Recently I was being interviewed for some potential media coverage on what it’s like to be a mother who is parenting abroad. In the process, I uncovered some long-forgotten tales of my adventures; mostly forgotten for their nightmarish quality that I wish never to re-live. Although in retrospect, they are actually quite funny. I recently saw Sarah Jessica Parker’s movie, “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” It was loaded with clichés that mostly made me cringe and then laugh out loud. I have my own fun-to-tell lice story with the added element of the living-abroad, foreign experience. I was asked by the interviewers if I had any “tips” for other parents doing the living/working abroad thing. It was difficult to think of my experience being anything that somebody could garner some lessons from. On further reflection though I have come up with some "tips" to share, none of which are full-proof guaranteed to make you the perfect parent, but at least “good enough” for getting my son safely and sanely past his 9th birthday while living abroad.
TIP #1: Life is an adventure, and it’s all about the journey, not the destination.
To live abroad, you have to become fully comfortable with unpredictability. There will be days that will give you premature grey hairs. There will be days when you really want to stay under the covers and pretend that you are in your bed 10,000 miles away in a place that you tell people is your “real home.” You don’t want to have to try to explain to your children what even you can’t understand. You don’t want to have to practice in your mind the correct way to say “eggs” to your friendly neighborhood grocer in the foreign language of your choice for the 1,000th time. You don’t want to be starred at. You don’t want to feel like an outsider. You don’t want to fight the insane traffic and let your children hear the string of swear words that come out of your mouth by another, near-miss accident. Whether your home abroad happens to be a relatively-cushy London or Tel Aviv or a more “hardship” posting of Dushanbe or Timbuktu, these will be your experiences at one moment or another. And so the adventure part is remembering why you’ve chosen this place abroad (hopefully because your heart is doing something it loves). And at our heart, and at our children’s heart, there is the thrill of the adventure – think of all those fairy tales and children’s movies we’ve seen in our lifetime and shared with our children. Sharing that sense of playfulness in your new home with your children will get you through the hair-pulling days when you wish you could be Dorothy, clicking your ruby slippers, asking to go home.
Along the same lines, I would also recommend not trying to replicate your “real home” in your new home. Oh yes, all of us, no matter what our age, will be thrilled to find those coveted Oreo cookies tucked away in our favorite grocer. Our children will jump up and down at the familiar sight that reminds them of home (even if you rarely allowed oreo cookies in your home). You will begun to salivate remembering what an Oreo tastes like dipped in cold milk. You will not think twice about paying $10 worth of local currency for this pack of cookie. You may even overlook the just-passed expiration date and pretend not to taste the staleness in those cookies. But what nobody will tell you is that by indulging in that taste of home away from home, thinking you can get “home” back through a package of whatever consumer item reminds you of home, you will have immediately set yourself up for failure. First, the kids may notice the staleness and start whining and complaining from the first bite. Or, you will be so happy to see their radiant faces, that you return to the store as quickly as humanly possible to buy more, only to discover that you were unlucky enough to buy the first packet from a once in a blue moon stock that made it into this random store 10,000 miles away from where the cookies were produced. And you will thus spend the rest of your stay in this country wondering over THAT mystery – how the box of cookies made into your grocer’s that one day.
After a 2-week vacation to the States where my son was fed baby carrots every day as a snack, when we returned to Ramallah he refused to eat “normal” carrots that I cut to resemble baby carrots, insisting they were in fact a very different item of produce from baby carrots. Don’t waste your time – get your kids psyched about hummus and nan bread and pad thai.
Tip # 2: Always give yourself and your family a
When I moved to Ramallah, my shipment arrived 6 weeks after I left the States. My son and I likened it to Christmas – we got to open up all these boxes and find our most treasured (stuffed animals) and practical (baking pans) that would make us feel comfortable in our “home away from home.” The next morning I woke at 5am in a panic with one thought running through my head, “Oh My Gosh, what have I done?! If I decide tomorrow I want to leave this place, I can’t pack a suitcase and go.” The relative permanency of my choice hit me like a brick. More unsettling was that I had this little being I was responsible for that also meant there would be no spur-of-the-moment decisions on where to go when. This certainly was not the same experience of my year working in Geneva, Switzerland as a single 20-something year old off to a new European city every weekend. Nope. Now there were school calendars to consider, and long term work plans, and stuffed animals (the items which have always given my son a sense of stability and comfort from a young age).
The “newness” of the adventure quickly wears thin when you walk through the door after work in those early months to hear your children complain that they don’t have any friends, that they hate their school, or that they don’t like how the streets smell. You may find yourself frustrated by all attempts to set up a new routine, only to have that interrupted by random local holidays that find you in front of the locked gate of the school door at 7:30 am on a Wednesday morning because you didn’t understand the local radio broadcast the night before announcing the “celebration of some war we lost centuries ago” holiday. You will feel inept at everything. Your children will mirror those feelings by also demonstrating their ineptitude to just “do as you ask.” The sixth month is the worst. You will start to consider the pros and cons of staying vs. going. You will wonder if a quick trip home will do the trick. You will wonder how you made your family completely unhappy with such a wrong choice that seemed like a great choice 6 months prior. And then, one day, early into the 7th month, you will wake up and everything will feel normal. Your children will not only go to school happy, but they will come home happy. You will learn how to say “egg” in the local language in a manner that can be understood by any native speaker at least 50% of the time.
I believe this little “tip” is quite golden – knowing this will save you the headaches of worry as you live through it. Unfortunately, this 6 month adjustment period is also necessary when repatriating.
Tip # 3: A reliable babysitter/childcare/house help is mandatory and the best one will not be the most experienced person you find.
Even when I wasn’t living abroad, I rarely needed or wanted to see a resume of the person I was hiring to look after my child. I used only one thing: my gut. Yes, word of mouth and recommendations from friends helped. But I know my child, and I know who he likes. If he didn’t like the person I hired, he would be miserable, and he would make the person’s life miserable. When I moved to Ramallah, I met many woman who came to me from references. Some interviewees would show up 30 minutes late, never having called to tell me they’d be late or apologize for being late. That spoke to me in volumes about a) how much they wanted to be there and b) how reliable they fail to be on a day to day basis. Other interviewees would walk through the door with a list of conditions, speaking to their most likely inability to be flexible when I would be most in need of it. And others would walk through the door declaring that they would make my son happy, without ever looking my son in the eyes or asking what it was that he liked. Some well-meaning colleagues suggested that I only consider women who were mothers themselves, overlooking the fact that not all mothers have the same parenting style, or that their priority would (as it should) always be for their own family, making me then not only accountable to the unpredictable needs and schedules of my own child, but to those of another’s family as well.
After a parade of “well experienced” candidates through our door who didn’t fit the bill for what I need it, I explained to my son that I was getting desperate and I really needed to work my 8 hour day uninterrupted. My son made one request: he wanted to have a vote, explaining that he too wanted to be comfortable with the choice. With much hesitation, I agreed to try to respect his wishes. The next phone call I received to an ad I had posted in a local listserv was from a young man. His first question in perfect English was, “Would you consider a male candidate?” He explained that he was a 4th year Chemistry student at BirZeit U whose real love was art, and to support his art, he needed money. He came from a family of 6 children, he was the oldest, and often looked after his younger brothers. Personally, I liked that a man would be interested in taking up a task that was traditionally seen as a “woman’s role” in Arab society and I thought a male influence around the house might be good for my son. We waited on the doorstep to meet Yousef. Directly at the appointed time, we saw him walking down the street. His long, curly hair was an odd site for this part of the world. My son turned to me and declared, “Mom, this is somebody I’m going to be comfortable with!” Sure enough, Yousef was hired as the sitter and was not only reliable for the entire year he was with us, but made every activity with my son full of creativity and fun.
Regardless of family size and working/non-working spouses, I believe reliability in a child care provider is the one of the most important qualities. I also believe it’s a necessity too when living abroad so that you go out and have your own adult-adventures in the place you’re trying to discover. It models to your child that it’s impossible for any human being to do everything alone. It lets them know that it’s really OK, if not good, to put your own needs first some time. And it introduces them to the fact that people do things differently than your parents, which is ultimately the world we are preparing them to live in.
Tip # 4: Never wear white when you have a child under 10
Both when living abroad or not - ‘Nuf said
Tip # 5: Put time and effort into building bonds and connections with other parents
Not only will they be the greatest resources in helping you find those random things like the “must-have” Halloween costume in a country that has never heard of this odd American holiday, they will be the ones who have your back when you need to find the best pediatrician in town at 3am and they will be a source of sanity when you start having nightmares about invisible lice jumping out of your child’s hair. They will be the sounding board when you think you’ve come up with the best idea in the world to navigate the local school system, only to realize that what you were about to do was culturally incorrect on too many levels to count. When you are beating yourself up for forgetting your child’s lunch because you were too busy picking out the right shade of lipstick for the meeting with the Prime Minister, they will ‘fess up to the actual number of times they’ve sent their children to school without lunches. They will be able to translate the school directives about the upcoming field trip, when you are convinced you misread that the children will be having lunch with goats. They will steer you away from the bad after-school centers and steer you into the good expat men willing to date single moms (ehem?). And they will be the ones who can appreciate your brag about your child successfully reciting a verse of the Koran in front of their religion class that you, yourself cannot read. Your friends from home will not be replaced, but these new friends will be irreplaceable.
Tip # 6: Yes, Friends will be your best friends….except when they’re not
I think it is Dr. Seuss’s “Oh the Places you’ll go” book that puts into lovely rhyme and reason the fact that everybody, in life, will be alone…sometimes quite a lot. And living abroad can sometimes feel like a very lonely and isolating experience. Nobody else will come to this place, wherever on the map that happens to be, with the same exact luggage. You will find that experiences you have and people you meet will touch you in a very powerful way – sometimes negatively, sometimes positively. You’ll try to communicate this to others, in healthy and unhealthy ways. They just won’t get it. Maybe they’ll be unforgiving, maybe they’ll be less than enthusiastic, and maybe it will just be impossible for them to understand the perspective that you have. And those friends and family you left on the other side of the ocean won’t quite get it either.
The only way to end a feeling is to start to feel. And loneliness is a feeling that will come and go in different degrees. Sometimes it will seem like a wave running through the family – first it will infect one member, then another, and then another. One of the best bits of parenting advice I ever received was that the purpose of parenting is not to make your child happy all the time, that will ultimately be an impossible task. The goal of parenting is to give your child the tools to adeptly deal with those times that life doesn’t bring all the happiness that we dream of. And so it is with loneliness. I think as parents when we are overseas with our children and feel the loneliness, it’s an opportunity to become very conscious as to how we’re approaching it. You can isolate yourself, dig yourself deep into a book, waste countless hours watching those so-called inspirational videos on Facebook, bake until every dish in your kitchen is dirty, or actually…one of the best remedies….just actually sit and share those feelings with your child. Listen to each other, talk to him/her about the feelings….just be a witness – you to his/her feelings, and him/her to your feelings. I found my son has an unlimited capacity for compassion at these moments. And it’s as good as any Oreo cookie(s) dipped in milk! My son has also come to know that one of my favorite activities at times like that is also sitting on the couch, snuggled under a blanket with him, watching “Pete’s Dragon” with a bowl of popcorn between us. Lonely, yes, but not alone.
Tip # 7: Learn to make promises with caveats
Nothing taught me better to not make promises to my child than living abroad. Before I moved abroad, I was a parent who was very eager to make promises to my child and then bend myself into a pretzel at 7am on a Sunday morning to fulfill it (ie, get into a car and drive 100 miles to a festival that was just “the” place to be that Sunday). When I make promises to my son, it’s because I want to know that he can trust me. Seeing him glow with happiness is a strong motivator as well! But sometimes strange, unforeseen events can happen in a foreign land – a sudden protest blocking a road, a nice dousing of tear gas by the IDF, or getting very lost on a road which is not on any map. At those times, there’s only one thing to do: surrender. I’ll turn around in the seat of the car to face my son in the back. “Look, I know I promised you {insert fun, once-in-a-lifetime activity}, but that unfortunately is not going to happen today…nor for the foreseeable future. But name anything else you’d like to do today and we’ll do it!” “Can we go to McDonalds?” (ugh) “Yes, we could, but it’s the Shabbat so it’s not open. Name something else.” “Can we go visit {insert name of best friend}?” “We could, but they’re out of town today.” “OK, let’s just go home” And an hour later, we’re sitting on the couch…watching “Pete’s Dragon.”
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