guest post: expat dream gone sour

This is a brave piece.  Inés dealt with her relocation to Washington DC in all the right ways: staying active, accepting invitations, making new friends, working on her own career.  A year later she has returned to her home country, separated from her husband. Don't judge her.  Know that she has already judged herself more than enough.  Sometimes relationships can't withstand the stress of moving. Each partner can adjust to their new home and routines in such contrasting ways and rates that they could be adapting to completely different places, alone.  I feel like this is important to share, not as a cautionary tale, but as a testimony to Inés' strength, enduring friendships, and ability now to reflect on her experience and grief, as well as a reminder of those things for those of us who are struggling with similar situations or have before.

Expat dream gone sour

A year ago I was making all the arrangements to have our belongings shipped to Washington DC. My partner of 20 years and I were relocating there where he was going to work for an international organization (IO).  I quit my job and was really excited with the idea of starting fresh in DC, a city where I would certainly be able to pursue my professional interests.

We had been living abroad before, in Brussels, when we first started living together. At that time we came back home because he couldn’t find a job in Brussels, so I was not entirely new to the feeling of leaving a job and a life I enjoyed to follow my husband and start all over again.  I knew it would take me some time to get a job in DC and I knew that the job market there was completely different from my European references.  Still I was confident that everything would work out; I had the most important thing to jump, a healthy relationship, a partner I could rely on through my transition to this new life, a person whom I trusted and who loved me.

A year later I am back home waiting for my stuff to arrive from DC, where he has stayed. We’ve been separated for 8 months already and I am just now starting to get back on my feet. I am still grieving while I write these words, but time has given me some perspective to realize that there were lots of things that went wrong even before we left to DC. 

Not once did it cross my mind that I would lose my sense of self-identity in DC. I arrived to a country in which I was the spouse of Mr. Garcia in a way I hadn’t experienced before. My visa, healthcare care insurance and job permit depended on us being married and even to get my driving license I needed him to file a specific application in my name.  I knew I was privileged as a foreigner in the US, but all these small things just contributed to increase the distance between us.

He arrived to DC a couple of months before I did and had a hard time adapting to his new job and his new life. When I arrived to DC he was already over his transition period, enjoying his work, his new colleagues and friends. He was thriving. In fact when I arrived he was not even there, he was travelling.  Heavy travel was part of his job package and I knew it, so I was prepared to live with that.

I joined the spouses network - I can’t stress enough how much resources this IO puts into integrating spouses and supporting them with all sort of practical and psychological issues related to relocation - joined a sports club, went out to meet people, explored the city, signed up to do voluntary work in my neighborhood, and started my job search, again with the invaluable support of the spouses network.  All in all I enjoyed my life there, but there were also lots of lonely days when my husband was traveling and everyone else I knew was working or looking after their children. I didn’t lose contact with my friends back in Spain, it was important for me to keep up with their lives.  So while I was trying to adjust, I felt that my husband was far away, not physically, but more so emotionally. I was unable to share with him his happiness; he was having the time of his life, enjoying his work, the trips and DC. I guess I was just envious and too busy trying to find my way in a fiercely competitive job market.

We started having difficulties communicating and when he came back from one of his trips I told him that I didn’t want to be a single-mom to his children, those were my exact words.  We had been trying to have children for a long time and he felt I was betraying him. He decided that I was not anymore the woman he wanted to be with. He needed someone who could strive as a mother, a career woman and support his husband’s international career.  The following months were a nightmare, I struggled to recognize my husband, his coldness that seemed to come out of the blue, and didn’t recognize myself either, I had never been a needy woman.

Over four months I felt as though a tsunami had crashed and then receded, devastating our twenty-year relationship. We had innocently assumed that it was strong enough to deal with the tensions that color the first months of a couple’s life during an international relocation. We trusted in each other and didn’t realize how little understanding we had of the emotional issues involved in the decision we took. 

I cannot change what happened now, but for those of you who are about to jump for the first time I will strongly recommend that you do your research first, reach out for support groups, prepare yourself for a bumpy period and try to have an honest and open conversation (or two) with your husband before relocating.  Acknowledge that you are taking a risk as a couple, and both of you will need to work hard, be flexible and patient to succeed in your new life.

Next week I will turn 40 and will celebrate it with my family and friends, most of them have had a hard time accepting that what seemed to be a sure bet has destroyed us as a couple, but they have nonetheless been extremely supportive and caring. I owe them a party and, to a large extent, my sanity.

vulnerability

Why all this thinking and writing I've been doing about relocating, since I started this blog, is suddenly getting more practical and less philosophical:

In the past 12 years that my husband and I have been moving together around the world, his has always been the job that anchored us abroad and almost always when we've been in the US.  I have worked and volunteered in the various places that we've lived but it's his employment that covers our health insurance, pays our rent, buys our groceries, etc.   

I’m not happy with the terms trailing spouse or housewife- they create pictures in my mind of me stumbling along, tethered to my husband, or staying home peering fearfully at the impossibly complex world outside my tidy little house.  Neither of these images bear any relation to my real life.  Like all of the other friends I’ve talked to about this subject, my husband and I work together to decide where we will go next and how to make the transition.  I could never stay home all the time and my house is rarely tidy, unless I have a housekeeper.

I can’t deny that it’s a privileged position to not have to be the one who provides financially for my family.  I may be busy with the responsibilities of my life but I have no supervisor or manager, my days are mine to design around our routines.  I make dinner and pick up the kids every day, make them their breakfasts and lunches, grocery shop, take them on hikes or to the park.  I also get to fit in time to paint murals, talk to friends across the country and around the world, go for walks, even take the very occasional nap.

There are sacrifices to this lifestyle, though.  My dreams of having a career beyond family have been put on hold indefinitely, as we get further and further from my graduation from grad school and any semi-relevant work and volunteering that I’ve done.  We also don’t have the security of having a back-up income in case one of our jobs should end unexpectedly, and several have. The international humanitarian development/emergency employment world is ever changing: money goes where the crises are. Our stint in Kosovo in 2001-2 was cut short when funding went to aid refugees from the war in Afghanistan, and the story was similar in 2002-2003 when we left Sierra Leone and Guinea because resources were shifting to help victims of the war in Iraq.  Out of his past seven jobs, only twice has he gone seamlessly from one job to the next, and several have ended in layoffs.  The layoffs are getting harder to manage as our family grows and the kids have their own routines and friends.  The end of health insurance coverage is scarier than it used to be. 

We moved to San Francisco a year ago for my husband to work at a small and relatively new organization.  It seemed like a great opportunity, and worth the effort to try to make a home here.  At that point he had been out of work for several months since the last layoff.  The months of unemployment combined with moving expenses had not been good for our finances, but we were hopeful that eventually we would catch up and begin to be able to save again.  We were stunned when, two weeks ago, they informed him that his job would be terminated. 

He has been applying for new positions ever since we got the news.  Some might require us to relocate our family, and while I have my issues with the expat lifestyle (see here and here, for example, from posts in October), the idea of moving within the US again just collapses me inside.  Moving internationally, it's an easier landing- the expat community is usually filled with other families with similarly transient lifestyles.  It's more obvious which neighborhood, medical clinic, school we should choose.  I would not mind at all handing over the housecleaning duties to someone else.  

At the same time I wonder if this isn't a chance for me to escape from the 'trailing housewife' system once and for all.  In my own fantasy world I imagine finding the anchor job myself and then somehow keeping track of that and home and kids while my husband consults internationally or works from home.  I imagine it being an opportunity for me to creatively use all the skills I have acquired through education and life, and work with a witty, intelligent, and diverse group of people to make the world a better place.  This is probably as ridiculous as calling myself a trailing housewife in the first place. I know there are plenty of people who have been steadily employed over the past ten years who are now looking for work and I can't pretend that my spotty employment experience over that same period qualifies me for my imaginary brilliant career.  

In any case, my first responsibility is doing what I can to make sure this complicated period rattles my kids as gently as necessary.  And I will remain quietly vigilant for any way that I can make myself better qualified for positions resembling the one I have created for myself in my head.   

letter to my husband's unemployer

This letter was written two weeks ago, at 3am, the morning after we heard the news.  It will not be sent, out of respect for my husband's concerns that it could complicate his situation and hinder positive references

Dear ___________,

I am so angry at you right now. You call yourself a humanitarian organization, your mission is all about the importance of educating children. Do you even care that you laid off my husband a month before Christmas? That he has kids in elementary school who may well have to be withdrawn when we are forced to move since we will no longer afford our rent?

We took this huge chance on you. We drove all the way across the country for him to take this job. We accepted the minimal compensation that didn’t even close to cover our moving expenses (which we are still paying off, with interest). We put up with his frequent travel over the first few months and resigned ourselves to the prospect of more in the future. We had to put medical bills on installment payments because the health insurance you provide is so poor. We’re not a family that spends lavishly. Our kids go to public school. We don’t expect fancy vacations, lots of new clothes, or the latest technology. We are more likely to go for a hike in the woods together on a weekend than go to the movies or eat out. Sure you could say we should have planned better, saved better, chosen a less expensive place to live. We were coming off of another lay-off, though, a year ago, and hoped that eventually we would catch up somehow and were crossing our fingers that it all would work out. We chose to live in the same city as your home office so that during the stretches that my husband wasn’t traveling, he would not spend all his spare time commuting.

I don’t expect this letter to make you hire him back or change anything for us but I want you to be more aware that you haven't just cut one salary from your budget, you've caused the total upheaval of a family of five. I am not so concerned at how this affects me or my belongings but it tears me up for how it could affect my kids, who may have to leave a school at which they’re thriving and a neighborhood full of friends, for an uncertain future.

I don't know how you prioritize how your funds are spent, but I hope that it was an excruciating decision for you to let people go. I honestly hope it haunts you for a long time.

Yours sincerely,

...

Letter from Dhaka

Monica, originally from Switzerland,  was my neighbor and one of the first friends I made in Hanoi.   She has experience moving internationally as a child with her family, and later as an adult with her husband and children.  They currently live in Bangladesh and will be moving again the new year.  I love her perspective on moving and parenting.  

On the term « trailing spouse »:

I do not consider myself as a trailing spouse and to tell you the truth I hate this expression because it makes me think that the spouse plays a passive role in this kind of life style. I see Tommi and myself as a team and we always choose what is best for both of us, career-wise, and for our children, as a family.  Because I also work in development I know that the countries that we move to are countries where I can also find a job and so I don’t see myself as somebody who had to give up my career in order to follow my husband.

On home:

For me home is where Tommi and I grew up. We are very lucky because we both come from the same city in the Italian part of Switzerland, so family reunions are simplified. We both want our children to feel that they come from Lugano and each summer I put my 6-year-old in a local summer school, so that hopefully she develops a certain memory of where she comes from and it allows her to meet children from the same region.

I have very positive memories from my childhood as a trailing kid and this is part of the reason why I also would like my children to experience this life style. Tommi, on the contrary, never moved as a child and his family has strong roots in small the city he grew up. However, he is proud to offer such an experience to his children. Both of our childhoods are full of positive aspects and so I am never 100% sure if what we are doing is right. However, I do think that this is the same for every parent no matter the life style and the only thing we can do is listen to them and be ready that one day they might want to stop roaming the world.

On moving:

I always have an equal say when we choose where to move.  At the moment I am the one taking care of the children on a day-to-day basis and Tommi is the one that has the better and more stable job. So I have more say when it comes to our children and a potential country, because I have a better picture of the day-to-day difficulties concerning our children’s lives. Tommi would never ask us to move to a country that he doesn’t consider “family-friendly,” even if it would be the perfect move for his career.

Moving brings mixed feelings of excitement but also anxiety. Before becoming a mother I never thought twice about moving. But now having three small children makes me wonder whether we are doing the right thing. Bangladesh has been their country and home for the last 4 years and I am afraid of taking them away from what they know and love. I know that they will be fine, but still I wonder. Maybe by next year, after we move to our next post, I will be able to give you a better answer!

I do not prepare much, but I do a lot of online research. My first concerns are school and house. I make sure that we have a good school for the children and if possible Tommi tries to fit in a mission before to prepare for his new assignment and also to look for a new house before we actually move. We also try not to over-plan or over-think the move and just go with the flow, because there are so many factors that we cannot influence and stressing out would just ruin everything.

The most important thing for me before we move is to prepare the children and ourselves to say goodbye. I also always try to find new employment for our house “staff”, it makes me feel better knowing that they will be alright when we leave. The rest is practicalities and once you’ve done one move I think it gets easier the next time.

The hardest part at the beginning is living in a hotel or a temporary residence, if we don’t have a home right away. Other then that I love the first weeks, because everything is new and exciting!

As soon as we arrive in a new country my priority is our house. If possible I try to move in as quick as possible and if our boxes are already there, I fix and decorate our house so that it becomes home right away.

On career:

My career at the moment is nearly non-existent! I try to do some consultancy in my field (program management and gender mainstreaming), but at the moment I prefer to be available for my children (6,3 and nearly 2).

On organizational support:

I think we have the best support from Tommi’s organization (bilateral donor) and I couldn’t ask for more. We still have to take care of ourselves (find our own house, car, schools, etc.) but they allow their new employees to take the time at the beginning to settle in and the support staff is always there to provide logistical support. I like it this way, because I like to be responsible of our move, it is part of the experience.

Advice for someone headed out for the first time:

Be open-minded. If you are not ready to adapt to a new context and a new culture, then maybe this kind of life style is not the best for you.