What happens when a free-willed, strong spirited, career minded person travels across the world with partners and children to make a 'happy' family? How do they find their happily ever after? What gives them the courage to forge on and emerge stronger?
Across the world, women (and some men), leave their jobs, their social lives and the general comfort-of-familiarity to be with their partners. They willingly cast themselves in supporting roles - all in favor of a happy family life. Right or wrong is not my question – critically assessed and accepted decisions, once made, aren’t meant for contest. My dilemmas surround the thereafter. I have been talking to 15 mothers from many different countries (India, Netherlands, Germany, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Norway, USA, Switzerland, Vietnam and UK), who moved one or several different countries with their families, learned different languages and assimilated into a foreign lifestyle for their happily-ever-afters. After recently choosing to be a trailing spouse and a new stay-at-home Mum I wanted to understand the challenges other Mums have faced and how they overcame them. My end goal - to find common trends among the experiences of all trailing spouses and maybe, just maybe, feel like I was not the only one who went on an emotional roller-coaster or possibly put it out there for other Mums. It is to say that they are not alone and to give them some of the strategies that consistently helped the serial-movers in their expat lifestyles.
On my journey of writing this article I found, overwhelmingly, that most families moved across the world for better career options, for one half of the couple, and therefore a more financially comfortable life for the family. What was apparent and something that made me happy was that over half of the families I spoke to also moved in order to expose their children to multiple cultures and languages. They wanted to open their children’s horizons and opportunities in the future. In this global world, we were all seeking the common thread that binds us together as humans overcoming languages and cultural barriers. On a side note, we were making these decisions for the children without fully accounting for the emotional and psychological turmoil that they go through the course of the move, especially the older children (but that is fodder for a whole different article, here I will focus on the trailing spouse).
Typically an international relocation has several phases – packing your belongings, saying ‘so long’ to friends and families, and pressing forward, with a brave heart, into the unknown. The initial phase after the move, before meaningful connections are made, is almost always accompanied with battling depression and misery in a swamp of loneliness. Having said that, a heartwarming trend I came across, in my interviews, is the support systems that women built for themselves, through their children and the children’s friends in their foreign homes. What struck me as amazing is how these networks are built and how they extend support, beyond the primary circles, with open arms and no judgement. In their foreign lands, Mums actively seek other Mums and their similar circumstances, and willingness to open to new cultures forms the basis of these connections. These Mums understand, on a very human level, the struggles the other Mum has been through in leaving their comfort zone. All Mums, more often than not, found the tremendous courage to assimilate into their unfamiliar surroundings with the support of other women.
The non-movers, on the other hand, easily dismissed these adversities quoting, “The families had more money, better prospects!”, but the heavy hearts are very real. Consider this – a move anywhere is difficult, transporting your worldly belongings and wrapping chapters of your life. It is significantly more difficult to move to a country that doesn’t speak any language with which you are familiar and is culturally very different. The simplest of tasks become massive challenges – for example, a seemingly easy task like grocery shopping can overwhelm you when you don’t know the name of that very-important ingredient that you want to find on the supermarket shelves. Of course, Google helps with the translations and what-have-you, but it doesn’t help with the daunting task of shopping when you cannot ask around for help with a wailing wee one in tow. Waiting to get on the public transport and not understanding that the platform for your train just changed, buying the wrong type of insurance, because Google cannot always be right, going to a doctor for your child and not being able to explain the problems with which your child is suffering and so many, very scary and real problems that expat Mums face. Even simple things like what-to-say and what-NOT-to-say in a foreign land can make for extremely awkward situations. The all-women support systems, all of whom have been-there-and-done-that, help overcome the cultural and language barriers. They not only help find the right source of information, but also make you aware of the common pitfalls. In addition, the grit to overcome these problems by learning the languages themselves, help immensely in that integration process.
Despite the coping strategies that one develops, an easily obscured cause of hardships after the relocation, I found, was the internal struggle of the trailing spouse - leaving a healthy career behind and diving into the unknown with practically no support system behind them. A lot of Mums I spoke to were extremely successful in their careers before they chose the life of a trailing spouse. Unknowingly their job had become a part of their identity, a part of their identity that added value to their overall self-esteem. During the move, a critical part of this identity was redefined or simply lost depending on how long a Mum had been a trailing spouse. The mental health challenges far outweigh the practical challenges in finding another job in the new country with minimal language skills, difference in job markets, and having no back-up child care. A prime reason for depression in trailing spouses arose from loss of confidence in their own capabilities - not just the complications of job applications and limited scope of opportunities, but also the fact that most Mums, after the move, first become stay-at-home Mums making their families the number one priority – something none of them consciously planned into their career outlooks. When Mums found themselves in a situation with minimal recourse to the employment markets, I found that these incredible Mums reevaluated their skills set, added skills in way that recalculated their careers– these Mums became entrepreneurs! These Mums, who looked at themselves and said, “I can do more”, actively and creatively created their own opportunities; a former architect who started art and craft activity classes for babies and toddlers, scientists who started science workshops for older kids, more scientists who wrote children’s books, another scientist who runs yoga classes in her local community, a former nurse who makes shoes for kids, another specialist nurse who is set to start a Kindergarten, and several more who volunteer at charitable non-governmental organizations. Several Mums re-trained and found employment. The key to these powerful women finding their new professional identities, a brand-new definition of their success was their sheer persistence and wanting to do more - do more to help themselves and all the other Mums around them.
पूजा जोशी
मेडिकल सायन्स या विषयात पीएचडी. वैज्ञानिक संशोधनाच्या क्षेत्रात दहा वर्षाहून अधिक काळ काम केले आहे.
सध्या लहान मुलांसाठी विज्ञान सुलभ करण्याचे आणि लेखनाचे काम सुरू आहे.
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June 2019