Expat Life: The Beginning
Australian native, Pincushion Protea ( Leucospermum cordifolium)
Life is a succession of lessonswhich must be lived to be understood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shaping a story
Where does one story begin and end as you shape the story of a life? I turn to the pages of the countries we lived in for the past 35 years. In addition to our home country, America, we lived in Australia, New Zealand, England, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. Each country provided adventures and a runway to destinations we might never have experienced if we hadn’t chosen an expat life.
My story is a travelers tale, one that spans thirty years, when I called five different countries home with four children, husband (Mr. H), and a dog. Each move took us on one incredible cultural journey to another, so much so, my children often asked where home was. They joined the global community of Third Culture Kids (TCK). A supportive network for children raised in a culture other than their parents or the culture of their country of nationality. It also includes children raised in a different environment during a significant part of their developmental years. It is a place for children to connect and share stories. Knowing they are not alone.
Our children often asked
“Where is home?”
“If not here, where?”
“When will I know I am truly home?”
With each country move, one of our children stayed behind, choosing to finish high school or college in their expat country. They stayed because it felt like home to them, they had a community to support them. Friendships and education held them together. We assured them their choice was the right one. I knew in my heart it was. How I truly felt was another matter, I hated letting go.
For me, the miles busily stretched on, I packed and moved into ten different houses, toiled in the soil of ten unique gardens, volunteered in twelve schools, flew millions of miles back and forth, home country to expat country, to keep the threads of the family connected.
Is it any wonder I dreamt of standing still, perhaps even, in a wild and breezy meadow, in the mid-years of my life? And finally, to say to my family “This is home, our expat journey ends here.”
The first time
They say when you meet someone special for the first time, you just know.
I was 26 years old when I met Mr. H in 1984 at a Super Bowl party in Manhattan. Don’t ask me who played, I only had eyes for him. We connected instantly. We fit the way Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn fit in the 1949 film “Adams Rib.” One in tune with the other, supporting each other’s interests and ambitions in life. He was finishing a Master’s degree at Columbia University and I was working my way around the boroughs of New York City as a Sales Manager with the consumer products company, Procter and Gamble. From graduate school, Mr. H stepped into an international business career in Australia. The day before we left for Australia, we married for love and adventure and set on our journey.
First home, Australian bungalow, painted by my mother
Homemaker
As our plane descended into Sydney I was handed the immigration Passenger Information Card by the flight attendant. Married and unemployed with temporary residence status, I felt an identity crisis looming. I left the occupation section on the card blank. In the airport, I stood in line, passed over my card to the Immigration Officer and he passed it back to me “You need to fill in your occupation.” I looked at him and blurted out my situation. “I am newly married, moving to Australia, I don’t know what to list as an occupation.” He looked down at the card and in big letters wrote out my new identity “HOMEMAKER”.
We settled into Australian life and a three-bedroom stucco bungalow in the eucalyptus tree foothills of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in Sydney. It was in this house that we came to love the flora and fauna of Australia. Two sunbathing goannas, “Ricky and Lucy” enjoyed dipping in and out of our pool on long hot days. At dawn and dusk, we were serenaded by a riot of laughing kookaburras, a native tree kingfisher bird. Their trills and hoots were added to shrieking cockatoos and gregarious chirping lorikeets that loved to join us on our porch.
A curious lorikeet, Australia
Our garden was an English country garden with a tropical flair. Camellias in shades of light and deep pink intermingled with fragrant jasmine, gardenias, and Australian native Dendrobium orchids that spilled out of large terracotta pots tucked into a grove of bamboo and banana trees along our porch.
We fully embraced and immersed ourselves in the Australian culture and life. It did not take long for me to move from homemaker to account manager for an advertising firm. It was a great chance for me to experience business life firsthand from an Australian perspective. Within a short time, we adapted to the Australian lifestyle, working to live rather than living to work.
If I am honest, expat life was exciting and lonely at times. People often ask what it was like moving to a new country, leaving family and friends behind, and starting anew. I measured homesickness in degrees. The post box at our front steps was my lifeline to family and friends in America. I checked it every day for news from home, sometimes twice. It would be years before a computer entered our world with that static sound preceding “You’ve got mail.”
News from home waned as the years went by. Three years into our assignment I felt the distance acutely with the birth of our first son, Patrick. Our friends visited me in the hospital, back then, a week’s stay. The absence of family calling out excited congratulations as they entered the hospital room cooing “Isn’t he the most beautiful baby, he has his father’s nose” was noticeably felt. These are the moments you come to accept and live with as an expat. You learn to control the degrees of homesickness.
Life with baby settled into a new identity with motherhood, visiting baby nurses, playgroups, and new friends. Months later a conversation started around the possibility of returning to America. A new job was on the horizon for Mr. H and he was excited. The prospect of raising Patrick around family was equally exciting for me. In our fourth expat year, we said farewell to life in our little bungalow in the foothills of the Australian bush and celebrated Patrick’s first birthday with family in Connecticut in 1990.
Back to the USA
While Mr. H transitioned into a long commute and working life in New York City, I put on my homemaker hat and settled us into a new home, a four-bedroom wood-shingled ranch in a quiet neighborhood. What surprised me with this move was the degrees of homesickness I felt for Australia. It was totally unexpected. We had stepped out of time with family and friends, no longer in sync with their world. Finding a way back into the rhythm again was a process. A mindset.
Living two years in a country, the average expat assignment, was easy, roots are shallow. You make the best of your time, knowing you will move again. It was a waiting game. Every year after that, roots grow deeper and spread quickly. No matter how hard you dig, pull, and yank those long spidery tendrils, you know you will leave a little bit behind. It takes time to find balance again.
Home in Connecticut, painted by my friend, Sharon Kinney
Our daughters, Christine and Claire were born in 1991 and 1993 bringing us to a family of five. Three children close in age created a lively environment, one I remembered well from my childhood days as the oldest of six siblings. We eventually thrived and settled into life, moving again, not far away, into a bigger home, a five-bedroom 19th-century stucco New England house built in 1925 with window views to a historic church steeple. The church bells chimed every hour on the hour, comforting us as we marked time in a bucolic village. It was the scene of changing seasons, pink geraniums spilled out from pots on our front step in summer and brightly lit pumpkins dotted the brick walkway to hay stuffed scarecrows pitched against the dogwood tree on Halloween.
The property lot was nearly half an acre with blooming dogwoods, maple and oak trees, and gardens filled with established rhododendrons, azaleas, and daylilies. My visiting father and I were together again in the garden, planting and digging a mixed flower garden to remind me of Windswept’s secret garden. Our world aligned in perfect harmony for nine years: house, schools, family, work, and gardens.
And then it happened.
Standing by the kitchen counter, out of earshot from the kids, Mr. H said—“I had a call today from a recruiter.” My antennae were finely tuned. I stayed calm. I knew what was coming. His gaze diverted to the window and back to me. “A company in Australia would like to meet with me. What do you think about moving back to Australia? They want to fly us out next week for an interview”. This scene played out many more times over the years. Each time, I felt like Lucy Pevensie in The Narnia series. Not one, but two wardrobe doors stood side by side before me. One a deep rich wood with a lovely worn brass doorknob, waiting for my touch. If I chose that door, we would stay. The other door had an aura of mystery about it, glowing in soft light, as if to say “Pick me, I will offer you adventures as you have never seen before.” I thought of Lucy, I picked adventure.
We flew over to Sydney for the meeting and it all came back, it felt like home again. It happened so quickly. Within weeks, decisions were made and our children sat down for the first of many “family meetings” over the years. We shared the exciting news as they all sat eager-eyed looking at us. “Guess what?” we said. “We are going on an adventure, we are moving to Australia!”
Children are smart, they hear the words but they look deeply into your eyes and watch your body language to see if there is a hidden message. We projected a sincere excitement. Suddenly Claire blurted out with a deep sigh of exasperation- “AWWWW…Australia? Do we have to walk there? She plopped down to the ground like a child who had no intention of getting up again. “I don’t want to walk all the way to Australia!” We assured her she didn’t have to walk and would travel in an airplane. Patrick was excited to live in his birth country. Christine, the deep thinker of the family was not sure it was such a good idea. She would let us know.
If I thought telling our children we were moving was hard, it was even harder to tell family and friends. We were doing it again. “It will be two years tops, home before you know it.” I said. “We will be back next summer to visit, we will see you then!” This was my way of saying everything but goodbye. I hated letting go. I much prefer a wave and “see you next time.” There will always be a next time.
It was a frantic few months packing up and setting the wheels in motion to move to another country. Mr. H was already working in Australia. I turned to him for help. I had no choice but to assign him the responsibility of finding us a home. He was very enthusiastic “Sure, I can do that.” He said it would be a surprise.
It was the first of many surprises to come.
To be continued…
PS..speaking of surprises, if you would like a little POSTCARD SPRING FLING in your mailbox, reply below. I love sending postcards!
Claire, Patrick and Christine, Australia bound…1999
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Thank you for reading Part Two of
Landscape of Memory: The Expat Years
You can read Part One here. Look for Part Three next week.
If any thoughts come to mind, drop me a line! I always love hearing from you.
If you haven’t heard back from me yet, a reply is coming!
Take care and be well my friends,
Jeanne xx
