baggage worth carrying

This moving thing may be a great source for learning about ourselves and our relationships, but it's so exhausting that all those lessons are not available immediately.  This time around, the ones I’m aware of so far are about the kids (future post on that, probably) and what I need to keep hold on even while I’m delighting in ridding myself of my possessions.

Lately I’ve been talking about how getting rid of my belongings is dangerously wonderful.  We’re moving to a furnished residence and deliberately aren't keeping much storage in the US, so we’re disposing of as many of our possessions as we can.  Books that have trailed us around the world for a decade and furniture passed down from family are being given away.  It’s such a freeing feeling that I’m nearly tempted to extend that into every aspect of my life- just be in the moment for everything, don't let possessions and attachments drag me down! There are exceptions- the kids are stuck with me until they head out into their own explorations of the world.  Certain documents- titles, deeds, birth certificates, etc- are safely encased in plastic folders and will be closely guarded.  Instruments, art, kids' books, costumes and camping equipment are all being shipped or stored.    

This time, for the first time, I've even considered stopping trailing.  We discussed the possibility of him heading off solo and me staying in the US with the kids.  In this post I worked on convincing myself that going together as a family to Doha was the right thing.  I still know that it is, but I needed something more to remind me why I wanted to keep trailing.   The word "trailing" itself sounds so passive and the hardest times to feel positive about it are when I've gotten caught up in thinking that's true, that he's forging ahead working long hours while we just dangle off him ending up any old where.  I've asked myself if cutting that rope would be the best way to take an active role in my life.

Trailing spousehood, for me, requires that I occasionally check with myself to see if this is still the path I want.  I’m not just along for the ride, just to see new places and have domestic staff. I truly would rather explore the world with my family, but marriage is hard enough even when you're not picking up and moving to an entirely other country every few years. On many of the moves my husband either goes ahead or stays on longer and I end up being responsible for making the transition with the kids on my own.  It can take a year of living in a new place before our experiences of it begin to match up.  He adjusts to his office and is oriented by his colleagues, both local and international.  I navigate the neighborhood, school, market, meet expats on the street and get my first orientation from our housekeeper and parents at the schoolbus stop.  He learns the streets near the office but can still get lost in our own neighborhood for months after we move.

Despite my zeal for lightening our load, some pictures and papers still manage to follow me around the world- there’s always one last bin or three that I am too packing-weary to go through before handing over to the shippers or stowing in the storage unit.  This time while we were sorting through a few of these,  I found photos from the year he lived in Liberia and I lived in Northern Ireland, before moving together to Kosovo.  He found old letters I had written, and journals, including the one from when I came to visit him in Liberia. It had a picture taped in that I had drawn of a pangolin I had seen on a walk outside the town where he was working. He came downstairs from sorting through his chest of old papers and photos and said, “I’m smitten with you all over again.” And just like that, so was I, with him.  

It was perfect timing for a reminder of our relationship before we had kids and I became a “trailing spouse,” how hard we worked to stay in touch via e-mail, satellite phones, and occasional meet-ups in Paris, Spain, Liberia and Vermont before we started living together.  Since then we've been a good team through a handful of countries and three states, three children, two layoffs and many camping trips. When he's far away we do our best to talk nightly.  I trust him to choose a home we will love before the kids and I even get there.  It can be easy for us to lose track of our shared history when it seems like we're always settling into a new place and having such different orientation to it.  I’m realizing that I can only continue to do this if I keep in mind the basic things we love about each other and remember why we decided to take on this lifestyle together. 

Dhaka on my mind

The combination of being in the “leaving” mode here and following the news about the tragic factory collapse in Dhaka has me reflecting on my Bangladesh experience. The situation I’m in right now, leaving a place I love, is about as opposite as it can be to that leave-taking from Bangladesh.   For the last two months that we lived there, I couldn’t wait to leave, didn’t care that we were headed into an uncertain future of no home and no job secured to support our family of four.  I was filled with grief and blamed it in large part on Bangladesh.

I moved to Dhaka happily and full of curiosity, with a newborn and a toddler.  We had a driver provided by my husband’s work and an apartment in a posh, tree-shaded, gated neighborhood that was home to embassies and several international schools.  Expats in Dhaka were warm and welcoming, exchanging phone numbers and arranging playdates after meeting each other for the first time.  We became members of the American Club and spent hours every week in the pools and on the playgrounds.  When we went on vacation it seemed easier to leave Bangladesh on an airplane bound for Thailand or Laos or even the US than to battle traffic leaving Dhaka by car.   I was rarely out of the expat bubble and then never alone. 

That wasn’t my intention.  When we moved there my immersion experiences in other countries still outweighed the time I had spent as an expat in the expat world.  Arriving with an infant and a toddler, I got swept up in the play-dates and sing-alongs and eventually the international club and school scene.  I did try to avoid the people who had only complaints about their lifestyle in Dhaka, who could not see the irony of bemoaning their difficult life while they enjoyed a drink at the club and their ayah played with the kids on the playground.  When I got pregnant with my third child, midway through the second year there (when we were still expecting to live in Dhaka for three or more years), I still thought I might follow the example of some missionary friends and go to a hospital in the northern part of the country to give birth, instead of jetting off to a world-class hospital in Bangkok.

There was a period right at the beginning of our time there that I started to have a sense of how many people in Dhaka were living right at the edge of their capacity, how close to the surface their frustration and anger simmered, and how if they ever decided to make an effort to get some justice for themselves and we happened to be in the way, we would not stand a chance.  In occasional moments of panic I would calculate how I’d get to the American Embassy eight blocks down our street, with both kids in tow, how long it would take if I had to carry both of them, wondering if I would be strong enough.  As I got used to the rhythm of our life there and saw that demonstrations rarely if ever brought any threat of violence to us, I relaxed and stopped thinking about it.  Eventually my son started school, I started working from home, singing with the international choir, and hired an ayah to watch my daughter. 

And then the baby died in my second trimester.  That first night of knowing the news, before I jetted off to the world-class hospital in Bangkok, I remember sitting on the floor in the kitchen and thinking that my own little tragedy was nearly nothing in relation to people’s daily struggles to survive.  That clarity disappeared quickly as I wrapped myself up in my own personal tragedy, trying to figure out what to call it – birth a too-hopeful word for a dead baby slipping out, miscarriage sounding like I had fumbled and dropped it.  I struggled to bring my living kids back into the center of my attention and stopped thinking about Dhaka much at all.  I resolved to leave as soon as possible.

In the years that followed I kept in touch with friends I made in Dhaka and took great joy in reunion when our paths occasionally crossed, but could not think much about the place itself except as a source of grief and bad health.  It was especially difficult when I would meet Bangladeshis and have to answer the inevitable question about how I had enjoyed living there.  I'd mumble about the food and warm wonderful people and then change the subject.

 The beginning of reconciling with my Dhaka experience came when my daughter’s first grade teacher asked me to take on their classroom’s presentation for their yearly UN day celebration.  Over two days, each classroom is transformed into another country and each class cycles through every room, spending 20 minutes in each “country.”  A good friend in Bangladesh sent fabric, handcrafted paper, models and storybooks, I made up a slideshow and put together brief presentations designed with the various ages of the students in mind. I had the kids who could read check their tags to see where their clothes were made- invariably there was a “made in Bangladesh” on one of them and that led to a short discussion of the garment industry and workers.   I wondered if any of the older kids saw the news and remembered our discussion.  What if one of these kids grows up and works their way through the ranks of a company that has power over a garment factory in another country?  What if they end up working for an organization that can have a positive impact on those workers and their families?

Honestly I'm ashamed of how fleeting my own moments of clarity and empathy were while I was there.    Why does it take yet another tragedy there for me to start trying to think about how I can help, now from the other side of the world? And how much understanding is necessary for empathy?  Living somewhere doesn’t mean I’m an automatic expert on it- I feel uncomfortable being called to represent a place that I really only lived on the margins of. Still there is a role we can play- I strongly believe that awareness confers responsibility.   The challenge is keeping that responsibility in mind and finding an appropriate role to play.

All of this is a work in progress

post script: the story of one immediately good outcome of my bad experience- had my driver not learned about the ultrasound clinic (at which I got that devastating news) by driving me and my danish midwife there, his son might not be alive today.  Soon after this, a quack doctor told his wife that their own baby had died inside and that she required an emergency D&C to preserve her health and fertility.  He took her for a second opinion at the clinic I had used and learned that she and the baby were fine.  Their son was born several months later, after we had left.  Our driver is a man of extraordinarily even-tempered broad-mindedness and integrity.  I have no doubt his children will make the world a better place.

on possessions: a break from packing

I'm writing this to take a break from packing because sorting books (give away/store/ship) is making me sick.  I keep thinking it's all fine, that all I need to do is focus on getting things done and making the best of everything and stop thinking about the big picture and by all means stop questioning any of it.  I was fine with giving away the dining room table and the kitchen island.  I completed a heartless culling of the stuffed animals without a second thought.  It was starting in on the books that finally broke me. I was going through my books again for the second time in a year and a half, trying to figure out if a book I haven't read in decades is worth making the effort to store or bring along.  It's tempting to just throw it all away, be in solidarity with refugees of wars, earthquakes, and fires.  That would be fair, right?  It's always bothered me when we've moved to countries where we live with luxuries that are impossible fantasies to the people my husband's organization is trying to help.  This time we're moving to a country that is so much wealthier than the ones where we've lived before and finally I'm trying to get rid of everything.  Is it really a quest for solidarity, or a rejection of the idea of a forever home- am I just giving up? Books represent a sure future with leisure and furniture.  Once again I think about how we should never have come back to the US where the expectation of putting down roots became mine too, in spite of myself.  Now with those expectations thoroughly shattered, twice in a row, I'm ready to rejoin the transient expat tribe.

Keeping the bikes and camping gear in a storage unit seems like simple good sense since no matter what condition we're in when we return to the US, we'll have shelter, a stove, cooking utensils, and minimal transportation.  Our previous postings included a generous shipping allowance.  When we lived in West Africa, a friend who worked for a shipping company told us how often those containers get blown or washed off the boats, so every time since then that full container left our home I would let go of everything and imagine it was gone forever until it arrived miraculously at its destination.  Much as I'd like to let go of my attachment to it all, unpacking the boxes always felt like Christmas.  This time around our residence will be furnished so our shipment will be much smaller than before.  We're getting rid of all the furniture except for a cabinet full of art supplies and the kids' art table and chairs- which we will ship along with us, and which  will probably be grown out and given away of by our next move.

The kids don't know what they don't need yet.  Thank goodness they've spent so much time playing outside lately- they're pretty satisfied with a climbing tree and a muddy hill, and with books or art projects or the occasional movie when they come inside.  This is great as I empty the house, but we're moving to the desert in the middle of summer- muddy hillsides and climbing trees will probably require a flight to another country.  Most of what I'm willing to drag along on this next move is theirs: books, dress-ups, art supplies, clothes to grow into, a few stuffed animals.  Even as I have been feeling like the future is ever more uncertain, I'm determined to create some version of steadiness for the kids.  Am I required to do this by hauling material possessions around the world?  I want to think it's more of a point of view than about the stuff, but I can't see into their heads. I appreciate how long it's taken me to understand that for myself.

And now it's time to stop wallowing and take care of the books and everything else.

only the beginning...