We’d love to hear from more of our readers! Got a tale about making the most of your partner-prompted relocation? Share it with us by December 13 for a chance to win a $25, $50, or $100 USD (or equivalent currency) Amazon gift card on December 20.**
**If you would prefer a local business that offers online-purchase gift cards, or a charitable donation to a U.S.-registered charity, we can honor that instead.
Updated to add: Mobile-friendly link HERE.
If you enjoy reading trailing-spouse adventures, and summertime happens to be when you feel a yearning for some new material, we’ve got you covered once again — this time with a trio of stories spanning from the United Kingdom to Malaysia!
Feel free to also reflect on our previous book recommendations (December 2020, June 2021, June 2023) or join my quest to read these books over the next few months:
June snuck up on me this year — can I blame climate change for my confusion? — so this post is hitting your screens just a bit later than intended. Then again, as with New Year’s resolutions and most things in life, it’s no good letting a late start stop you from getting started!
If summertime happens to be when you feel a yearning for some new reading material, feel free to reflect on our previous book recommendations (December 2020, June 2021) or join my quest to read these books over the next few months:
What’s milder than a trigger warning? I need a phrase like that for when something is well worth sharing, but may cause you to gnash your teeth to bits if it hits too close to home. A night-guard warning?
Here’s some information that’s endangered my enamel this week and sent me flashing back to a hot kitchen from my former life:
Picture it: Seattle, 2009. The Great Recession, my husband’s new job, the collapse of local print journalism, and our family planning efforts had converged. The result? I went from being a go-go-go New York City journalist to a Seattleite with far too much time on my hands. Literally barefoot and pregnant and making a no-bake blueberry pie as an unprecedented heat wave bore down on the Pacific Northwest, I had to laugh at myself to hold back the wide-eyed panic at not recognizing the person I was becoming.
Eighteen months later, having found reliable childcare and grudgingly accepted that “temporary” relocation seemed likely to last for years, I began looking for something to get me out of the house regularly and keep my mind sharp. The local journalism scene was still reeling from the loss of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but I found plenty of opportunities to bring my time and talents to the booming nonprofit sector, from tiny startups all the way up to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
And that’s where I had my very first a-ha moment related to trailing spouses — specifically, the “Golden Cage” phenomenon of dependent spouses stuck without work permits despite having all kinds of advanced degrees and skill sets. All around me, nonprofits were keeping costs down and impacts up thanks to the unpaid labor of middle-class immigrants (i.e., transplants intending to stay put) and expats (i.e., long-term visitors). In return, the volunteers were establishing local networks and keeping their resume gaps from turning into gaping maws. How’s that for a silver lining?
While tutoring English-language learners, answering helpline phone calls, and organizing charity auctions, I made friends with Canadian, Indian, and Serbian volunteers galore — mostly women who had landed there as the result of their husbands being recruited by the region’s international tech industry. My own cross-country relocation woes and job-hunting frustrations paled in comparison to not even being legally allowed to work, on top of adapting to a foreign culture and language.
On the flip side, I’ve now seen similar issues among expat communities in India. Yes, some embassies, international schools, and multinational corporations offer priority hiring for spouses. Sure, the pandemic and remote-work technologies have made it easier to be entrepreneurial and/or work from anywhere in the world with decent WiFi. But at the end of the day, from the U.S. to India and in between? I’m routinely surrounded by career-oriented trailing spouses — including people with advanced degrees, more than a decade of work experience, and all kinds of special certifications and qualifications — thwarted from using their professional skills locally.
It’s such a waste! (Gnash, grind, gnash, grind… Where’s my night-guard?)
Do you agree? We’re not alone! Momentum is building on the need to improve international partner work access around the world, arguably kicked into high gear by the visible diversification of the trailing spouse community. (Hint: It’s not just wives anymore.) A new report by Permits Foundation, including analysis based on survey responses from Trailing-Spouse.com readers earlier this year, highlights the importance of partner work access.
Want to know more? Keep reading — and share with your networks.
Director of Permits Foundation, Helen Frew, explains why enabling dual careers in the global workplace is becoming increasingly important not only to families moving abroad but also to international employers and governments.
Employees and their families face many challenges when moving to a new country. The question of whether the accompanying partner can also access work has to be one of the top factors that can make or break the experience. If the answer is no, it can result in global assignments being refused or cut short. .
Founded in 2001 as a corporate initiative, Permits Foundation is the only organisation that advocates worldwide to help improve legislation so that partners of international employees can also access work when in the host country. This important issue is increasingly being recognised by employers as a key component of a successful posting. As a result, Permits Foundation is today sponsored by 40 major international companies and organisations.
The Foundation engages at government level and in target countries identified by our sponsor network. We work towards achieving the best practice model whereby partners of international employees are automatically authorised to work for any employer once their dependant status is recognised. Since the Foundation began in 2001, over 30 countries have changed their policy in this way. However in many other destinations there is still work to do
Permits Foundation’s world map shows where partners of international employees can directly access work.
Part of the Foundation’s success is advocacy built on a strong evidence base. Our surveys produce timely data that we can present to governments and policy makers. In 2022, we published two new international dual-careers survey reports, part one giving feedback from employers and part two the perspective from partners themselves.
The latest findings, published on 17 October, show a striking link between partner employment access, success of an international assignment and family health, well-being and integration.
Behind every set of data is a family. The comments we have received, really highlight the real life impact of policies in practice:
One partner wrote: “As an established professional with a masters degree, it has been so disappointing to not be able to work. My skill set is in high demand where we are located and I have had to turn down many job opportunities due to our work visa situation, it has put a financial strain on our family, not to mention, I miss my career.“
Another respondent said: “In 2022 it is easy to imagine how many households are dual working spouses. For more women to grow into senior leadership roles we need to see better access to work when relocating to other countries.”
Permits Foundation will now take the survey findings forward as we look to make improvements for international families in the US, Singapore, South Africa, China, and India. For example, we recently wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and our research also underpinned this article in the Times of India.
The more organisations that give their support to our cause, the stronger our case for change. If achieving our goal has or would make a difference to your international experience, do let your (partner’s) employer know about the importance of our work. You can also follow Permits Foundation’s progress at www.permitsfoundation.com.
Helen Frew has 20 years of international advocacy experience spent in the U.K., Brussels and The Hague, representing organisations in both public and private sectors and helping them to engage and influence policy at government level.
Ten years ago, I was a Seattle-based journalist reporting on Amanda Knox’s homecoming for Reuters among a bewildering throng of screaming Italian and British paparazzi. Covering her story, and as a Third Culture Kid with family and friends on both sides of the pond, was the first time it truly hit home for me that people can see exactly the same thing and come to wildly different conclusions. Even more so when our interpretations are steeped in implicit biases, based on personal experiences and cultural norms.
I felt a strong sense of déjà vu this past week, as Meghan Markle’s mere presence at the funeral events for Queen Elizabeth II filled up my Twitter feed with a frenzied dichotomy of veneration and vitriol.
All it took was Year 2 of a global pandemic, combined with a great deal on Amazon Prime Day, for me to finally break down and purchase a Kindle e-reader. (I may have been the last person in Seattle without one.) The ability to borrow library books digitally is hugely useful for my nomadic lifestyle, but I still prefer print media — even though my husband rolls his eyes alarming back into his head at my teetering piles of magazines, newspapers, hardcovers and paperbacks. Taking up precious luggage space, no less!
In my defense, however, I often meet interesting people on our travels through the ice-breaker of comparing what we’re physically reading — something you can’t very well do when you’re staring at glowing screens — and my load gets lighter as I bequeath my dead tree materials to my new friends or leave them behind the next crop of hotel guests to enjoy.
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I’ve gravitated towards historical fiction and memoirs, especially with descriptive language about the food and scenery. When considering a selection of summer reading recs for or about trailing spouses, here’s a diverse list with something for everyone, with links to their Goodreads descriptions:
One of the best parts of being a trailing spouse is stitching together an amazing tapestry of friends and family across different corners of the world.
Perhaps the worst part is the cruel distance when you most want to be near them — including when it’s time to say goodbye.
Earlier this year, I lost my dear friend Anne Doll in Seattle to appendix cancer, at the age of 40. Earlier this week, I lost my grandmother in Nicosia, Cyprus, at the age of 104. In both cases, I was thousands of miles away in Delhi, trying to push through my grief and guilt to continue parenting through this pandemic. (Our inability to observe communal mourning rituals during COVID lockdowns, even when mere driving distance away, has surely been a core element of our collective trauma this past year.)
Although I spent years writing for newspapers, including dozens of obituaries, and there’s so much to share about how two heavily-pregnant trailing spouses became fast friends during the hottest Seattle summer on record? I couldn’t bring myself to eulogize Anne. Fortunately, her husband has done that for us all. And, while I can’t be there for her memorial service this summer, at least my family’s absence will provide a few extra bedrooms for her college friends who fly in for the occasion.
For my grandmother, however, given that I missed her funeral by a matter of hours, I thought I could share my thoughts here. After all, she was a trailing spouse, too. (Whenever she had to list the different Cypriot city where each of her three children had been born, the reaction was usually something like, “Lady, did you have to have a kid each time you moved?” I think some of our readers can relate!)
When it comes to #TrailingSpouseGoals, RBG is our GOAT.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on Friday has renewed interest in her incredible life story: persevering through partner-prompted relocations, health crises, and decades of systemic discrimination, culminating in a triumphant third act as the towing spouse — with her husband Martin as her biggest champion.
It’s one thing to leave family, friends, and employment opportunities behind to accompany our spouses when their careers require a relocation. But when the move also means giving up our favorite foods? Yikes.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
As a tourist or business traveler, I’ve found myself saddened by two edible extremes: discovering amazing new foods that I won’t be able to find again back home vs. managing the absence of a dietary staple while on my journey.
As we kick off the Roaring Twenties, 21st century-style, it’s only fitting that our conversations and screens have been jammed with people’s filtered reflections on how they spent the 2010s. What did we do? What did we learn? How should we use these experiences to shape our course for the next decade?
Or, if you’re like me, you spent winter break racing around back “home” (Seattle, WA) to see friends and family, stock up on local groceries, and fill up on as much holiday cheer as possible before racing back “home” (Delhi, India) for the kids to start school again.