creating home Archives - DIARY OF A MOVE

Dealing with Expat Divorce – Part 3: Surviving the Breakup

In my two previous posts, I looked at why relationship breakups are harder on expats than on non-expats. One of the key reasons is that expats find it much more difficult to reconstruct “home.” In this post, I explore how expats can rebuild home after a breakup.

Imagine that you are living in a foreign country and your primary relationship has collapsed. You are heading for separation or divorce and desperately need support – both practical and emotional – but your family and friends are mostly far away. What do you do? Here are some survival strategies which help expats cope with the major challenges of relationship breakdown: coping with the initial shock, rebuilding home, and navigating the legal process in a foreign country.

Coping with the initial shock

While people differ widely in the pace and extent to which they recover from trauma, most experience the initial stages as a time of disbelief, dislocation and denial. Divorce – any divorce – is extremely hard. However, it is even more difficult and more dislocating in expat situations, for the reasons I mentioned previously. Nour, an inspiring Turkish divorcee I interviewed, described her experience as “an emotional boot camp.” Most expats going through divorce feel depressed, lost, overwhelmed. It is important to get through those initial stages of pure survival in order to start thinking about new beginnings. Another person I interviewed compared this stage to dealing with an injury: you need to apply pressure to stop the bleeding first, before you can start moving.

Identify a couple of “emotional anchors” – close friends or family – with whom you can connect a lot early on. Don’t hesitate to ask for help from them. One of my interviewees, David, said, “There can be a strong tendency to want to hide; you need to fight it. People close to you want to help, but they also want to respect your privacy. So If you don’t ask for help, you surely won’t get it.” Most of the people I talked to would not have made it without their friends’ practical and emotional support – but they had to ask.

Get expert help if you can afford it. Nour spoke of coping with the initial shock “I saw a therapist and worked with a life coach, among others.” Even if you can’t afford this sort of help, there are still resources. Nour told me: “I read a lot about divorce because it gave me the feeling that I’m not the only one, that I have nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of people not only don’t know what is out there, but they also don’t look.”

Strive to stay active. For instance, exercise is very important for one’s mood. Nour, again: “I did sports, even though I’m not a sporty person. I went to book groups and expat meetups.”

Rebuilding home

Once you have begun to recover your footing, you need to focus your energy on recreating home, consistent with what home means for you. As hard as it is to see the big
picture when you’re in the midst of something that feels like a Category Five hurricane, understanding your concept of home is crucial; it helps you concentrate your efforts on rebuilding the home you lost with divorce. Think of what you need to find home again, the resources you’d like to have, and search for what’s available.

If home is place, give your physical home a priority. Even if you don’t have to move out
of your home post-divorce, but especially if you do, you will need to make adjustments to your living space. If feeling at home in your physical environment is crucial for you, don’t postpone making those adjustments “until things settle.” Start as soon as possible. The comfort you get from your home will soothe you and make you feel more supported through a challenging process.

If home is a feeling that comes through rituals, focus your efforts on reviving your rituals or creating new ones. For instance, many family rituals may have to change post-divorce. It helps if you anticipate that and try to find new ones to replace them. See it as an opportunity to do something new. If you can only have family movie nights at home every other Friday (when you have the children), then maybe the other two Fridays of the month you can treat yourself to something you love, but weren’t able to do before – like actually go to a movie.

If home is people, focus your energy on rebuilding your circle of friends and support network. Find or build your new tribe. The importance of rebuilding one’s social network was a constant refrain in my interviews. Many people go into isolation mode during or after a breakup. For expats, this distancing may also come from their environment. Don’t cut yourself off – as much as it may feel you want to hide. Join an expat organization, a book club, the PTA. Talk to a friend, a neighbor, a colleague or another parent at your children’s school. Get on Skype more often and talk to your friends and family back home.

Tell your story. People will want to hear it and it will help you find a community.

Finally, many of the people I interviewed spoke of how the experience helped them find home within themselves. When you go through divorce, especially when you are away from the people you love, you are practically forced to find home within. Despite the many external disadvantages to dealing with divorce as an expat, there is an area where being an expat is an advantage: expat life equips us with a level of endurance and a mindset of adaptability that are invaluable in such situations. Michelle, an American expat divorcée told me, “Being an expat makes you incredibly resilient. Especially as partner, you are used to constantly reinventing and redefining yourself; and this is exactly what you have to do when your marriage breaks down. You have huge resources in you that can help you cope.”

Navigating the legal process

The biggest complaint I heard from the people I interviewed concerned the crippling lack of information on how the system works – the process of divorce, the parties’ legal rights, custody issues etc. – in any particular country. Language is a huge barrier: how do you get information on the legal framework that applies to your case and what your rights are if you don’t speak the local language?

The best option is to get a good local lawyer who speaks your language. However, hiring a lawyer can be incredibly expensive and, even in countries where there is state provided free legal information (in many European countries, for example, there are specialized websites or free legal consultation services), that information is usually in the local language. This can be a serious disadvantage and can also create an atmosphere of distrust if there’s an asymmetry in the parties’ access to information (i.e. if one party speaks the local language and the other does not).

If possible, find a friend or acquaintance who can help translate. Alternatively, there are
online articles, mostly in English and usually posted by attorneys, on family law in different countries or issues relevant to expatriates of specific nationalities (for instance, a lot for Brits divorcing outside the U.K.).

However the experience of the people I interviewed confirmed that none of that is enough. There is a real need for better resources to help divorcing expatriates cope with a life-changing process that will so profoundly shape their futures. In my next post, I will look at how such resources can be generated and ways for the community to help expats who go
through relationship breakdown get the practical and emotional support that they need.

This series of posts is based on a presentation I gave at the Families in Global Transition conference(FIGT16) in Amsterdam on March 12, 2016.

divorce, expat April 5, 2016

Dealing with Expat Divorce – Part 2: Why Home Matters

1 Comment

In my previous post, I looked at the reasons why breakups, divorce in particular, are different for expats than for non-expats. In this post I focus on a less obvious, but critical factor in why expats struggle during relationship breakups: the concept of home.

Many of the challenges that expats face when their relationships or marriages break down are similar to those that non-expats face: financial hardship, loss of relationships, emotional suffering. So on the surface, it might seem that expat divorce is just a variation on “regular” divorce. If one looks closer, however, some deeper issues emerge for why expat divorce is much harder. These concern how expats perceive home and how vulnerable they are when home is lost. Divorce essentially implies a loss of home. When that happens, the consequences for expats are much more dramatic.

Divorce is fundamentally harder for expats because they need to reconstruct home in a foreign environment, away from family, friends, familiar social and cultural structures.

What exactly is “home” and how does expat divorce affect it? In my research, I have
identified the concept of home as a central factor in influencing how expats adjust when they move. In particular, there are three ways most people experience home: home as place; home as people; and home as feeling. This framework is also helpful in understanding the challenges that expatriates face when their relationships fail and why
these challenges are different than the ones that non-expatriates face.

Knowing in advance which dimensions of home are most important helps expats cope better with divorce.

Home as Place

This is the traditional definition of home, where geography is the defining aspect. Home
can be your passport country; the city, town or village where you grew up; the neighborhood where you spent formative years and made lifelong friends; the house or apartment that features in your childhood memories; your childhood bedroom; or a landscape that speaks to your soul. There are places that make us feel rooted and connected in a visceral way, either because they hold powerful memories or because they remind us of places that do.

How does divorce affect expats whose concept of home is strongly rooted in place? By definition, people leave behind familiar physical locations when they take expat assignments. When relationships break down, the impact of being in unfamiliar places can hit very hard. The location and mobility issues associated with expat divorce are particularly challenging. When an expat marriage fails, questions of mobility become prominent. Do you have to move? Do you want to move and if yes, can you do so? Do you need permission to move? What about if you have kids – how does that change your desire or ability to move?

After a separation or divorce, some people may want to move – whether to leave the
memories behind or to start over – and when there are no children and custody issues involved, they do just that. Others may have to move even if they don’t want to. For many accompanying spouses, their homes, their children’s schools, but most important, their residence permits are linked to their partners’. After divorce, they may be
legally required to leave their place of residence. Some may want to move but, once children are involved, it gets complicated. For instance, when the parents have joint custody, one parent cannot move the kids from their place of residence without the consent of the other. So if you’re an American married to a German living in Germany and your ex doesn’t want to move, you are stuck in Germany, unless you can get sole custody. Even if your ex is also American, you still cannot move without permission. Finally, there are extreme cases where one of the partners can restrict the others’ mobility. In certain Middle-Eastern countries husbands can not only prevent their wives from moving or even traveling, but can also throw them out of their joint home and, worse, force them to give up their children. Many women stay in unhealthy marriages out of fear of losing their children.

Finances may also prevent expats from creating a physical home post-divorce. One person I interviewed was a Greek woman whose Swedish husband didn’t want to divorce and so refused to move out of their home. She had to move with no job, no savings and no safety net. Her ex refused to pay support and did not allow her to take anything from their home. She struggled to create a new home from scratch. She had no money for the down payment of the small apartment she found for herself and her two children. Thankfully, her friends rallied for her and raised that amount. While she wasn’t working before, she now had to work two jobs; still she didn’t have money to buy furniture. “At the beginning, I didn’t even have a mattress for my children to sleep on,” Maria told me. “Every month, I would buy one piece of IKEA furniture with the little money I would manage to save. It is a slow process, but it’s becoming home. Had this happened back home in Greece, I would have moved in with my parents, at least temporarily. I would have had a home immediately.”

After divorce, expats must define and rebuild a new Home as Place for themselves.

Home as People

This refers to our core relationships – our family, friends, our tribe – the people with whom we belong; the people with whom we can be ourselves. When an expat marriage breaks down, what relationships are lost and how does this affect expats’ sense of
home?

The relationships that constitute “home” narrow down when one chooses the expat lifestyle. For expats, who are far from extended family and long-time friends, home becomes the nuclear family, the family that moves with them. Divorce breaks up that nuclear family structure. It makes the more fragile set of relationships that represent home disappear. When you divorce, you lose a partner – whatever the qualities of that partner. When you divorce and have children, you often see your children less. This is common for any divorce; but for expats, losing the relational dimension of home is particularly brutal because often it has become the core dimension of home.

Home needs to be reconfigured and reinvented and one needs to adjust to that new configuration. When Tania’s husband moved out, her concept of home, which up to then had been centered around their nuclear family of five, had to change. There was a gap. Had they been back home, her extended family and friends would have immediately helped fill that gap. But they were not, so her children and she had to adjust to the new reality and the new structure for home, just the four of them together, just some of the time. They had to open themselves to new ways of being together and, like any change, that took time and effort and a shift in their way of thinking.

If your concept of home is deeply rooted in people, then their support – practical and emotional – is key. Your family and circle of friends can make a huge difference in how you fare through the divorce process. But they are often thousands of miles away, so local support networks become vital. In any divorce, however, you often end up losing part of your support network. Losing such networks can be devastating and rebuilding them is a huge challenge.

In expat divorce, whatever local social network you have begun to build up also gets disrupted. Usually you lose relationships as the result of inevitable changes in the way you socialize. If your social circle consisted mainly of friends with whom you interacted on a family-to-family basis, for example, that has to change. Now that it’s just you or you and your children, you may no longer be able to have the same social activities that you had as a “family.” Your configuration is different now and not everyone in your circle is comfortable with that.

You may also notice that some “friends” will “drop out.” People may feel they need to choose sides or attitudes towards you may change. Juliana, a Brazilian living in
Vienna, told me: “When I take my son to soccer practice, I notice that both the other moms and dads are looking at me differently now that they know I’m separated. It’s uncomfortable sometimes.” Whether it’s embarrassment or social awkwardness, divorce is a taboo subject, especially in expat circles. There seems to be a fear of “contagion,” which, even if not rational, may result in you feeling distanced by your network.

These losses are normal when one goes through divorce, but for expats, especially for those for whom people are a large – if not the largest – part of home, such losses are much more devastating.

Home as Feeling

This dimension refers to the feelings that home evokes, such as belonging, safety, comfort, familiarity, authenticity, love. What challenges does divorce raise for expats’ emotional home? When a core relationship breaks down, different aspects of your life and identity are affected and this, in turn, influences how secure, comfortable and at home you feel.

To start, divorce has an impact on your professional identity and feelings of competence and self-sufficiency. For expat partners, whether male or female, who have most likely either given up their career or put it on hold in order to follow their partner abroad, this is a serious challenge. In most cases divorce implies that, if you are not in the job market, you will need to get back in it. So, in addition to trying to get your life together, you have to consider questions such as: How employable are you? How long have you been away from the job market? Are you even eligible for a work permit or visa in the country where you live?

More generally, there are often gender differences in how expatriates cope with divorce, especially when it comes to professional identity. For most men, that aspect of their identity remains intact post-divorce. There is a sense of comfort that is rooted in professional identity and men seem to have that anchor more than women. The majority of expat men going through divorce state that focusing on work helps them cope with the emotional downside of the breakup. By contrast, most expat women, who are much more likely to have sacrificed their professional identity as a result of expatriation, don’t have that resource to fall back on.

Another gender difference in the aftermath of divorce is the fact that women often may have a harder time getting back to work depending on the country they live in, especially if they have children. For instance, in Switzerland, childcare costs, especially for pre-Kindergarten ages, are very high, even relative to the higher salaries. Also, Switzerland lags far behind other OECD countries in terms of providing equal professional opportunities for women compared to men. All that makes being a working mom in Switzerland a challenge – even more so for a working single mom.

In addition, different cultures have different expectations from mothers. Staying at home and taking care of the children for several years may be the cultural norm in one country but unacceptable in another. This has an impact on how family dynamics evolve upon expatriation. Juliana, the Brazilian mother of two living in Vienna, told me: “In Brazil, being a stay-at-home mom is not well regarded. Had we stayed there instead of moving to Europe, I would have focused more on my career, which now would be at completely different level. I would not have become so dependent financially on my husband.”

Financial dependence is another key issue that is linked to the feeling of competence associated with professional identity.

Expatriation is disempowering for accompanying partners, especially because it leads to a transformation of couple dynamics: it often creates a dependence relationship that can turn out to be catastrophic. This dependence happens gradually and very subtly. It is only exposed if and when the marriage starts going south, and many partners start feeling trapped – financially, emotionally, physically.

I hope it is becoming clear that the consequences of divorce for expats are particularly devastating because they involve the loss of home at very deep levels. Sometimes the consequences are so scary that partners prefer to stay in unhealthy or abusive relationships rather than leave.

In my next article in this series, I will look at how expats can rebuild home after a
breakup.

This series of posts is based on a presentation I gave at the Families in Global Transition conference(FIGT16) in Amsterdam on March 12, 2016.

expat, home, transition October 28, 2014

Moving and that irritating neutral zone

1 Comment

In my last blog post, I wrote about being in transition – how I have often used it as an excuse to avoid making decisions and moving on with my life. Given that there will always be some aspect of our life that is temporary or uncertain, I argued, we should not use transition as a pretext for putting life on hold and staying in a “neutral zone” forever. Even though it feels like I wrote it yesterday, that post was six months ago. That’s how long it took me to emerge from the neutral zone of my latest move.

Moving is as transitional as it gets. The hardest part about moving, for me, is not the work involved in packing and unpacking our whole existence, with all the associated crises and catastrophes, big and small. My biggest challenge is making it through that nerve-wracking phase of constantly searching for stuff. You know, the weeks (or months) after you have moved into a new place, when you cannot find anything – or rather, you can find things, but not the things you need and definitely not when you need them. The time it takes for you to get used to where everything belongs, including yourself, that’s the neutral zone between leaving one home and creating another.

Moves sometimes are like black holes that make our lives, as we know them, disappear – thankfully not forever. That irritating searching phase is only one way in which that happens. How do people deal with that? Is there a way to shorten the neutral zone and not feel like the move is taking over our existence, forcing us to put everything on hold? I have been thinking a lot about these questions because for the past six months, I have
missed doing things that I love – including writing. Creating a new home, even with existing “material,” is exciting and inspiring; and it is all consuming. Everything else tends to be relegated to second, third, fourth place, joining a long list of things one will do “when settled.” But that takes a very long time. Half a year is a very long time to put everything on hold.

Every move has been a learning experience and
this one has taught me that it’s important not to fully immerse, thinking that it will speed up the process. It’s worth more to allow myself to keep doing what I am passionate about – even if it is in small installments; to find the time and space to engage with what energizes and motivates me; to not have my life on hold, even if only for a few minutes every day. Remaining connected to the part of me that functions and creates outside the move gives me the strength and inspiration to put together the perfect home. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

I’d love to know – does a move take over your life and how do you cope with that?

expat, family, home, transition June 21, 2013

Closing doors

Add Comment

When one door closes, another opens…right? I hadn’t known that the famous quote from Alexander Graham Bell goes on to add: “…but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

Being able to close some doors and open others, to look ahead and not back should be key skills to have when one leads the nomadic life. Isn’t that a large part of what we do when we move constantly from one place to the next – dismantle our existence and
rebuild it, in a slightly different way, somewhere else; close one door and open another?

Does this mean that all of us who choose the mobile life have what it takes – namely the ability to let go and move on in absolute smoothness? Is there hope for those of us who are not naturals and find it extremely difficult to close doors – despite being excited about the ones that open? Even though we do get better at it with every move, it is always hard. And painful. Sometimes heart-breaking.

It helps not to see it in absolute terms. Yes, we should be getting better at closing doors, but we don’t need to close them all the way. We should be developing our proficiency to
bravely and skilfully move on to a new life, but there are elements of our previous life that have become part of our identity and make us who we are. We don’t close the door to those the same way that we don’t close the door to the people from our various past lives. That makes it easier – at least when you are an adult and can reason that way.

It’s different for kids. They see things in much more absolute terms. They don’t think in terms of the big picture.

When we left Vienna last summer, we were not sure how long we would be away, so we asked the schools to “reserve” spots for our children for
another year, in case we came back. That year has passed and yesterday we had to officially give up those places. As happy as I am with our new life here and all the new doors that it has opened, it still felt strange to close the last “old” door that was still open.

I’m not sure how the children will react when we tell them. They could see this as a sign of stability in their new life; less uncertainty. But it could also be that, in the back of their mind, those reserved spots were a silent promise that they could always go back; a secret outlet for when they were not too happy with their life here. Do we take away that outlet? Or do we wait until the excitement about the new doors becomes more powerful than the regret about the ones that are now closed? Even if, in the grand scheme of things, they are not really closed.

expat, home, transition May 31, 2013

It’s raining outside but I don’t care

2 Comments

There must be something wrong with me.

The only word that can capture perfectly what goes on outside my window right now is: yuck. This feels like the chilliest, wettest, stormiest, most miserable November I have ever experienced – in May. After over a month of consistently rainy and cold weather, everyone around me is at the end of their wits – not just the foreigners, but also the Swiss, who, I thought, should be familiar with this kind of weather (turns out that many of them are not, since this is the worst May in thirty years). The weather has been part of every single conversation around me for weeks now.

So there must be something wrong with me, because it hasn’t gotten to me yet. The fact
that the probability of rain is 90% throughout the day today and the temperature in the single digits leaves me untouched. Though I do feel bad for the kids not being able to take advantage of our garden or the so many wonderful outdoor activities this city has to offer, personally, I don’t mind. To say that this is highly unusual for me would be an understatement.

I may have mentioned, a while ago, a (mild) addiction I have to Japanese matcha green tea. When we left Vienna, one of the things I knew I would miss the most was my daily ritual of walking over to my little neighborhood Japanese café and ordering my matcha
latte – or rather, not even ordering any more, since they would know what to start preparing as soon as I walked in the door. I knew there was no such thing in Zurich. For months, I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to find something similar, until a couple of days ago, when I walked into another favourite café and had something that tasted exactly like my favourite drink. My eyes lit up. Could this be a sign that I’m almost there? It’s funny how something so little and so trivial can mean so much. Yet, aren’t sensory experiences, like tastes and smells, closely linked to our emotions? If a matcha that tastes “just right” makes me feel at home, that’s not trivial, at least not to me.

So at the nine-month mark, I am starting to feel at home here. And with home, like with friends, you have to take the whole package: the good and the less good. You learn (and like) to live with both. That’s why I don’t mind the weather.

I also don’t mind it because – if one excludes its depressing quality, which I have already moved beyond – it is perfect weather for writing. I love being able to concentrate on my work without being tempted, constantly, to go for a walk or a bike ride or an ice cream along the lake by a glorious sun shining on my beautiful surroundings (I know, I’m strange). As long as I can hear the birds – and it seems that most of them didn’t get the memo and are, stunningly, still tweeting away every morning, even under the pouring rain – like them, I will keep pretending that spring has come.

Does the weather get to you?

If you are in the same
corner of the world as I am – or even if you’re not – here’s a little something to make your day.