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TRAILING

“We possess nothing in the world—a mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say ‘I’”

—SIMONE WEIL

I LIKE TO fly. Space and time dissipate with the vapor trail. Bubble-wrapped solitude, headphones, and a book. Deliciously detached. One weekend I flew from Chicago to London to celebrate a family wedding. Eight hours without commitment. The weightlessness of traveling in silvery air, floating without my mother-wife carapace.

The pilot announced our flight path “across” to London. I’ve always thought of going “up” to London, after flying so many times there from my native land, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Why do we still call the South Pacific down and Europe up? On a globe, a mapmaker positions north and south, but Earth’s spin renders arbitrary these irrefutable points. Ancients knew better than to settle into the simplicity of up and down: the Roman goddess Fortuna, “she who revolves around the year,” rattled mortals on her wheel of providence. Knowing that today’s luck could be tomorrow’s fall kept humans aware of life’s mutability.

My own life flipped topsy-turvy when I moved from the Southern Hemisphere to America in 2001. My personal coordinates seemed knocked off-kilter, the solid self I thought I possessed became unformed. For a while I cleaved to London as kind of a nest. My eldest sister and her family lived there, my only family in this hemisphere. I’d spent three years living there in my twenties and had visited many times since. London’s muted pigeon-gray light, its drizzle, and pink brick became familiar beauty. So it became “across,” a half-way house, until slowly, imperceptibly, incrementally, Chicago became “home,” and I transferred my allegiance to wide pavements, big blue skies, yellow and red brick.

On the plane, as it creaked and swayed up through the cumuli, a loud voice sliced through my thoughts. “Hey, I’m Lisa.” A willowy woman in yoga pants folded herself into an improbable lotus position on the seat next to me. She thrust out a hand. “Are you on business or pleasure?” Taking her hand, I removed my headphones. Lisa’s husband had a job in London and wanted to explore Europe for a few years. She was joining him for a two-week reconnoiter of the city. Should she move there? The blue skies of Colorado versus grey clouds. Giving up her jobs: child psychologist and yoga teacher. All those years of education—for what? Uncertainty, an unfamiliar culture. What should she do?

It posed a dilemma for her, as it had for me. As it still does for me, years later. I don’t know who coined the term “trailing spouse,” as if one were a piece of loose yarn, waiting to be snipped from a carpet. Around two hundred million people wind about the world for work—highly educated expatriates seeking advancement or shelter from economic storms. One half of a couple chases a job or a promotion and the other half—usually a woman—“trails.” Negotiations between partners are delicate. Careers get juggled, re-balanced, dismantled, broken. There are other issues to consider: children’s educations and friendships, aging parents in need of care, property to look after. It’s complicated. The winners and losers on Fortuna’s Wheel cannot be predicted.

I FIRST FLEW into Chicago during February of 2001. An arctic blast was blowing off Lake Michigan. My heart felt sluggish, pumping icy blood so slowly that I feared my feet and hands would never thaw. The city was bleak, monochrome—not a blade of grass or a leaf to be seen, no break in the clouds, no relief from the slicing wind in my face as I bowed my head and struggled up Wabash Avenue. My husband was interviewing for a position leading a cinema school, a rare job suited to his industry and academic inclinations. Handing over our sons, ages one and seven, to a nanny for their first overnight without us, we left a Southern Hemisphere summer, balmy Auckland, my job and an office view of the Waitemata “sparkling waters.” I thought there was no way—no way—that I would move if he got an offer.

A remote chance, really.

We didn’t write a pro and cons list, negotiate, or think of scenarios in the future. It happened in a shimmer, between me working as a public relations executive, organizing a dump truck-themed second birthday party for my younger boy, and taking my older boy to swimming lessons and rugby practice. Sometimes life seems to happen around you, and like looking into a wobbly mirror, you can’t be sure of what you see.

GETTING SUCKED INTO my husband’s orbit was a possibility that worried me. He made television shows and films, music videos and plays, played the guitar and read five books a week. I advised clients in a media and communications agency and wrote magazine features on the side. He drove our youngest child to daycare. I led the older son’s “walking bus” to elementary school. At seven o’clock, we’d careen back into our bungalow to share the routine of dinner-bath-bed.

Our blooming existed partly because I was not financially dependent on my husband. New Zealand is, or was then, a social democracy with taxpayer-funded support for mothers and babies, subsidized early childhood education, and generous vacation and sick leave, which enabled me to work and have children with relative ease. Work gave me an intellectual high—a friction of deadlines, ideas, and power. It also provided a six-figure salary.

My mother was a single parent. The loss of her husband and the death of her parents when she was a child made my mother poor. Being without, and the accompanying lack of freedom and opportunity, made me nervous. Like Virginia Woolf, I thought about “the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and the insecurity of the other.”

On the counsel of a financial advisor, I had opened multiple bank accounts, saved for a house, set up investments, bought a house, and paid the mortgage as fast as possible. I’d gone to university and built my career to avoid dependence. In agreeing to move to a new country, I assumed my career would continue. Changing our carefully balanced arrangement made me uncertain, but I thought we’d adapt. Times had changed since Woolf wrote of the patriarchy and the dominance of the professor: “His was the money and the power and the influence.” Hadn’t they?

We took a risk when we got together, trusting our instincts that it was right even though we’d just left other relationships, working against our friends’ six-month-wait rule before leaping afresh. In our first year, we moved in together, had a son, married, and bought a house—in that order. The first lawnmower and barbecue arrived when my husband turned forty. Life was settling down for us: we’d just “done” our bathroom and kitchen. Our firstborn was settled in school. Our second son had progressed from the Babies’ Cottage to the Big House at daycare. I’d been promoted to director at work. The circus of career, family, and friends was holding together.

A bit more time to revel in the feeling of life-doesn’t-get-better-than-this would have been great—so I told my boss, just days before my husband was offered his new job. Work and family had begun to feel less like a reckless teeter-totter and more like a tentatively balanced tightrope act, quivering somewhat, but balanced. Such simple pleasures were not to be taken for granted. Perversely, we were compelled to kick start the momentum.

MY SENSE OF adventure overrode any qualms in the five months since our first trip to Chicago. Bone-eating cold—forgotten. We had both traveled and worked around the world, but not often together and not with our kids in tow. He had worked extensively in America, but New York and L.A. were the only cities I had visited. (My television cop show-informed view of the country was deficient, I knew.) I was not really a stand-by-your-man kind of woman, ready to drop my own job and friends in a flash, but I was proud of my husband’s win. The whirl caught me. “Risk! Risk anything!” wrote my countrywoman Katherine Mansfield. “Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” How can we know what is hard until we are in the pain of it? And once there, how do we confront the truth?

A FEW MONTHS later I cleared my desk, left my office, and cried at going away parties. My colleagues gave me a Barbie doll outfit, a recipe for apple pie, a poem, and a parody of The Addams Family theme song:

She is a real lady, with hair so sleek and shiny

A dazzler for us every day, that’s Toni Nealie

A wonderful wife and colleague, a mother and good friend indeed

We all do truly love her, that’s Toni Nealie

DIVIDING OUR HOUSEHOLD belongings between a dumpster and cardboard packing boxes, we culled our possessions as we ran one room ahead of the professional packers. Husband’s vinyl collection? Dumpster. (We did not know that years later my husband would purchase a vintage record player and spend years re-creating his vinyl collection in our Chicago basement.)

Bed our youngest child was born in? Pack.

Memorabilia from travels: Nepali prayer wheel, South African bottle cap sculpture of a camera operator, jacket embroidered with cowry shells and Pacific motifs? Dumpster.

A hundred boxes of novels and art books? A hundred thousand tiny pirates, soldiers, dinosaurs, stacking blocks, farmyard animals, and Legos? Pacifica paintings? A green plastic salad spinner, albums of photos featuring my children’s first steps and first hospital trips, the blue glass fruit bowl Nic and Verity gave us for our wedding, my mother’s old pewter vase engraved with a couple kissing before a windmill, vintage bone-handled silverware, Italian plates purchased on vacation? Electrical appliances? We didn’t stop to realize that they would not work on American voltage. We hauled out the banal and the cherished alike. Pack. Pack. Pack.

The plastic corseted torso I wore as Dolly Parton to a fancy dress party? (I don’t recall saying “pack,” but it crossed the Pacific in a shipping container.)

Mosaic pot with a heart pattern that a friend made for our wedding? That we chose to store with a friend, for the time being, until our return from this “sabbatical.” My husband had secured a three-year contract. We would return. I knew that.

THEN, OUR FAMILY flew over the oceans, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, the Equator, the Tropic of Cancer, the South Pacific, the North Pacific, continental America. We sped over the International Date Line and through seven time zones. In flight, there is no regard for the logic of hours, but I would soon discover the tyranny of clock-watching when desperately wanting to talk to my mother, waiting until three in the afternoon for her to wake up seventeen hours ahead of me. Twenty-four hours after departure, a white limo whisked us to Oak Park, Illinois—then got lost. It seemed that we had fallen into the mean streets of a television drama. The night was inky: no moon or stars visible, no lamplight penetrating the thick canopy of trees along the Des Plaines River Road from O’Hare Airport.

Poring over a map, my husband directed the driver. I peered nervously into the dark, searching for gunmen hiding behind the oaks. The driver ignored a detour, driving through a mile of roadwork on Lake Street. She woke the kids, crashing into a road barrier and taking out several traffic cones. We arrived in front of our temporary apartment tower, the orange cones still jammed under the limo’s bumper. Where in hell were we?

Oak Park, just across Chicago’s city limits, had the fine prairie homes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Victorian Painted Ladies, elm and oak-lined avenues, and the wide, grassy sidewalks that Ernest Hemingway wrote about with disdain. No nukes, no guns, gays welcome, diversity celebrated—or so we read on the Chamber of Commerce website. Two days later, we headed into the city to explore the Field Museum. Outside the Roosevelt El station was a police stakeout. Helicopters. Roadblocks. A real hostage scenario. This was no television cop drama. We had arrived in America.

All too soon, my husband and second-grader vanished into the secrets of their important work and school days, where they formed fresh relationships and learned new routines. The small human and I were left to get to know our new home. I spent hours staring at shelves of Tide and Purex, o.b. tampons, and Edy’s ice cream, searching for a familiar name.

This was a type of aloneness I had never encountered. No familiar friends to talk to, no colleagues, no meetings to rush to. My husband, who used to meet me for lunch or coffee during our working days, was consumed by his new position. I felt abandoned, by all but my toddler. A limpet, he clung to my leg even when I went to the toilet. This was new. He used to be an independent little boy. Now I always had an appendage attached. We spent hours together—at home painting, playing with fire trucks and reading Hop on Pop, listening to story time at the library, playing at the tot lot, walking the streets searching for a face that could become familiar. He was too young to hold a conversation and he napped every day. Never before had I so many hours without another adult.

On my birthday, I jammed into a Victoria’s Secret fitting room trying on lingerie along with my all-male audience, husband and sons, cheering me on. There were no grandmothers, aunties, neighbors, nor babysitters. In this new life, I set up play dates with moms in a playgroup. The “play date” was new to me. In my old life, friends dropped in unannounced for a cup of tea or called to arrange a beach trip the next day. Now, mothers on the school playground pulled out their organizers to schedule meetings, often a week or a month in advance. We gathered in kitchens that had granite countertops and appliances hidden behind wood paneling. These were middle-class homes that were bigger and fancier and tidier than my friends’ homes in New Zealand. They had mud rooms and multiple bathrooms and more plastic toys than I had seen outside of toy shops. We drank drip coffee and watched our small children tussle over dinosaurs and spaceships. At school PTO meetings, I recorded minutes about whiteboard fundraisers and new playground equipment. I did the splits in mom-and-toddler gym ’n’ swim classes, conquered Play-Doh and hand painting, and learned to make cupcakes.

SPLITTING, SPLINTERING, LOSING my adherence to secure friendships, to identity, to self-purpose. “It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality,” wrote Simone Weil. When you move away from everything you know, your reality falls away around you. The detachment, the severing, makes the illusion of it all painfully clear. I don’t understand why anyone would seek to be detached, to aspire to see the illusion. Which images faded first? My terraced garden, with its tall plumes of bamboo and birds singing in the flax bushes. Moonlight streaking the magnolia blooms. The camellia tree under which we buried my youngest son’s placenta, to root him in the land. Dear friends, whose children would grow up without my gaze. My son and his pal Eric rolling down the grassy hill in Grey Lynn Park. The drive to work past mangroves and sailboats. Colleagues. Work tasks. Lunching with my favorite client Robyn in a courtyard café. She died of breast cancer several years after I moved.

It becomes harder to summon these realities in any tangible way. They are streaky memories, sometimes defined, at other times receding, blurred, wavering.

ALL THE SELVES I had constructed unraveled like an unfastened bandage. Attributes that I thought were fundamental to my being had vanished. I was no one’s friend, employee, countrywoman. I was not even a citizen. My familiar identities were oceans away. I grieved for what I had mistaken for self. When the bank manager opening our account wrote down “homemaker” as my occupation, I burst into tears. I gnawed the inside of my cheek. Tendrils of my hair fell out, blocking the shower drain and curling across the floor. My self-image as an independent woman faded.

The bureaucratic landscape changed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. New policies prevented me from getting a driver’s license. The offer of a political speechwriting job slid away because I was unable to get work authorization, despite having a visa to work. Was I sentenced to a life of molding Play-Doh warriors and stringing macaroni necklaces? I left the country a few times—Christmas in London with family, a visit to my son’s godmother in Amsterdam, a trip home—and it was always a relief to let my guard down with people who knew me. But that joy and ease was shredded upon my return, when I was hustled through passport control and sometimes into the secondary room for interviewing. My ethnicity, race, and nationality were scrutinized in a way I had not previously experienced. It seemed that I had erred, but I didn’t know what my crime was. I felt powerless. Resentment glowed inside me, a line of hot lava under smooth black rock. No travel books or relocation advisors could have alerted me to these possibilities.

THE BAY WINDOW of our second-floor apartment looked onto a quiet street with ornate Queen Anne houses and not much traffic. The morning would start with a glimpse of the woman who jogged around our block so slowly we called her the “sloth lady.” Then I would walk my schoolboy to his class, with the toddler in his stroller. Then to Whole Foods for meatballs, bananas, potatoes, carrots, peas, and fish sticks. I’d trudge a mile home with grocery bags hanging off the stroller. After that, make the beds. Unload the dishwasher. Cart the boys’ dirty t-shirts, jeans, socks down narrow back stairs to basement. Start laundry. Make sandwiches for lunch. Cut off crusts. Finger paint. Nap. Race to school to fetch my older son. Watch kids on swings in playground. Walk home. Supervise homework. Hustle down to the basement. Put laundry in dryer. Cook the meatballs. Serve children. Clean kitchen. Pick up dirty socks. Run bath. Yell at boys for sloshing water onto floor, where it threatened to seep into our landlord’s apartment. Watch teeth cleaning. Find youngest son’s blankie. Read The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate. Turn on going-to-sleep-music—Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Light at Dawn. Dim lights. Go to bed. Get up. Repeat.

EACH DAY I longed for the hour when my husband would return, another adult, familiar, who understood me.

EXCEPT HE DIDN’T, really. Our lives ran on different tracks. His world was expansive, full of novelty, films, filmmakers, and frequent travel. I had no stories to tell. My voice was stuck in my throat. I had expected an adventure, but this was an indentured mess of diapers, fish sticks and chicken nuggets, nose-wiping and whining, the latter mainly mine. How had I become caught in this trap?

“SUBURBAN NEUROSIS” was a term first used in the 1930s and popularized in the 1950s. It described the anxiety and sadness of women who moved from cities to tract housing developments on the edges of towns and fields. When women moved far from their mothers, extended families and local support networks of neighbors, they lost their babysitters and sense of community. They raised their children alone while their husbands worked. Isolated women with “new town blues” became weepy, lonely, and bored. Housework becomes drudgery when you do it alone, when it is the focus of your day.

When I complained about not coping, my husband, in a moment of exasperation, asked, “What do you expect me to do about it?” He advised me to be patient. Used to meeting daily work deadlines, I was accustomed to more immediate gratification. Part of me could have traded in the kids and spouse for a new pair of boots—the walking kind. Unlike me, he planned his projects years in advance, and read and wrote meticulously with no obvious end in sight. He probably wondered why he’d flown over the ocean with a hothead.

Magda was my first friend. Polish by nationality, she relocated from Amsterdam with her Dutch husband and their two young children a week before me. We met by chance on the street outside our apartment. Her daughter’s colorful tricycle caught my eye. Her son needed a diaper change, so I invited her in. Days later, when the planes careened into the Twin Towers, my family gathered at her house. Strangers in a new land, we mourned without our wider families, trying to make sense of a changing world.

Some days, we cooked meatballs together for early dinners with the children before the men came home. We shivered together on the playground as the weather cooled and the leaves turned brown. Because of post-9/11 security issues and my failed quest for a driver’s license, Magda gathered the kids and me in her Honda to shop and go to the park. Friendship stopped me from breaking.

At a party, I overheard my husband tell our new friends that he wanted to stay. I threatened to leave. Divorce had not been in my vocabulary, but lo, there it was, hurling across the room in front of crying children, too late to be scooped back. What had been posed as a sabbatical was now of indeterminate duration, perhaps forever, and I felt pathetically unmoored from all I had known and all that I had been.

I simmered. His life, expanding. My life, shrinking. His: the city, the world. Mine: the suburbs, pre-school, elementary school. Him: a calm house after a stimulating day full of people. Me: small, grubby hands, and loneliness pressing in. He told me I was doing a great job, but I didn’t value my role, so his praise felt pointless. Unlike my mother, who felt that her mothering role was pivotal, I did not prize my position. Churlish, perhaps. Some women I knew would have traded their jobs to be at home with their kids. Some women said I was lucky. But this was not my choice; I was a woman who had grown up aware of the power of my own agency.

What does this say about how we divide our labor, that even I diminished the work of full-time parenting? My husband advanced his career, got paid, and gained recognition, while I learned what it means to be just a mother. Every time I visited our doctor, dentist, or ophthalmologist, they asked what he was doing. This is how a woman becomes invisible.

I MISSED MY homeland: the nikau palm outside my window, tui birds on the flax blooms chiming their bell notes to each other at dusk, the volcanic Rangitoto hugging the entrance to Waitemata Harbor, the hibiscus tree behind my kitchen, the ozone smell of the Pacific pounding on the east coast, how sunlight reflecting on the shiny karaka leaves made my eyes crinkle in the brightness. In my nostalgic dreams of New Zealand, there were no traffic jams, difficult clients, timesheets to update, monthly invoices to file, or sick kids that came to work so Mom didn’t miss a meeting.

Job contracts don’t have a fine print section warning of loss, missing, craving, dissolving, drowning. Relocation guides concentrate on making lists, how to deal with movers, how to find schools, where to have lunch and shop, and which appliances won’t work in your new country. Those books, which I didn’t think to look at until after we’d moved, couldn’t help me. Now there are websites, blogs, and social networks dedicated to expatriates and their spouses, addressing cultural barriers and the “expat blues.” Today I read an article posted on a site for Internations, a club of almost two million people. It said I could find balance in my transition by paying attention to the five fundamental aspects in life: health (earth), relationships (water), motivation (fire), reflection (air), and intention (ether). Ha! If only I had known. I did not find my balance for a long time.

THERE ARE MILLIONS of trailing spouses, drifting from Poland to Dubai, Britain to Australia, Jordan to France, the Netherlands to Indonesia, New Zealand to the U.S.A., with or without children, with or without common language, with or without relocation expense accounts and repatriation agreements. Books and blogs can’t really tell you how to chart your emotional terrain, how to circumnavigate the currents of loss and longing. They don’t tell you that you might gain twenty pounds, about the babies born, the friends who get breast cancer, the children who grow up and graduate, the family members who die, the boss who moves away, the divorces, the second marriages, the mourning and celebration, the trivia and change, all while you are away. No, these are waters you have to map yourself. “I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning,” wrote the poet Stevie Smith. Hopefully, the shore holds firm.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE way in my new life, I righted myself. My thinking shifted. My husband was right about patience, although for a while I begrudged him a wisdom not earned in the trenches of suburbia. My little piece of thread was snipped from a social tapestry that had taken many phone calls and cups of tea to create in my former life. My weft is still firmly knotted in there, but slowly over the years, I’ve woven myself into a new community and stitched my children in safely.

Am I the same person I was? I don’t think so. It becomes harder to go back to my homeland because life has moved on there. My sister moved to Britain forty years ago. As her children grew into adults and had their own families, she became more embedded in British culture. As some choices widen, others narrow. As her world expanded through travel and career choices, so the option of return diminished, like some inviolate law of economics explained with graphs and laser points, but rarely understood.

I didn’t initially think about our children’s education, as second-culture kids raised away from extended family and the culture they were born into. I didn’t think of our future, any future. In my mind I was perennially twenty-seven, with no vision of my husband and I getting older. Along the way, the suspended reality of living in another country had worn off. I know now: this is our life.

I have learned to be resilient without a familiar structure. Act for myself? Face the truth? Risk, risk everything? Who I thought I was, wasn’t the entire me. Turns out, I am less of a risk taker, less adaptable than assumed. More needy, less independent. Vulnerable to Fortuna’s wheel and the vagaries of change.

Our internal worlds are as uncertain and changing as the world around us. I understand that now. We may think we are our jobs, our houses, our countries, our families, our cars, and our purses, even. When that’s stripped away, we are left with seams patched to the best of our ability and a few wayward tufts—strands never quite smoothed.