For 10 years, I shared a London office at Yves Delorme, a luxury textile brand, with a wonderful colleague whose family was from India. I always admired her holiday pictures from Amritsar or jungle safaris — with no idea that one day, I would be having similar adventures with my own family.
Exploring the world. Studying yoga with experts. Making friends from dozens of countries. Learning Spanish. Raising tri-lingual, adventurous kids. Starting a business. Building my brand.
For some trailing spouses, moving to a new country can be a career setback. But for me, following my husband’s career to Guatemala and India opened up incredible opportunities that I never could have imagined back home.
I am walking on air! My book Diplomatic Baggage, first published in 2005 about my adventures as a trailing spouse to my E.U. diplomat husband AW, has been bought by Bloomsbury and released again with a fancy – you could almost say sexy – new cover!
A big thank you to Alexandra Pringle, who published my last two memoirs (Packing Up: Further Adventures of a Trailing Spouse and Full Marks for Trying: An Unlikely Journey from the Raj to the Rag Trade) and decided to make it a trilogy with Dip Bag.
I made so many friends all around the world during the years described in the book, and then through hearing from its readers (including Nicole, the creator of this very blog)! When I wrote Dip Bag, I don’t think I appreciated quite how many of us trailing spouses there were because I was mainly thinking of dip wives like myself and not the hundreds — thousands — whose partners work abroad for other reasons. I now realize that I am part of a real global family.
Editor’s Note: The inspiration for Chris Pavone’s 2012 bestselling debut novel, The Expats, came from his 18-month experience as a trailing spouse in Luxembourg. Now the author of five thrilling novels, including the recently released Two Nights in Lisbon, he has agreed to share his own story with our readers as part of our Trailing-Spouse Book Club.
My wife and I both worked in book publishing. One evening, she came home from work and asked, “What would you think of living in Luxembourg?” I was nearly 40 years old, and except for my college years at Cornell University in upstate New York, I’d never lived anywhere other than my hometown of New York City. This felt like a pretty big hole in a repertoire of life experiences, a problem that could be solved simply by saying yes. So I did.
”Ohh, what breed is she?” The lady in our neighborhood park asked me.
On the end of the leash was my newly-arrived dog, Sasha. Nervous of her unfamiliar surroundings, Sasha twitched with excitement at every new smell and sound.
After a 41-hour, two-plane journey from my parent’s home in South Delhi, India, Sasha was finally on the ground in Evanston, Illinois enjoying a calm, albeit chilly, walk in the park.
With Sasha’s arrival, our family of four was finally complete again.
It has taken us three years to get here.
Our move back to the U.S. began in June 2019. My wife Kristine had been working as the head of communications at an Indian firm in the satellite city of Gurgaon. While geographically not very far from our home, Gurgaon was a nightmare to get to thanks to Delhi’s traffic conditions — and that evening, Kristine’s Uber driver had fallen asleep at the wheel.
That scare, as well as her mother’s deteriorating health back in Illinois, prompted her decision to finally repatriate, 21 years after first leaving Chicago to join me in Asia.
Kristine and I had met in the dorms of Columbia University, where she was earning a master’s degree in public policy and I was studying at the Graduate School of Journalism. My reporting career then took us to Singapore, which in those days had limited nonprofit ecosystem opportunities for an experienced professional; Kris switched her skills and focus to communications.
Seven years later, with baby boy Keiran in tow, Reuters transferred me to its London headquarters. In the decade that followed, new journalism opportunities moved us to Mumbai, then Delhi.
Kris and I had a good run as an adventurous expat couple. When we lived in Singapore, we traveled easily to Thailand, Vietnam, mainland China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Laos and Cambodia; in London, we were only able to make it to Paris on my not-so-brilliant Reuters salary, but our son went to a lovely nursery school and we spent a lot of time exploring one of the world’s greatest cities.
In Delhi, the bond between our son and my parents blossomed. He also got a solid foundation, academically, socially and emotionally, during his nine years at the American Embassy School (AES). He made friends from all over the world, in a community that celebrated diversity.
My career advanced and our family life thrived , but Kristine’s professional life suffered a setback with every new city.
Like the Delhi summer heat, the discussion about whether to move back to the U.S. had been simmering for what felt like forever — and suddenly, in June 2019, it boiled over and Kristine’s mind was made up.
With just one year of high school completed, the move would not overly disrupt our teenager’s education, but we gave him a choice: Go with Mom to the U.S. and enroll in a new high school in a new place, or stay in Delhi with Dad for three more years and graduate with your friends at AES, his school since the first grade.
Keiran chose adventure and the unknown. There is lots of literature about the resilience of ‘Third Culture Kids’ that may explain his choice and his ability to adjust so well. He has made good friends at his high school in Evanston, become passionate about powerlifting, and excelled in his studies. America and Evanston fit him like a glove.
History also repeats itself. Growing up as the child of an Indian diplomat, travel and moving have always felt natural for for me. The New York snow, Portuguese forests and the bare Peruvian Andes? All familiar. By the time I went to St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, I had hardly lived in India; by the time Keiran moved to the U.S. as a high school junior, he had never actually lived in the country of his passport.
My boy is a U.S. citizen, born in Singapore, who began speaking English with a slight British accent, and will be heading to an American university with only three years of experience attending U.S. schools. And he is better for it!
I had chosen to stay behind because I loved my job as a journalism professor at Ashoka University, which is just over an hour outside of New Delhi. Teaching a trade that had given me so much to smart students on a beautiful campus seemed hard to give up. And with the job’s generous academic holidays, it seemed feasible to fly between Delhi and Chicago multiple times a year, splitting my time between my aging parents in India and wife and son in the Midwest.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic put a screeching halt to my best laid plans for a global two-homes lifestyle. My campus access was gone overnight, shut down in March 2020 due to India’s national lockdown. My classroom moved onto Zoom, where I struggled to teach a subject that requires in-person field reporting. But worst of all, international travel and relocations suddenly became incredibly difficult — even worse than what we had experienced in the months after 9/11.
Time to consolidate and choose the best place to be. For me, it was with Kristine and Keiran — just in time to experience nuclear family life again and one last Father’s Day together before his departure for college.
In Evanston, I’ve found work with a fellow ex-Reuters colleague doing media research. Part of me misses exploring new cities, new food, and local brews, but there’s no place like home.
Keiran has graduated high school and looks forward to his new adventure as a college freshman in Minnesota. My parents were even able to travel from Delhi to Evanston to be with us for Keiran’s high school graduation last month, as COVID-19 travel restrictions have finally eased.
Importing our nine-year-old Sasha to the U.S. took the better part of eight months, however. Navigating Indian government protocols and the more laborious scrutiny of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), then finding an airline that would take unaccompanied live animals… the total cost ended up coming close to a first-class ticket!
Reunited with her humans and fully recovered from her long journey, Sasha is a busy gal, and doing a fine job as an ambassador of Desi rescue dogs to our neighborhood. She has made friends with my mother-in-law’s golden retriever Rosie, and is fascinated by all the bunny rabbits and squirrels, which are twice the size as Indian ones.
And when the famous Chicago winter hits us … she will experience snow!
Got a relocation story of your own to share? Contact us at hello@trailing-spouse.com.
For most of 2018, I considered myself a pretty ordinary guy, living a relatively ordinary life in the middle of America, with a rather ordinary job. I ate leftover pasta at my desk for lunch, I listened to Morning Edition in the car every day, and on weekends I’d watch college football on TV and maybe brew a batch of beer.
But suddenly, my girlfriend’s job offered a foreign assignment. Extraordinary!
Happy New Year! Many New Year’s Resolutions typically focus on health, and in COVID times, this is no longer an area of our lives that any of us take for granted.
Whether you’ve resolved to focus on gaining boundless energy, losing excess weight, or feeling youthful vitality? I want to share a powerful insight — especially for those of you, like me, who find yourselves much farther away from home than ever expected, in a place that already takes you way out of your comfort zone.
That insight? Your body will set you free.
Simply put, it does not matter your age, gender, size, or ethnicity. If you have a human body, then know that your DNA contains an optimal health code that is waiting to automatically produce massive energy, eliminate excess weight, physical beauty, and heal itself. The key is to understand your metabolism and provide your body what it needs, so that it can do its job.
I did not learn this insight until I was in my mid 30s, teaching math in Hong Kong — and, to tell you the truth, it ran counter to everything I ever learned or experienced about my own health. Additionally, I was on a completely unrelated career track, as an international school teacher.
So how did I get here?
There I was, living my best life in Chicago, a city I loved, with the man I loved, an amazing group of friends, a great job, and a magnificent apartment in a trendy neighborhood that was at least 20% less than market value.
It was 2017. My partner Jaime and I had been living together for about a year when he decided, with input from his Ph.D. advisor at the Illinois Institute of Design, that he should get some work experience in the UX design research field.
Jaime is a Colombian national, so that limited his options — and the competition in Chicago is fierce. (One interviewer actually told him she couldn’t hire him under his student visa status — but would like to give him a hug!) As I held out hope that he would find something local, he began receiving offers from everywhere else: Grand Rapids, Austin, Florida, Seattle. I begged him to accept the job in Mumbai — at least we would be going on an adventure — but he passed, worried about the political climate and possible reentry to the U.S.
My only “hard no” was Dallas, Texas. I’ve always had a thing against Texas. It was almost arbitrary, but the idea of “everything’s bigger in Texas” and “open carry” was more than off-putting.
One day, I got home from work and he was excited to tell me about a great interview and offer he had just received. Where? Richardson, Texas. A suburb of — you guessed it— Dallas.
Suddenly, I had a tough decision. Could I stomach moving to a place I loathed — or would I stay put in my best life, but lose one of the best parts of it?
Editor’s Note: Have you read “Embassy Wife” yet? Katie Crouch’s novel was one of our 2021 summer reading recommendations, but it’s good all year round!
See below for our Q&A about how her life inspired this fun and thought-provoking read.
There are obvious, predictable downsides to living overseas.
You can brace for homesickness on a level that feel like a chronic stomachache. You’ll romanticize all the missing comforts of home — in my case, the smell of Downey fabric softener. You’ll count the days until your holiday visits or permanent repatriation.
But, nobody tells you about irreversible personality shifts you must balance with the utmost care when you do get “back home,” to avoid coming across like an arrogant ass.
I have behaved like a jerk — a big one, at times — when returning home after a cumulative six years spent abroad for my husband’s career with Nike. I’m going to share some of my unfortunate missteps with you, as a cautionary tale to help prevent others from behaving as poorly.