Traveling (and living) for two

When I was still traveling the world on business as the Expat Expert, I would be so exhausted at the end of long working days of lecturing, answering questions and handing out reassurance like the Candy Lady, that I would often soak in my hotel bath tub and sob like there was no tomorrow.

I probably just wished there would not be another tomorrow, listening and absorbing the heart-breaking stories of dysfunctional expatriate families that women shared with me.

There were (and still are!) many happy experiences of living abroad, but for some reason, it just took one look at my face and expat women generally felt like they were talking to their therapist, a best friend, or maybe their mother. They would unload too much information about their unhappy lives into my bottomless basket of empathy. By the time my day ended, that basket would be full of their tears with just enough room for me to add my own.

It might have just been jet lag, menopause, or a combination of both. Hormone supplements do not travel well.

So, how do I explain the weepiness I just experienced on a working vacation in Asia with my husband? The pills still came with me (thyroid meds, check, estrogen, check, progesterone, check) but I had the time of my life as the previous blog postings will confirm.

More importantly, I was not sleep deprived at all, especially after the hot mud tub experience. Lack of sleep usually leads to my tears. If anything, I was getting too much sleep, my body momentarily forgetting it belonged to an insomniac (which sadly, it remembered last night!)

This time my crying was, as t-shirts scream at tourists all over Asia, same same but different.

My sadness overcame me as it always does because of the gaping hole in my life, the one that would have been filled by the presence, comfort, friendship and love of my mother if she hadn't died suddenly in her early forties, before I even reached puberty.

The unfairness of her unlived life usually hits me in the summer, when Rodney and I explore the golf courses of the interior of British Columbia. I always get weepy thinking how much my parents would have enjoyed the same experience and how much I would have enjoyed golfing with her (even though family folklore had her shooting in the low 90s when I refuse to even keep score. I'm not sure she would have pleased with that.) 

I stopped traveling on business for many reasons (believing I could chain smoke in Asia without consequence being high on the list) but there was another more compelling reason: I was exhausted by the pace I was keeping, never stopping as if my life depended on it or rather, two lives.

I believed retirement would bring me to a new stage where my loss would lose its power. But I'm learning that it only changes and heads off in a different direction.
 

It would seem that I'm now desperately traveling for two.  And still having a good cry in the bath tub.

The Hidden Costs of Desperate Travel

Vacationing in Scottsdale, Arizona last week—my second visit to the Southwest Sun Belt since late December—I stopped to consider, and not for the first time, the cost of this privileged life I lead.

I’m not talking dollar and cents either, although one can never ignore the bottom line altogether. Rather, what is the emotional cost of always being somewhere else?

“Oh, I assumed you guys were away so I didn’t bother to invite you to our party,” friends and acquaintances often say to me on the phone. Or: “Were you guys in town that week? I didn’t even think to phone.” Then there’s my own internal monologue that typically begins, “I’d volunteer, own a dog, take a part time job, etc etc but I’m not sure exactly if I will be in town then.”

Always being somewhere else, means I’m not here a lot, wherever ‘here’ may be. Not that I don’t enjoy a lovely west coast life, but it’s one that sees me heading out to the airport a lot.

As a former expat who later engaged in a global career that had me out of town at least a third of the year on business, it has been extremely difficult to build up a network of friends and on-going activities that require my physical presence and engagement. Compounding matters, we chose to move to Vancouver for Rodney’s job, a city in which we knew next to no one. Seventeen years later (gasp!) I can honestly say I know tons of people but none I would call immediately upon returning from a trip (the ultimate sign of a close friend).

In our early years when Rodney was away on business most of the time, I used to fret that I could die while he was away and no one would be at my funeral, least of all my husband. Pathetic you may think, but I’m not the first former expat spouse to have such thoughts. I just have the nerve to write them down.

Now, as I contemplate celebrating my sixtieth birthday in a few months, the same rule holds. I could give a party, but no one would come from the corners of the earth where most of my oldest friends live.

I’ve made my trade-offs and take full responsibility for them (and lots of pictures).  I could have done things differently. Soon after we moved to Vancouver, for example, I certainly could have jumped in and joined any number of groups and made a ton of friends. But I was terribly gun shy about meeting new people after surviving the incestuously small, Canadian Embassy communities abroad. Too often for me, someone’s nose would get out of joint because the turkeys, salmon, Alberta beef, apples, maple syrup you-get-my-drift were delivered by our Embassy to me before someone else (shoot me now!)

It also was never my personality to be part of a small gang in which everything about you is known (or made up!) I like to spread my friendships around because it works for the curious side of me. The more people I know, the more interesting stories about life I hear and the more experiences I collect. This is why travel is so appealing to me.

Still, as I approach an important milestone in my life in a few months (and begin hearing about parties parties and more parties going on around me to celebrate other people’s 60^th) I confess I do sigh at the idea of a being such a loner. It’s so true you can’t have everything (although I come pretty darn close!)

So I’ll settle for seeing the world and enjoy the company—even if it has to be virtual at times—of a few good friends.

It’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Getting Lighter Later in Life

I wish this was about weight I’ve lost—specifically from my waist--but it isn’t.

It’s about traveling light through airports and, well, the rest of one’s life. I’m learning that shedding useless emotional baggage I’ve carted around for decades can be as energizing as giving away clothes I no longer wear.

In the past few years, I’ve pared down both my closet and my expectations.

There were practical reasons for ditching most of my clothes: they were only collecting dust. I have worn a dress just one time in the past eight years, to a party celebrating my daughter’s marriage a couple of years ago. My writing life requires only a uniform of blue jeans and t-shirts, black jeans if I need to dress up which is rarely. I did save the dress (I had bought it to launch one of my books in Bangkok in 2003 and it folds up as small as a hanky), but ditched everything else. Everything. Shoes, skirts, fancy jackets. I could have had a Chico’s yard sale.

The easy-to-fold-up dress served my other goal to travel only carry-on which began in the final years of my travels as the Expat Expert. My moving company sponsor shipped my books ahead for me and my hosts would set up my power point presentation allowing me to roam the world hands free. I didn’t even use a mobile phone which frankly, I think shocked people more than the one small bag I carried.

On my lecture tours I would stop in each place for only two to three days so I didn’t need more than a couple of outfits. Hotel laundry ensured I was always wearing something fresh, although there was the time in Kuala Lumpur when the Hilton I was staying in told me my cleaning wouldn’t be ready for twenty-four hours. When I informed the poor employee receiving the brunt of my dismay that the delay would mean my speaking to members of the Malaysian-British Chamber of Commerce buck naked, they managed to speed up the process.

There is an art to carrying off carry-on.  As the writer of the article puts it:

It's a chance to pare down and simplify our lives, to discover what is truly essential and what is not.

The writer reminds us that we are more than the sum of our possessions. I also believe we do not have to be the sum of our earlier life experiences, not forever at any rate.

Yes, we spend a ridiculous amount of time in adulthood getting over childhood. There is an entire industry of health professionals devoted to helping us exhume our traumas and dramas as well as a mass media analyzing and labeling them.  And yes, the sum of our experiences adds up to who we become as adults.

But surely there is an expiration date on excuses, justifications and laying blame?

To me, getting older has allowed me to finally grow up. Aging has meant moving on with my life, no longer looking back all the time except when I want to remind myself of what is not only essential, but worth remembering.

My new lightness is far from being unbearable even if my jeans feel tighter. In fact, it has been utterly liberating.

Don’t wait until 60.

Welcome!

This blog has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I will be turning 60 in May of this new year.

Yes, I'm lying.

I've been a journalist in some form or another (newspaper, radio, television, non-fiction books, and on the web) for almost forty years. I was a blogger when these formats were still quaintly known as 'weblogs'. That makes me ancient, even on the Internet.

I am also a recovering aviophobe. I no longer have to get plastered on vodka before the plane leaves the ground. Age, in this instance, is a good thing for it definitely has something to do with my fear of flying vanishing in the jet stream. These days, there is a lot worse to worry about.

No longer being an airborne basket case means my husband Rodney doesn't mind inviting me along on his business trips. We've been married over 30 years, but my tagging along has only been a recent phenomenon, one I have eagerly embraced. In fact, it was on one of our recent journeys together that I came up with the idea for this blog.

We were enjoying a drink at our hotel in Udaipur, India. Yes, that is a picture of the hotel we stayed in. Incredible, I know. Traveling with Rodney (who took the picture) definitely has its privileges.

The hotel was mostly empty as the world economy has hit the tourist industry in India hard. Nevertheless, we met, as happens so often to Canadians, two fellow countrymen. They were life partners--from Ottawa--who were on an extended tour of India and points beyond. After exchanging horror stories of the diabolical bureaucracy involved in obtaining a travel visa for India, we learned that one of the men had a brain tumour last year. Luckily, it was not fatal but soon after his recovery they prepared to leave Canada for their planned journey. Their friends were aghast. They went ahead anyway for they had heard too many horror stories of a different kind: people who put off experiences they dreamed about (for this is not just about travel) until it was too late.

Their story inspired me to not wait any longer in starting this blog about my own life's journeys both literally and figuratively. It's amazing what one can excavate from memory at thirty-five thousand feet, especially sober. Now, to record it all for posterity.

Enjoy.