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.

on critical incidents, slow lessons, and being an ambassador (sort of)

I've been thinking about intercultural everything lately and my deliberate and accidental studies on the subject, also about what it means to be perceived as a representative of a place and religion that I don’t feel comfortable representing. Ever since we put up our Christmas tree my kids have been bringing in their friends from our block to show them, and the Filipino manager of our compound was clearly heartwarmed when he came in to check on maintenance and saw it.  Both subjects lead me down the same path of having to be secure in myself to be able to handle the rest of the world.

A key part of my undergrad studies at the School for International Training was recognizing “critical incidents” in intercultural situations and trying to extract learning from them.  It was a challenging and uncomfortable assignment, as the critical incidents tended to be experiences that we’d otherwise want to forget as soon as possible- times we had committed some kind of embarrassing faux pas in an intercultural situation.  It’s only now that I’m teaching my kids, and that they are old enough to both reflect on their own mistakes and resist the whole process, that I’m really coming to appreciate the value of the exercise. 

Moving to Qatar is my critical incident, so far. I’m sick of the way moving so frequently makes me feel constantly a little off-kilter, but every so once in a while I get this little break where I have the time and space and presence of mind to reflect on where I’m at and I realize that I’m a hell of a lot stronger/more resilient/more tolerant than I was before I started in on this latest endeavor.  I don't linger on it, but it's a relief to be able to remind myself. Qatar's a critical incident because the more prickly and misfitted and grouchy I get as I struggle to get my bearings and support my kids (while trying to take it out on them as little as possible), the more I learn, and the steadier I feel in the moments in between that are thankfully getting longer and longer. 

Maybe I was just coasting along and the universe or whatever you want to talk about a force greater than each individual being (or the great force within each individual being) noticed I was not working hard enough and tried having me move around the world for 10 years or so. That was a good start but there was still more to learn, so then I got a couple of other jolts (which I choose not to share here), and I still didn’t get it. Finally we landed in San Francisco, which I tried valiantly not to care about (“these are not my hills! this is not my home!”) and fell in love with anyway… just in time for that home to be torn away from us/me.  I ended up being faced with a move to a country that was very near the bottom of the list of places I would ever consider living.  Still, at its very core, my nature is optimistic and curious. I figured that there must be something interesting about this new place even if my first impression was of a contrived artificial urban desert, heavy on consumerism, populated mainly by expats who are only biding their time until they can afford to go home again. Maybe it took this big of an upheaval in my life to start understanding the lessons from decades ago.  Maybe I’m a slow learner, and I’m thankful to be given the time to keep working on them.

The trick with the critical incident thing, that I hadn’t really understood before, is that it’s not an excuse to beat yourself up over whatever intercultural faux pas you just made- that just leads to wanting to retreat back to a more familiar milieu or at least avoid all the people involved.  It’s a chance to learn more about and share more with people and environment, adjust your behavior, and move on.

I’ve also been thinking about how I don't feel like an adequate representative for my very large and diverse home country or a religion in which I have not been an active member, if I can be said to be a member at all.   As far as I know we’re the only non-Muslim family in our compound.  I love the immersion of it, but I’ve wondered how we’re skewing the neighbor kids’ ideas of what an American is, and now that we’ve got a Christmas tree up we’re representing Christians too, though we don’t follow the precept of a particular church. Every time I get into a taxi I ask the driver where he’s from and usually he asks me, too.  Then when I say America he often smiles and says “America, it’s very good there?” and I invariably say, “it’s a big country, lotta people, there’s good and bad.”  More and more it doesn’t bother me that much now when people see me as expert on all things American, and now Christian, thanks to the tree.  Even if by some accounts I’m misleading people by not being a “typical” version of whatever it is I’m representing to people, I’m only offering up chances to learn down the road.  We are all critical incidents.  We learn by untangling our own confusion.  

In other news, my kids have been offered places at our chosen international school here so this first adventure in homeschooling will soon be over.  It has been like opening a door that seemed like it was leading to something small and limited and finding a big world I hadn’t even known existed on the other side, reminding me to not worry too hard about things I don’t yet know about. Despite my misgivings and disorganization and struggle with curriculum, I think we’ve done this right, maybe by mistake, maybe because most things, carried out with good intentions and focus on progress, no matter how slow, turn out to be their own path to something new.