Is this my career?

My son called to say he had to stay after school to complete an interview, then stayed up late transcribing the info in order to make a poster. Turned out the interview was about geology and it was for his careers class.  I asked if he had an interest in geology but he said no, there had just been a limited availability of interviewees.  I said what about my career and he just rolled his eyes.

Wait a minute.

I never thought about this, though I’m sure lots of other people have.  There’s plenty of writing around about the worthiness of being a full-time parent in lieu of a paid work, if we’re so lucky to have a co-parent whose job can pay the bills, but we are never ever invited to talk to the class about our career.  What would the kid wear if they wanted to dress up as a trailing spouse for career day?

I never intended to check the “housewife” box –to be the primary caregiver for the kids and to cook most of our meals. I didn’t ever consider it when I was growing up and people asked me what I wanted to be when I was an adult. It’s not the actual work of parenting and home-making that I don’t like. What bugs me is my own expectation, supported by my education, media, and peers, that I ought to be doing something else. 

I’ve been talking with a friend lately about her impending return to full-time work and her concerns that she will not be spending enough time anymore with her three young children. I have encouraged her, saying that it’s fine for kids to see her working. There are a lot of ways to raise kids and a lot of ways that they will turn out fine. I think it’s most detrimental to them for their parent to be dissatisfied with how their life is turning out. I’ve spent years being dissatisfied, just perpetuating the message that not having a career outside my home leads to frustration and resentment. It’s not the example that I want to be.

Do I need to package it up to make it worthy in my eyes? My kids eyes? It’s hard to say how I’d want to promote this lifestyle as a career anyway, since it seems like it is a very dependent and vulnerable position. I tried putting all the pieces together of everything that I do and turning it into a positive spin description: joining forces with someone who you enjoy and explore the world together, open to possibilities, home-making in the most creative and challenging sense, as home changes every few years, exploring new cultures and cities, forming friendships around the world until it’s impossible to go to a place where you know no one. Learning to drive in all kinds of circumstances- how to dodge rickshaws and drive on the left (Dhaka), avoid hitting cyclists and spaced out pedestrians and to parallel park a minivan into a tiny space on a near-vertical street (San Francisco), and I will spare you another rant about Doha traffic. It sounds good for a minute, but I didn't try it out on the kids. 

Message is, you are going to school in order to be a person who gets paid money for the work you do. Staying home is a fall back. None of this is good for a trailing spouse’s self-esteem, no matter how hard he or she works at helping kids adjust to a new country and culture, learning his or her way around town and dealing with medical care, maintenance, procurement of everything from groceries to gas bottles to smoke detectors. There are even a lot of perks, including being able to be available to my kids during our major moves, take art classes, walk around Doha, all the way to the most mundane, like being able to grocery shop on weekday mornings.

There are a lot of memes out there saying live your dream, follow your passion but that’s not realistic for all of us, or at least it can’t be an instant fix. Qatar is a prime example of this- the millions of migrant workers here are not living their dreams, in fact some of them would likely describe it as more nightmare, though I have met people who have made it work- earning money here has enabled them to build houses, educate children, and start businesses in their home countries.  Others are lucky to make it home alive.

I went to college and then grad school and then started having kids. When the first two were big enough to be in school full time I got jobs at a couple of international kindergartens in Hanoi but then the third one came along and I stopped working again. here.

Last summer I worked full-time at a camp and I think I was a better parent than I had been in a long time. I still was primary parent for them because my husband had stayed in Doha. I loved it and I wrote about it

This story doesn’t have an end. I’m not done thinking about it, not done working on it. I love it when I have a job that challenges me and lets me use my skills and work with interesting people. I also love having the freedom to design my whole day, explore, make art, cook, and spend time with kids. I know I’m very lucky to have the time and resources to sit around thinking and writing about the subject.

"you should write a book"

“You should write a book.”

I know I am not the only expat whose friends have said this to her. It’s sort of flattering but not very helpful, more distracting than anything else. It is a mighty leap from having lived in a lot of places to being able to write a book, a little like people in Taiwan assuming I could teach just because I spoke English. Maybe we should take a note from this advice about how to talk to our kids about their performances. The best compliments are when someone tells me that it felt true to them, that it made happy or made them think, not when they said I should try to make money from it.

I’m already a reluctant blogger, so not sure I’d have the wherewithal to write an entire book without getting thoroughly sick of myself. I started this with the vague hope that eventually it would contribute to leading to something paid and interesting in the future, but the more I move around and spend so much time managing the home and kid realm, the less employable experience finds it way onto my CV.  My stock answer, when someone asks me what I “do” now, is that I’m a driver and a cook and take some art classes and walk around exploring things and occasionally take part in the blog herd. I’m mostly satisfied with that, right now. 

And I’m not satisfied either.  I am looking for work that will somehow let me use my combined skills and education and experience in an interesting way and pay me for it.  It’s a long shot, I know, but I’m not desperate enough to take just anything yet. My husband’s longest stint in a job (and our longest time settled in one place) since we’ve been together is two and a half years and I want the kids to stay for longer than that the next time around. I’m starting to wonder if I need to be the one with the anchor job in order for that to happen. Moving around has certainly taught us all valuable somethings about transition and resilience. It wouldn’t hurt to learn some more about continuity and accountability, which don’t go along with not knowing for sure whether we’ll still be here a year from now.

I’m aware that I'm lucky to not have to be a professional anything at the moment.  While I may hate the vulnerability that is the byproduct of dependence on another person for material support, I do appreciate how it lets me explore and create and share what I come up with for free. Today I dropped off a handful of photos at a building site to men whose pictures I'd taken last week, and those three minutes completely transformed an up-until-then grouchy morning.  

So the short version is: still semi-satisfied, still looking, still hopeful, still grateful. 

temptation, hard work, appreciation, relief

Last summer was magical.  It was stark contrast to my life in Doha- the people, the hills, the air, the water, the lack of traffic, the music. The peace.  Coming back was hard, but then a job posting came up that seemed to offer an opportunity to bring us back to that area year-round. It was work I could surely do well and was qualified for, a chance to move somewhere that wasn’t entirely new for a change, to be the one with the anchor job, to stop trailing once and for all. 

I applied.  I got an interview.  You can’t interview for a job without wanting it completely and convincing yourself that you would be the best possible match for the position.  You have to tell yourself that it’s better to go than stay, find reasons to justify that the move will be worthwhile.

Hope is ridiculous and wonderful. We keep doing it despite overwhelming evidence that life is hard and often unfair. I know that it would have made more sense to let go of all hope the instant the interview was over –and then it would be that much more exciting if I was chosen, that much less painful if I didn’t get it. I didn’t let go entirely but I did work hard on keeping it in check.

It’s been a strange week, full of rich conversations with friends and lots of thought about what it would mean to go, what it would mean to stay.  I’ve been able to see, for a moment, what I gain from  living in a place that is hard, that contradicts so many of my values and that deprives me of so many of the things I thought I needed in order to be happy.  My search for beauty here has made me more appreciative of my surroundings, and having shared it with others they now encourage me to keep up the practice even when I’m wishing I were elsewhere. 

I’ve also thought deeply about how wonderful it would be to move someplace where I already have friends, where I know my way around, where there are seasons and mountains to climb.  It seems worth the stresses of looking for a new house, figuring out schools for the kids and easing them through the many layers of their transition.

Today, checking my e-mail before I even got out of bed, I received an impersonal note thanking me for my efforts and informing me that someone else had been chosen.  I got up, made a sandwich, and walked out into the cool air of the Doha winter dawn, surprised to be more relieved than sad.  

I’m sure that over the next few days and weeks there will be moments that I will be more sad than relieved, wishing that the next time I get on a plane to leave Qatar I will know I don’t have to return. I don’t have a lot of time for internet lists that tell me how to behave and feel, but I came across one the other day that had a point that has carried me through the suspense of this application process, and continues to comfort: 1. Know that you’re not seeing every option. This is not new news to you or me but still a good reminder when I thought my heart was set on one particular way that my life could play out.

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.