work for their staff?  What is the current normal range of salaries, what are reasonable hours to request they work? 

• How much is reasonable to pay for rent?

• How do I get my internet and phone connected?  Where do I get a SIM for my mobile phone/ where can I buy a new phone that will take a SIM (local phone networks are nearly always cheaper than in the US)?

• What neighborhoods are most kid-friendly? 

• Where is the nearest grocery store or market to the neighborhood where I will be staying in the beginning?

• Is it a better idea to ship furniture or have it made when I arrive? Where should I go to have furniture made?

• Which doctor/dentist/clinic is best and will any direct-bill insurance?   Which doctors will just throw antibiotics at you?  Which will insist you evacuate to Thailand (or the nearest country with good hospitals) ASAP for a problem another doctor will treat competently in-country?

• What preschools/kindergartens/international schools do other expats send their kids to and why?

• What is acceptable work and casual attire?

• Are there any basic social customs that I should be aware of that may be different from other places that I have been, that could be important for me to pay attention to my first weeks?

• Is there any food/spice that is impossible to find in-country that I should bring with me?

Please comment if you have any other questions that you were glad you had asked -or wish you had asked- before you moved or in your first weeks.

big world lotta people

Be honest, if you have never been to Dhaka yourself or seen a picture of it, have any thoughts of its people ever crossed your mind? Not vague reference to Bangladesh as somewhere very far away, but actual deliberate imaginings about the people going about their lives there?  I hadn’t either.  Realizing that fact during a drive through heavy traffic our first week in Bangladesh did a number on my impression of my place in the world- I had never spared a thought for the multitudes stuck in traffic any more than they had imagined me or my little town in Vermont.  How could this place that I'd never even considered have so many people in it?  

And this just one of the reasons why I love living abroad.  I love how it forces me out of the center of my universe and to appreciate that there are countless other perspectives on the world and that I do not have a hope to understand or even be aware of most of them.

This isn't an excuse to give up and retreat into the safety of my walled house and garden, well-guarded apartment complex, or lush expat club.  I just hope keeping this in mind helps me remember that my story is important to me but it is only one of multitudes: on the small scale, helping me restrain myself from making judgements on other peoples' choices, especially if I don't know where they come from or what they're going through. On a large scale it helps me get excited for yet another move, despite all the work involved, for all there is yet to discover.

Pregnant in Pristina

Pristina was my first experience as a trailing partner. We did not yet have any kids and I was determined to find some work relating to the masters degree I was completing, in international and intercultural management, with a focus on conflict transformation. I could not, at that point, even imagine babygroups and sing-alongs at the clubs that I later relied upon for meeting people and learning how things worked. I spent a lot of time in tiny smoky internet cafés where I kept in touch with my friends far away and worked on my resume, visiting organizations to see if they might have any work or volunteer opportunities.

I realized I was pregnant at about the same time that I started volunteering with an organization that helped organize Serb and Albanian youth groups. We would travel up to Mitrovica, near the northern border with Serbia and check in with the groups. This didn’t last long- I chose to stop going when I learned Mitrovica was heavily polluted with lead from a mine that was still operating. Another factor in my decision to stop was that it was Ramadan, I had not told my fasting colleagues that I was pregnant, and I felt bad eating in front of them though that was the only thing that could quell the horrible nausea of my first trimester.

Staying home wasn’t a great alternative. The family who owned our house lived in the basement apartment and the mother and grandmother would do our laundry and clean for us. They were wonderful hosts to us, warm and generous. Unfortunately for the nauseous pregnant lady, their generosity often came in the form of leaving a plate on our table filled with pickled and cabbage-influenced treats. I had loved them when we first arrived in Kosovo in October but by December the fumes would send me fleeing. The hallway became a dangerous zone that I would run through, holding my nose, to avoid breathing the scent of their dinner downstairs.

I tried to spend as much time as I could outside but it was a fierce winter and I only saw one snowplow in Pristina the whole winter, far from our house. In our neighborhood the snow would pile up then freeze down into glaciers full of crevasses and slushy pits big enough to incapacitate an SUV that got stuck, blocking the road for over a week. There was no possibility of a garbage truck coming through for collection so the contents of the dumpster on the corner was regularly set on fire in order to make space, pouring clouds of acrid smoke through the streets to mingle with the sulfurous smell of burning coal. I would wobble over the icy ruts to the internet café where to search online for information about being pregnant, reading articles intended for Americans about subjects like avoiding being stuck in traffic jams because of exposure to dangerous chemicals in exhaust. Then I would head home along smoky streets, apologizing to the little person growing inside me and telling him to hold his breath.

I was not disappointed when funding for my husbands’ position dried up and we had to return to the US ahead of schedule. We settled in the mountains of Western North Carolina for the four months until our son was born, hoping that the clean air and good food would make up for the less healthy environment in which he got started.

Eleven years and two more children later, I'm enjoying reflecting on that stint in Kosovo, wishing that it could have been longer and that I'd paid less attention to advice online. Our son continues to thrive.

(note: checking out my memory with Google some eleven years later, I’m learning that Roma children living in UN IDP camps in Mitrovica had lead levels that are among the highest recorded anywhere, and families who were only intended to stay in the camps for 45 days ended up living in this toxic environment for nine years)

trailing spouse advice: first few weeks in a new country

walk the streets

talk to your neighbors

accept all invitations

ask questions

join a group that does something that you like, local or expat- choir, sailing, soccer, club

limit your internet time

find people from your home culture to talk to

get out of the house

go for a bike ride

eat out

eat in, food from home

smile at people on the street

say hello, learn how to say hello in the language of your new home

smile through your frustration- the people who drive me the craziest have often turned out to be among my best friends

sleep on a problem

try to avoid people who complain all the time, limit your time with them if they are so hilarious you can't resist

call a friend far away

your house staff can teach you a lot about local culture and expat culture

...this is only a beginning- add to this if you have experience to share!

support for the trailing spouse from the company that brought us here

Just kidding.  There never has been.  My husband has worked for three different non-profits and one UN agency and not once has there been any formal effort from the HR section of the organization to put together some kind of network of spouses, buddy system, even a list of resources that might be helpful to the non-working partner.   The first two NGOs we moved with did take care of maintenance and transportation.  The UN just threw lots of money at us and left us to take care of every last detail ourselves.

Typically when we arrive in a new country and J starts his new job, he has to work longer hours in the beginning and often has to travel to familiarize himself with other project areas.  In Dhaka this meant that after two weeks in Bangladesh I was left alone for several days with a six-week-old and a two-year-old.  In San Francisco he went off to work, my GPS died and I had no idea how to even get to a grocery store.  Thank goodness for neighbors!

While I would love for an NGO to hire me to tell them how to reach out to trailing spouses and help facilitate their transition into their new home, I'm reluctant to leap in and take away someone else's privilege to learn the hard way. I know that some embassies have spousal support well organized and some corporations pay for relocation specialists to help coach families through their moves.

I'm not certain I needed any such organized hand-holding.  Sure I experienced frustration, awkwardness, loneliness and confusion. It's hard to step out those first few days and weeks, not knowing anyone and only understanding as much about local culture as your culture shock book can tell you.  You can feel isolated when you can't just go online to the local expat parent yahoogroup, send a text, or keep up with friends on facebook- hooking up to the internet, or getting access to it in your temporary lodgings can take awhile. You'll have to figure out not only where to get a SIM for your phone but how to get there.

Little by little the worst of it passes and within a couple of months you start to have a sense that you might be starting to  feel settled in this place.  There are moments along the way that make it all bearable, like signing the lease or the day your shipment arrives, but even those as small as a friendly interaction with a stranger on the street or  being understood when you use the three words you know in the local language can help.

I'm just realizing now, ten years into this trailing spouse career, that there are some benefits to being the "trailing" rather than "working" spouse.  I have spent too much time envying the ease with which my husband gets to make his transition.  He shows up at his job and is assigned a desk, a phone, an internet connection, a staff, and he usually gets some kind of official orientation. I get thrown in with little to no support or points of reference and have to try to figure it all out by myself, but I have more freedom to explore and ask questions about our new home.  My husband has structure and adults to talk to every day but he also has to work long hours in an office and focus on his job, to the exclusion of getting a sense of being settled in our neighborhood and city.

the high life I: discomfort with expat privilege

I mourned when I found out that our latest move would be within the US- moving domestically is much more work in many ways than internationally and there is not even promise of staff to help you out once you arrive in your new home.  At the same time I was relieved to not have to confront my issues with being supported by a humanitarian organization to live at a relatively high standard of living in the country where we moved in order to help very poor people.

Eritrea was my introduction to 'expat life.'  My first experiences abroad, in France and Cameroon, I was fully immersed, living with French and Cameroonian families.  While I knew that in Cameroon I was getting some special treatment for being a foreign guest, I was still eating with the families, sharing their space, accompanying them on their daily routines.  Suddenly in Eritrea I was living with a family member who worked for a UN agency.  He employed a driver, a cook/housekeeper and a night guard. Our home had once housed the Italian governor and was classic colonial, high ceilings and tall windows in most of the house.  The kitchen, not designed to be used by the occupants, was cramped, low, and dark, as were the servants' quarters out back, though by now these were not occupied by our staff but by the house's owners, because they could make much more money renting the place to wealthy people like us than living in it themselves.  For the first time I attended cocktail parties where the only Eritreans present were taking care of the children or serving food and cleaning up.  While I felt enormous discomfort with this expat world that seemed to keep itself at a distance from the country that hosted it, I comforted myself by telling myself I wasn't really part of it and imagining that after a certain period of time I would move out of the mansion and spend more time with Eritreans.

outside

inside