Editor’s Note: Gregory Buford, the author of a novel and two memoirs — including the recently released Kept: An American Househusband in Paris — answers stories from our readers as part of our Trailing-Spouse Book Club.
Q: How did you become a trailing spouse?
Continued from Part 6 of Erica’s story.
After spending six years in Washington, D.C., my tenth move as a trailing-spouse Navy wife brought us to the tropical paradise of Oahu in Hawaii.
By this point, with a little nudge from COVID times, my employer had seamlessly transitioned to remote work with no plans to return to a full-time, in-office model. My youngest daughter was also getting ready to leave home for her first year of college at the University of Tennessee. It made sense for me (and Gleyber, our red fox Lab) to join my husband for his two-year tour at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base.
Still, I was taking a leap, not knowing if I could keep my job or continue to feel like a successful part of the team with a six-hour time difference —but I knew if I didn’t try it, I would regret it.
This turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
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:
In 2008, I had an ideal life. I was working part-time for a chemical company as a supply chain implementation lead, and I was a part-time stay at home mom in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. It felt like I had the best of both worlds — until my husband came home with an opportunity to send us halfway around the world.
As a couple, we’d always been open to moving; six years into our marriage, we were already on our third move together. So, when he told me about his company’s offer to move us to Prague, it felt like a no-brainer. We collectively made the decision to seize the opportunity and lean into the adventure.
It was only a two-year assignment. It’d be like going on a really long vacation, right?
Now I know I can’t lose
As long as you follow
I’m going to win
I’m going to beg, steal, or borrow
As long as you follow
Fleetwood Mac
Since Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie died on November 30, I’ve been listening to “As Long As You Follow” on repeat, often with tears, but sometimes with laughter, remembering how I once joked that it was the perfect song for the career expat.
“You can sing this to me at our wedding!” I chirped at my then-fiancé, when we were discussing plans for our married life.
We didn’t know where we were going, or when. All we knew was that at any moment, a call would come from his employer and we’d have a week to wrap up our lives. We said our “I do’s” in New Orleans, and next thing I knew we were on a flight to Nairobi, where he had a role that would fulfill him for the next two years, and I… well, I had myself to contend with.
Though he never sang McVie’s words to me, I followed my husband: from Nairobi to Kampala to Paris to Lyon and finally, eight years ago, to Geneva.
Continued from Part 1 of Kirsty’s story.
After almost 10 years in the Middle East, my husband and I decided it was time for one more big adventure before we would need to settle down in one place so that our daughters could finish school in person. We headed off on another set of multi-month travels, this time in our camper van across the Arabian peninsula, before relocating to Goa in India for a slower pace of life.
Both of our careers had done well during our years in China and Abu Dhabi, but my husband was facing burnout and wanted to take a sabbatical. Goa was an affordable place to drop to one salary, and he became the trailing spouse — handling the school runs, grocery shopping and cooking while I traveled to Abu Dhabi every few months to work with clients and continue my role as an educator for Nikon Middle East. I also began running photography retreats in Goa.
For me personally, this was a particularly challenging time of expat life. The jet-setting wasn’t as fun as it had been in my younger days, and I didn’t really enjoy being away from the family. I had already experienced life as a working Mum, but it was undeniably hard to redistribute our household responsibilities now that I had become the breadwinner. My husband (and many husbands I’m sure) simply didn’t realize that things like having a supply of presents for parties the kids were going to, or back-up ballet tights in the drawer for those inevitable holes, was something he should be looking to do!
Part 1 of 2
A new year is always a time of reflection. Perhaps even more so after the last three years among the expat community; almost every fellow expat I know has a pandemic story of displacement, or getting stuck somewhere, or some other sudden, unexpected change prompted by the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent variants.
Upon reflection, I believe the winding path of life, complete with stumbles and rocky patches, has held me in good stead for where I sit today. Able to breathe a little easier, be at peace with holding space for things that don’t go quite as planned, and capable of once again being curious and soaking up the opportunities that come our way.
After all, the life of a expat spouse involves learning to dig into your own inner resources, especially if you also want to continue having a career of your own. Fortunately, I’ve long described myself as passionately curious — a quality I believe has enriched my life in a multitude of ways, especially as a long-term expat and creative professional.
In my little family, each of us — my husband, our two teenage daughters, and myself — was born in a different country: Ireland, U.K., China and the UAE.
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.
My journey as a trailing spouse began in 2016, when my wife got a job offer to be a Gender Officer for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Eastern Ukraine. I had recently been let go from my position as Associate Director for International Development at Michigan State University, and we had two young children. The timing seemed right, and we landed in Kyiv that summer.
Six years later, we were fleeing for our lives, catching one of the last flights out of a war zone with whatever we could carry.
But long before that happened, despite my initial enthusiasm for our new lives, the experience had been disastrous. I had no idea about the loneliness and the absolute despair and loss of self-worth one can feel as a trailing spouse. Having held very senior roles with highly-respected institutions like the United Nations and Columbia University, it was disorienting to find myself as a stay-at-home dad with small kids in a land where I didn’t speak the language and even the simplest menu requests were met with resistance.
Up until 2016, I had already lived and worked in so many different parts of the world — including India, the United States, Liberia, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Malaysia, and Canada — that I didn’t expect Ukraine to be such a significant culture shock.
We are a family of international citizens with multiple passports, in fact. I was born in Ludhiana, Punjab, then moved to the U.S. as a teenager; my wife was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and was working in Kosovo when we met as U.N. volunteers there, then in Syria when we got engaged. Between us and our two children, we speak Russian, Hindi, English, Uzbek, Persian, Urdu, Ukrainian, Punjabi, French, and a little bit of Turkish, Arabic, and Spanish.
But on the Gupte Scale, the move ranked low — no higher than 6 points out of 15. Initially, we were not in Kyiv but in Dnipropetrovsk, in a more remote part of the country. The grocery stores were well-stocked, but with mostly former Soviet and some European foods rather than any of the familiar comforts of American, Indian, or Asian foods. The location did offer some excitement — definitely more than the doldrums of Osh, Kyrgyzstan and East Lansing, Michigan — in the form of accessible travel opportunities for exploring the rest of Europe. The timing helped at first by giving me a career break, but being in a hard-to-understand area broke my spirit and I stopped looking for work during what should have been some of my prime earning years. The climate was too cold for my liking, and I felt uncomfortable interacting with so many strangers.
The situation was hard, both personally and professionally. As an American of Indian origin, I found it difficult to adjust to the food, language, and culture. Ukraine is a fairly patriarchal society, where a wife working and a husband staying at home and caring for the children is quite uncommon. I felt completely alienated, and the isolation and pressure I felt as an unemployed man and primary caregiver to our children took a toll on marriage and all our lives.
Although I had always been an athlete — a competitive tennis player growing up, and a marathon-runner as an adult — I totally let myself go and my health declined.
Most people we met were through our kids’ schools or through an old college buddy Serhiy Uryn, who is Ukrainian, or through some Indian expat circles there.
The Ukrainians are very nice; my lack of adjustment wasn’t anyone’s fault, but simply a fact of life. For my wife and kids, Anarkali and Darius, adjusting to Kyiv was much easier, especially with their Russian language skills.
On top of all that, throw in the existential fear brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the first 100 days of lockdown life, followed by nearly two years of no international travel.
On the bright side… well, I don’t quite know what the bright side was of my six years in Ukraine! Maybe just experiencing the historical importance of seeing a new country take shape and change its spirit from Soviet to European? I did work a lot on my poetry, launching my own website (mrurdupoetry.com) and YouTube channel (Mr Urdu Poetry). And the pandemic did suddenly make my underemployed-and-stranded-with-kids situation feel relatable to more people!
We left Ukraine on the day the war started this year, late in the evening of Feb. 23. As we reached Poland, bombs and missiles rained on Kyiv. We were very fortunate to have a narrow escape, without very little notice due to conflicting intelligence reports. We didn’t get anything out of our two homes — just one suitcase and a few handbags. If we hadn’t left when we did, we’d be in bomb shelters as we were on one of the last flights out before the airspace completely closed.
Most of our expat friends were also able to evacuate, but not all our Ukrainian ones. My wife’s subordinates and colleagues were left in particularly dire straits as they worked the East/Donbas frontline region.
After reaching Poland, my wife and I weighed our options: staying, going back to the U.S., or moving on to a third country. My brother lives in New York, my mother lives in Punjab (India), and my wife’s family lives in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
We decided to come to India and either try to continue working remotely or find new adventures and teach our growing kids more about their Indian heritage. Our Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) status allows us to live and work here, so that gives us enough flexibility once we figure that part out. Meanwhile, our stuff still isn’t out of Ukraine, given that the seaports are currently controlled by Russia and the cost of getting things shipped out is five times what it should be…
On the Gupte Scale, moving from Kyiv to Delhi has scored about average, maybe an 8 out of 15. Our destination, timing, and resources have been decent. I do miss my two great friends, Andrew and Serhiy, and our small circle of expat French and European friends from our school. I don’t miss my own sad, lonely walks, but the adjustment has been harder on my wife and kids this time; they miss the ease of calm, public spaces for walks, along with their colleagues and classmates.
My wife’s last day of work was Sept. 30; she opted not to leave us to return to Ukraine, which was the requirement to keep her job. We thought we’d take a sabbatical or a hiatus to let ourselves breathe a bit together rather than sort of long-distance survival within Ukraine where my wife was at the frontlines in Donbas, while the kids and I were in Kyiv.
We are both terrified and excited at the options life may present us. India is definitely a richer country and allows for far more possibilities for one’s dreams so we are pursuing our dreams here: me of being a proper writer and my wife of being a proper practicing artist. (See some of her work here.)
India’s chaotic nature is something to get used to — but the food is wonderful, people are warm, everything is available, and I am better equipped to help myself and my family as a guide.
It has been a bit weird, feeling like an Indian for all expats and expat for all Indians. My tastes for food are Mexican and American as well as Indian. My desire for physical distance and physical space has changed, though it is adaptable. My relationships with extended families are weak, if not negative, due to not having shared critical moments of each other’s lives and our cultural differences.
Suffice to say, there are pressures and joys for me here of all kinds that can at once make my head burst with anxiety (e.g., driving in Delhi), and delicacies to make my mouth water all the way to the Brahmaputra (the largest river of India). Kindness is plentiful; so is aggressive driving and constantly being taken for a ride in all senses. India is endlessly self-contradictory, and all its insights lie in that tiny sliver of crossover Venn-diagram style.
But for my fully-expat spouse and kids, this experience of landing and living in India is completely foreign. It doesn’t leave much room for my own weirdness, where I have to navigate what it means to be Indian again as an American in India. It is all very exhilarating as some things are familiar and trigger nostalgia of early childhood — and some things are really aggravating.
One of the strangest feelings is to be living in India again after 30 years abroad and not have my father around.
Dr. Subhash Sachdeva was larger than life, at least in the lives of all he touched; he loved adventure and drank from the cup of life with gust and passion. Throughout his five decades as as internal medicine specialist, family doctor, and general practitioner, he had immense diagnostic ability and a wonderful heart to treat the wealthy and the destitute all the same, and had amazing detective-like abilities to crack the hardest medical cases. He was proud to be named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Health in the U.K., and to have treated patients from all over the world.
He passed away from complications of Parkinson’s disease in April 2018, while I was serving with U.N. Women in Kabul, Afghanistan
We wish we could have celebrated his birthday with him this week, on Oct. 14 — he would have been 75 this year, reaching the same milestone as India’s independence. But, I am in a way grateful he didn’t have to suffer through the forced-isolation of the pandemic and got to have a proper cremation and service with friends and family all around in his final journey.
Still, it would have been nice to spend time together now. He would have maybe seen this article and maybe asked me to buck up and go and find new mountains to climb and new vistas to see and to leave the war behind. Here’s to you Dad — a toast of all that was, and all that has yet to come.
After that, Diwali, a major festival celebrated across India, falls on October 24 this year. It will be nice to be with Mum in Punjab as a family for this holiday season, for the first time in years. She had massive health scares in New York City last year when she had to have two surgeries on the spine, and then one for the heart where she was resuscitated and then a cardiac pacemaker put in, all during the Covid era. We are lucky that our kids now have this time to grow closer to Grandma and learn more about their culture.
We’re aiming to move back to the United States in Fall 2025, continuing our careers with the State Department, USAID or one of their partners. My wife and I might even go back to school and train as psychologists, to try and heal other refugees or people from around the world that may come to the U.S. and need mental health support in these uncertain times.
In terms of what lessons I have learned from finding myself in a tough situation that could help other trailing spouses… I don’t know. Each situation is truly different. Being a trailing spouse is just the way life works sometimes. If you feel unhappy about it, stay focused on the fact that this is a finite experience — with a beginning and an end. Join all the expat organizations you can find — or start one. Meet all expats you can find. When things get really tough, don’t get down on yourself or hurt yourself; split or leave, find sanity somehow.
Trailing has inspired me to be a very involved father. Although I taught and worked in women’s rights, becoming a stay-at-home parent with young kids put me to the test and taught me the greatest value — care. One day, it will make me a better known poet and who knows? Perhaps a better therapist, too.
And guess what? I have just registered for the Vendanta Delhi Half Marathon, as a 10K runner. Wish me luck on Oct. 16 — and check Trailing-Spouse.com’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages for my results soon!
Got a relocation story of your own to share? Contact us at hello@trailing-spouse.com.
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.
