kids and spouse for a new pair of boots—the walking kind. Unlike me, he planned his projects years in advance, and read and wrote meticulously with no obvious end in sight. He probably wondered why he’d flown over the ocean with a hothead.
Magda was my first friend. Polish by nationality, she relocated from Amsterdam with her Dutch husband and their two young children a week before me. We met by chance on the street outside our apartment. Her daughter’s colorful tricycle caught my eye. Her son needed a diaper change, so I invited her in. Days later, when the planes careened into the Twin Towers, my family gathered at her house. Strangers in a new land, we mourned without our wider families, trying to make sense of a changing world.
Some days, we cooked meatballs together for early dinners with the children before the men came home. We shivered together on the playground as the weather cooled and the leaves turned brown. Because of post-9/11 security issues and my failed quest for a driver’s license, Magda gathered the kids and me in her Honda to shop and go to the park. Friendship stopped me from breaking.
At a party, I overheard my husband tell our new friends that he wanted to stay. I threatened to leave. Divorce had not been in my vocabulary, but lo, there it was, hurling across the room in front of crying children, too late to be scooped back. What had been posed as a sabbatical was now of indeterminate duration, perhaps forever, and I felt pathetically unmoored from all I had known and all that I had been.
I simmered. His life, expanding. My life, shrinking. His: the city, the world. Mine: the suburbs, pre-school, elementary school. Him: a calm house after a stimulating day full of people. Me: small, grubby hands, and loneliness pressing in. He told me I was doing a great job, but I didn’t value my role, so his praise felt pointless. Unlike my mother, who felt that her mothering role was pivotal, I did not prize my position. Churlish, perhaps. Some women I knew would have traded their jobs to be at home with their kids. Some women said I was lucky. But this was not my choice; I was a woman who had grown up aware of the power of my own agency.
What does this say about how we divide our labor, that even I diminished the work of full-time parenting? My husband advanced his career, got paid, and gained recognition, while I learned what it means to be just a mother. Every time I visited our doctor, dentist, or ophthalmologist, they asked what he was doing. This is how a woman becomes invisible.
I MISSED MY homeland: the nikau palm outside my window, tui birds on the flax blooms chiming their bell notes to each other at dusk, the volcanic Rangitoto hugging the entrance to Waitemata Harbor, the hibiscus tree behind my kitchen, the ozone smell of the Pacific pounding on the east coast, how sunlight reflecting on the shiny karaka leaves made my eyes crinkle in the brightness. In my nostalgic dreams of New Zealand, there were no traffic jams, difficult clients, timesheets to update, monthly invoices to file, or sick kids that came to work so Mom didn’t miss a meeting.
Job contracts don’t have a fine print section warning of loss, missing, craving, dissolving, drowning. Relocation guides concentrate on making lists, how to deal with movers, how to find schools, where to have lunch and shop, and which appliances won’t work in your new country. Those books, which I didn’t think to look at until after we’d moved, couldn’t help me. Now there are websites, blogs, and social networks dedicated to expatriates and their spouses, addressing cultural barriers and the “expat blues.” Today I read an article posted on a site for Internations, a club of almost two million people. It said I could find balance in my transition by paying attention to the five fundamental aspects in life: health (earth), relationships (water), motivation (fire), reflection (air), and intention (ether). Ha! If only I had known. I did not find my balance for a long time.
THERE ARE MILLIONS of trailing spouses, drifting from Poland to Dubai, Britain to Australia, Jordan to France, the Netherlands to Indonesia, New Zealand to the U.S.A., with or without children, with or without common language, with or without relocation expense accounts and repatriation agreements. Books and blogs can’t really tell you how to chart your emotional terrain, how to circumnavigate the currents of loss and longing. They don’t tell you that you might gain twenty pounds, about the babies born, the friends who get breast cancer, the children who grow up and graduate, the family members who die, the boss who moves away, the divorces, the second marriages, the mourning and celebration, the trivia and change, all while you are away. No, these are waters you have to map yourself. “I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning,” wrote the poet Stevie Smith. Hopefully, the shore holds firm.
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE way in my new life, I righted myself. My thinking shifted. My husband was right about patience, although for a while I begrudged him a wisdom not earned in the trenches of suburbia. My little piece of thread was snipped from a social tapestry that had taken many phone calls and cups of tea to create in my former life. My weft is still firmly knotted in there, but slowly over the years, I’ve woven myself into a new community and stitched my children in safely.
Am I the same person I was? I don’t think so. It becomes harder to go back to my homeland because life has moved on there. My sister moved to Britain forty years ago. As her children grew into adults and had their own families, she became more embedded in British culture. As some choices widen, others narrow. As her world expanded through travel and career choices, so the option of return diminished, like some inviolate law of economics explained with graphs and laser points, but rarely understood.
I didn’t initially think about our children’s education, as second-culture kids raised away from extended family and the culture they were born into. I didn’t think of our future, any future. In my mind I was perennially twenty-seven, with no vision of my husband and I getting older. Along the way, the suspended reality of living in another country had worn off. I know now: this is our life.
I have learned to be resilient without a familiar structure. Act for myself? Face the truth? Risk, risk everything? Who I thought I was, wasn’t the entire me. Turns out, I am less of a risk taker, less adaptable than assumed. More needy, less independent. Vulnerable to Fortuna’s wheel and the vagaries of change.
Our internal worlds are as uncertain and changing as the world around us. I understand that now. We may think we are our jobs, our houses, our countries, our families, our cars, and our purses, even. When that’s stripped away, we are left with seams patched to the best of our ability and a few wayward tufts—strands never quite smoothed.
ON THE RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES OF BEING AN ALIEN
HE LEANS IN against me. Stale neck, faintly damp chest, coffee breath. There’s no getting away from his musty warmth. I focus on the yellow and black diamond pattern of my thin cotton dress, my coppery skin denting beneath the fabric as he presses cool metal to my flank. I sink into myself, away from the burn in my cheeks, away from this man pushing the border between outside and in. Don’t look as he glides his arm down my back. Don’t flinch as he presses my armpit, the back of my knee. Does he feel my swampish fever, the fear percolating to my surface? I’ve been scanned many times at airports, but never with such strange intimacy. Nearby, shoeless travelers watch their belongings bump along the conveyor belt at O’Hare. The TSA officer’s wand slides along the inside of my thigh. He hasn’t spoken to me at all.
I flick my brown eyes up, meeting the worried blue eyes of my son across the man’s shoulder. The boy’s blond hair curls up beyond his now pale temple, his ears flushing at the lobes. The officer pulls away and I feel the air between us. “Who is this woman to you,” he demands from my son.
“She’s my mother,” my son responds. The man glances from my passport to my son’s, to him, to me, to him. We don’t look alike. Do not speak, do not speak, do not speak, my dark eyes tell my fair boy. The man waves us on.
The woman who stops me by the boarding gate is rougher, bigger,
