I am an Expat

The expat wife is dead. I killed her today. She’s been bugging me for a long time, and like a guilty secret it was time to face it and move on. She had to go.

She’d arrived in a moment of flippancy. I’d tapped her into existence on my keyboard thinking I’d return back with something better. It never came. I’d been unhappy with all of her alternatives. A trailing spouse? No, I’m not a trailer. A STAR (Spouses Travelling And Relocating Successfully) too corny, and I’m more than a spouse. Nothing seemed to fit. Why wasn’t there a better alternative? What would I call her?

I went old school, vintage if you like. I wrote a post about my life and the lives of many others and I called it, with a sense of irony, The Expat Wife.

And off she went. She was read over fifty thousand times and shared often. But her name continued to haunt me.

I stopped to grab a coffee the other day and ran into a male friend on his way to the office. There were a group of women over in a corner, they’d dropped their children at school and were meeting for a quick coffee. “What’s the collective name for a group of school Mums?” he asked with a tone which hinted towards mockery. I shrugged and smiled as I knew he wouldn’t have liked my answer.

Last week I met with friends, women I have met here in Doha. In the room were teachers, hairdressers, journalists, librarians and veterinary nurses. Some were new mothers with strollers parked behind them, others had been on the road for years and had sent children off to University. These are the women I write about every day. Women who bravely set foot on a plane ready to leave family and friends behind. Women who birthed in labour wards where another language was spoken in between contractions. Women who sat with children with broken limbs and escalating fevers in hospitals far from home. Women who created new businesses out of necessity. Women who study online and sit exams on foreign soil in between school drop offs and pick ups. Women who find themselves in a new country with a flat tyre, a trolley full of shopping, two children in the backseat and a husband in China.

What do you call them?

Women. Expat women. They are not expats with vaginas. Not expats who trail. They are the same as their male counterparts. It’s plain and simple, let’s not confuse it. You don’t require a penis to be an expat.

We are all expats.

I am an expat.

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Comments

  1. 🙂

  2. Oh hell yeah!

  3. Well said!

  4. Way to go!

  5. Amen!

  6. Well said, I started out as an expat, then became a wife… but I will always be me 🙂

  7. I Imagine you feel a lot better after getting that off your chest! AND I like it! Very well said!

  8. “You don’t require a penis to be an expat.” That may take a little getting used to for some. 🙂 I always went for Tai Tai. That’s what we were called in Shanghai. The men used to all say that in their next life they were going to come back as an expat wife. I think they should. Life may not be quite the party they think it is.

  9. I don’t live the expat life that you’re probably referring to, but I swear if I ever heard a man saying that I’d probably punch him. Most of the time it’s the guy who gets to go into the office and otherwise mix with humans; I don’t think they have a clue half the time….. (Steps down off soapbox…)

  10. I have always just called myself an expat, even though I’m here solely because of my husband. However, I did name my blog “Expat Mum” several years ago and always wonder if that was the right thing to do. Still, I am a mother and I often write about family life so,… oh well.

  11. I’ am an Expat, but when people ask me what I do…. I answer… my job is to make 4 people happy!!!!! where ever!

  12. 🙂

  13. Great post! When we recently moved from Istanbul to Warsaw, one of my husband’s colleagues asked how I liked being the trailing spouse. I had to restrain myself from punching him in the face! I was so angry. I do not trail. I am not a puppy pulling on the back of my husband’s pant legs.

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