state of the repat, one year in

I’m trying to write about what it’s like a year into repatriation without giving advice on how to get here*. It wouldn't help to hear there will have been unexpected growth and grounding when you’re only six months in and it’s the dead of winter and you still don’t have any friends in your tiny village (why did I think I would be happy in a tiny village anyway after decades living in cities??) and you’re missing all your old friends like crazy.

Maybe this is more about commiseration with other people who've made it through a year and might recognize themselves a little bit, and maybe also for those of you about to leap to help you, during the part while you’re wrenching yourself away, pretend it will be ok later. It will be ok, but it will also be much worse, in ways you didn’t expect. And then it will be spring again and the neighbors will come out of their houses in your tiny village and they will be friendly after all. And you’ll be able to think back to this time last year and remember how wretchedly wrenched you felt and all scrambled up about home and identity and what you wanted new people to know about you and on top of all that there was no furniture in the house. What a blessed relief that part is over. 

So for my cohort of yearling repats and those about to leap, I’ll say this: it got better and I didn’t realize how until I let go of trying to recreate things I’d lost. My Doha expat routines and community simply cannot be replicated in rural Vermont.  I made it through the year thanks in part to Netflix, sugar, a few friends both here and far away who did some propping up, a couple of snow adventures, and, now that spring has come: lakes, a paddleboard, and acceptance of this new version of home and my evolving place in it.

*I don’t like to write to give advice, because for the most part I like learning by doing. I don’t like reading what smug people write, from the other side of the problem, about how I should best navigate it. Does it even help to read those lists of things that dying people regret? They didn’t figure this out until they were old and certainly not from someone telling them. It’s related to letting go of being able to talk your kids through all the hard parts. They need to do some of their own messing up.  We only provide the base. I’m only starting to get a hint of how my older kids are choosing to navigate the world and all I’ll say for now is that I’m mostly very relieved, especially about the oldest one because it’s the first one that’s probably the most mis-parented. If he’s lucky he’ll get a good graphic-novel-memoir out of it.

expert novice

All these moves have made me practically expert at being new, so wonderfully experienced at being inexperienced.  Irony and contradiction, both. I’m writing to work my own way through how I’m feeling about the latest bout of repatriation and maybe help some others who are trying it for the first time. It’s the new ones who look for input from the outside and thus will follow whatever tags led them here. Those of us on our umpteenth new home know we have to look inside ourselves, there's more help there than we might imagine.

The circumstances of being new have shifted since my own first moves. Starting out in Kosovo, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Bangladesh, my initial contacts were torn stubs of paper with scribbled telephone numbers. Vietnam, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Doha had various levels of online groups to join.  With this one somehow I’m back to having no online group and with social media-based connections that seem more flimsy than those penciled phone numbers.

It’s hard every time in new ways, partly because the kids and I are all at different stages in our lives, partly because moving is hard work, no matter what. I read this article recently that I liked, about how it feels to repatriate to a place that you felt was home and how it won’t be, it can’t be. Making it work requires lowering and shifting expectations. I do love it here and I suspect the bouts of struggling with it are just phases. I’m hoping intensely that it’s just a phase. Isn’t that the base of so much? Trying to decide if whatever you’re dealing with is worth it to work hard on and pass through or if you should abandon it because staying’s worse than leaving. Three years is our max in one place, let's see if we can beat that this time around. 

What follows are some loose suggestions and ideas for you new ones and you experienced ones who want to commiserate, and for me to read every once in awhile if I'm losing perspective. Really they apply as much to new expat homes as to being a repat, though remember that as a repat community-building and friend-making go soo muuucchh mooorrrre sloooooooowwlllllyyyy than in the speedy expat world.

Rules

There’s only one, with a twist: accept all invitations, complicated by the combination of remembering that you don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not while trying to keep conversations going with people to see where connections can be made. I suppose it comes down to “stay interested but don’t lie.”

Choices:

A few weeks ago I had a choice: drive a couple of hours to go skiing with people I have known for a long time, with whom I know I have things in common, or go to a village event where it’s likely I will meet new neighbors and just maybe some of them will eventually turn out to be friends. Against my own rules I opted to meet up with the old friends and was glad. We skied, we caught up, and I reconnected with fellow Vermonters, even if they live two hours away.  Lessons: make time with people who share some of your history, and break your own rules once in awhile.

Roots

I don’t think the roots are a given, that you can do those on purpose. I think those grow and then after years and years you just realize you have them.  I thought I had them here- I grew up in this state after all and worked here and finished undergrad and went to grad school here and I love it. Isn’t that enough? I’m starting to think no. On this return I’m feeling like an imposter, ready to hand in my Vermonter credentials and pretend I have to learn everything from scratch. But I shouldn’t, right? I know where maple syrup comes from and how to get around Burlington on foot, bike, and in a car. I know back roads in three counties. I remember when the Nordic ski center at Bolton Valley was a little shack with a woodstove in it. It’s confusing to be both native and foreign at the same time. I’m not worrying about it too much. 

We serial expats benefit by letting go of our identities being tied to any one place, and that becomes most clear upon repatriation. There has always been some contention over who gets to be American, with the most recent arrivals being the ones who are least welcome to claim it, as though it’s a single continuum of arrival. Those of us who started here and then left and came back and left again, or stayed away for a long time, may have USA on our passports but feel less American than some who have most of their lives here and aren't yet citizens.

Reading about it

You can read all the blogs and memes you want but really you are the one who has to make it home. Reading just puts it off so don’t overdo it.

There’s a genre of repat narratives that mostly involve complaining that people don’t “get” us, that they have no interest in where we’ve been or all the places we hold inside of us, and that’s why it’s so hard to assimilate back into our home country and make friends. In my experience a good number of the people who are interested are often more interested in the story, which in Vermont just emphasizes our differences.  It’s valuable to find other ways to connect than just talking about yourself.

Finally I can’t be much help to my fellow recent repats, except for the same old thing I tell myself: that as long as you make some effort and some occasional progress, little by little the new home will feel like home eventually or you will give up and move back abroad. (we have not gotten to this phase yet, so don’t even think about starting to worry, parents and other concerned friends). Big world, lotta people, lotta possibilities, don’t beat yourself up.

to my summer world: what I want you to know

This is some of what is under the surface of the me you’ll be seeing again in a few weeks, the parts that may be different from people making the transition within the US. 

This place I’ll be for the summer is possibly my favorite in the world, both for its natural beauty and that people there who are making a conscious effort to support each other, work hard, and have fun creatively. No matter how beloved, it is worlds away from where I am right now and it will take a certain amount of adjustment to settle in again. I want to think I can just shrug it all off, leave my Doha-self in Doha, but I know from experience that I can’t and probably shouldn't anyway.  I’ve come back to this place from many different countries and adventures over the years and it's in these transition times that I am the most challenged and learn the most (when I will start learning from staying in one place for a number of years remains to be seen…). 

I am coming from the desert. Right now, and until I leave, it’s over 100ºF every day and the horizon is always a hazy dusty yellow every direction. I haven’t seen a forest since last August. I haven’t climbed a hill that you would call a hill since last August either.

Most of my interactions here are with people who are not from my home culture, and with whom I don’t share a first language.  One thing I like about living abroad is being able to tune out conversations around me because I can’t understand them. It is so exciting to be around people with whom I share fluency in the same language, but also awkward and exhausting.

I know there will be discussions this summer about privilege and race and class. I know people where I’m going are concerned about long-term structural inequalities in the US.  I remember from last summer that it was hard to take part in these conversations at first. For the past two years my framework for that has been built in a very different place and from a different point of view than I would have had in the US.

I’ve been working on understanding privilege over the past few years and living here has helped me think about it from the less-privileged point of view –as a woman and a non-Qatari, though there are many further down the privilege scale than me here, including workers from South Asia, Africa, and East Asia. The anger expressed in my own home country, where having more relative privilege somehow made it harder to see the problem, is making more sense.

I get frustrated here by having to behave according to cultural expectations of a people who seem to have an overwhelming sense of entitlement.  Since I have lived here the respect I’ve gained for the generosity and kindness of some Qataris has been vastly outmatched by my experiences with the reckless and rude behavior of some others.  Most of this I experience on the road but some also in how I have witnessed Qataris treating shop clerks and from reports of abuse of domestic workers in Qatari households (http://dohanews.co/after-assault-in-qatar-indonesian-domestic-worker-returns-home/). This country often does not seem to be a healthy place, for Qataris or foreigners.

From this other-side-of-the-world point of view I’m proud of my country, proud of the work and dialogues taking place there.  I miss those here, especially within the upper-class international expat community where we almost never talk about race or privilege and only rarely about class, even though all those things affect our lives every day.

So give me a couple of weeks to get used to hills and native-English-speaking community and courteous drivers again.  Let me let my soul catch up with me so I can be present for important discussions, and be patient while I try to make my point of view more locally relevant. 

I know we’re all coming from very different places, both our environments and what’s inside our heads.  I’m so looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and hearing about where you’re coming from, too!

into the glare

Spring in Doha is bringing out the worst in me, and I mostly blame the heat. It's so hot here these days that I wish there were another word for it that conveys more about the flesh-searing, sweat-soaking oppression of it all. Air conditioning is our life support again. An open door can heat a house in seconds. Forget the sunshade on the windshield and your steering wheel will raise blisters on your fingertips. 

Last week the temperatures rose to 100ºF and higher every day and I vowed that it wouldn't keep me inside. "Take that, deadly weather!" I thought as I found a hat to wear, bought a spray bottle, filled my backpack with water bottles, and set out into the glare. I've written here and here about how it's walking that keeps me feeling human in the ways I want to be human- finding beauty, both accidental and by design, and staying aware of and connected to the cycles of people and plants and animals around me. Covering ground by driving, as I've written here, makes me feel human in all the worst ways: furious and terrified.

I took four great, if sweaty, walks and felt triumphant. I started this post and included some friendly suggestions about how to survive a walk in the extreme heat, and how very rewarding it is to be outside regardless of weather.

And then yesterday I had 90 minutes to kill before an art class. It was 7:40am when I set out, only 95ºF. I headed south along a route I'd walked before but kept coming across new alleys I could not resist. By the time I decided to start looping back, an hour later, it was over 100º. I bought water and a spray bottle at a store and kept on hustling back to my art class where I collapsed in the air conditioning. Really unpleasant symptoms of heat exhaustion set in as the class went on and I spent the rest of the day just wrecked. I had taken little of my own advice above- no water, no spray bottle, no hat, few places to stop to buy refreshments and cool off, and most of the taps on the outsides of mansion walls had run dry. The sun humbled me and I'm grateful it wasn't worse. Starting tonight, my walks will take place after dark.

Here are some photos from what may be my final daytime walk until fall. You'll notice that there are no humans in them, as most sensible people were not out.

one of the alleys that led me astray, so shady and inviting

a thoughtful time

I’m coming up on an anniversary of the beginning of a very sad time. For years it hasn’t made me sad anymore, more thoughtful around the end of April. I’ve written more specifically about it in this post. Today I was floating around the lazy river at the water park, being end-of-April thoughtful, and found a tiny baby bird just below the surface of the water. I scooped it out with my hand and put it gently under a plant.  Thoughtful meant I could not help remembering that I’d only held a dead baby in my hand that one time before.

And then also it’s almost exactly a year since we rescued a one-day-old kitten. We (mostly I) bottle fed her every 2 hours, then every 3 hours and eventually 4 hours, night and day for weeks.  For awhile not confidant she would live, nor really confident that I would cope well if she died, I was feeling in some tiny barely-and-reluctantly-acknowledged nook in my soul that she was some kind of chance to pick up where I left off and not fumble it this time (a day-old kitten is around the same size as a 16-week fetus).  I can’t believe I’m sharing this, and I probably wouldn’t be able to except that she is now sleek and fat, bigger and snugglier than either of our other cats and a special friend to our youngest, born three years after we lost the little brother.

A friend of mine has been through this baby-losing lately and reached out to me to see if I had any insight, experience, and support. I shared that post about Dhaka and some of what people said that was helpful and some of what was less helpful.

I’m reluctant to give advice here, to tell people how to feel or behave, because that seems like one of the most irritating and click-hungry areas of the Internet.  I’ve been deleting nearly everything in my FB feed that starts bossing me around. But. I have found the most interesting and helpful advice comes from people who have been through hard things and want to help you help other people who are going through hard things, because it’s difficult to know what to say or what people will need, even when we want desperately to be able to say it and provide it.

This is one that I like: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/opinion/la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407

I also like the one that’s been written by lots of people lots of different ways that suggests that asking a person to let you know if they need anything means that you might feel like you've done your part though the person in need will likely never ask you- so specific suggestions of ways in which you could help might be more likely to support people.

The one part I add, that helped me then and I have remembered ever since, is about woman who came in to me the morning after, to my bedside in the hospital in Bangkok, and simply told me that I was doing hard work. She was visiting in her role as a patient liaison person but had previously worked as a midwife there. She didn’t encourage me to think to future children or the ones I already had, she just met me right there and acknowledged the process and my place in it without hurrying me through it. The memory of this one encounter has stayed with me over the years, even as that work has eased, is the core of what I offered my friend, and is what I share with you as I’m passing through this thoughtful time.