Episode 2: Redefining "Trailing Spouse"

In this episode, Chandra shares her introduction to the horrid term, "trailing spouse" (which is given to the non-employee  expat). She also attempts to flesh out redefining or renaming the term. There is also the first (of hopefully many to come) comical travel stories and Chandra shares a "delicious" quote and some inspiration from the life of a famous American expat.

• This episode's "Chan Select": Aquarium of Genoa

• Follow on Instagram @expatriotical

"Live and Travel in the Know" with Expatriotical!

Transcript

Bienvenue, Benvenuti, and Welcome to Expatriotical, the podcast for expats, travelers, and other adventurous souls. I’m Chandra Alley and after living as an expat with my husband and 4 children in two different countries for almost 6 years, I’ve learned the arts of pivoting during pitfalls, traveling tastefully for less, and soaking in amazing new cultures without loosing your own.

Join me, as we dive into the joys and challenges of travel and the expat life every episode!

We have arrived everyone. We are now at episode two of Expatriotical! For some of you this may be your first episode, but if you started with me last week, I’m thinking, or at least hoping, that something sparked your interest or got your attention and you came back for more. And to me that’s a big deal and it is a privilege for me to have you here. So thank you!

In this episode we will have a “Chan Select”, like we did last week, were I share with you one of my favorite places, whether it be a restaurant, museum, or what have you, that I have encountered during my travels as an expat.

I will also share a travel story today. Because, similar to, though not as raunchy or raucous as the movie The Hangover, when you are traveling, some of the hijinx that happen are almost unbelievable and honestly quite comical. Though the laughs, for me, usually come when I am looking back and not in the moment.

But to start with, today I want to try to tackle redefining a term that I was actually introduced to not too terribly long ago. A couple of years after I had become an expat.

I remember it pretty clearly. I was having tea with my dear friend Michelle, and also Isaiah and Caleb, because they were not old enough for school yet and they went everywhere with me. Hopefully, that extra bit of knowledge helps to wipe the slate of thinking it was prim and proper English tea, to more of a free for all, with scalding hot drinks. Anyway…

I’m not sure where our conversation had started, but at some point I believe, it must have turned to moving, whether it was all the moves they had made, or maybe one they were about to make, but Michelle mentioned the term, “trailing spouse”. And when she finished her sentence, I reluctantly asked, not because my question wouldn’t be well received, but because I felt I should have already know the answer, but it was a safe space, so I said. “What is that? A “trailing spouse”. I don’t know what that means.”

And she said, “That’s what they call us. The partner who moves, but it’s not for their job.”

I remember feeling an immediate surge of heat rise up within me, going straight to my face. I couldn’t believe it. How insulting! Trailing spouse, my foot. I was so much more than that. I was not just this puppy or reluctant child that my husband dragged behind him.

I was and am a life builder!! I was indignant! How dare those guys call me that, because I automatically assumed it was some upper level VP of a corporation that needed a term for us and so “he” said, “Ahh ya know, the non-employee, the the “trailing spouse”.

I will know admit my grave error in assuming that it was a man that first coined this term, because I just looked it up and to my surprise and complete dismay, the first person that is attributed to having said this was a woman named, Mary Bralove (not sure how to pronounce that), who was quoted by the Wall Street Journal in 1981.

Wow. Apparently, Mary knew nothing, other than financial statistics, of what it was to be a quote unquote “trailing spouse”, because if she did, I can’t imagine how, in her right mind, she would use such a demeaning term.

Because, as we all know, the non-employee spouse, is so much and does so much more! We establish a life for our partner and our children (if we have them) everywhere we go.

For me, that has looked like: researching and visiting new schools for my children, finding new general practitioners, pediatricians, dentists for us and the kids, an orthodontist, specialty doctors, etc…

I find the new markets to shop at, the new stores I can buy affordable clothes at, parks I can take the kids to, places we can have birthday parties at. At each new location, I strive to set up plenty of playdates for my kids as they come home and say they’ve met new friends, so that I can better get to know the kids and their parents making sure it is a safe and amicable situation for everyone involved.

In Italy, I waded through automated phone calls in Italian to set up appointments with cardiologists and other health professionals. And everywhere we go I am the chef, tutor, translator, transportation coordinator, on-call in/home nurse, social activities/schedule coordinator, housekeeper (other than 10 months in Italy and for the last 3 weeks here in Paris, thank you Karen!), purchaser of all things food and clothing related, mom, wife, friend, daughter, and sister.

It is my understanding, that everywhere we move, Chris’ job is pretty much the same. He has new coworkers and deals with new clients, but the role of his position is typically the same. That is not to diminish the fact that there is plenty of stress that comes with working with new cultures in new climates, under different conditions. Please do not think I am saying that the person, whose job a family moves for, has it easy. But I am saying that, in most cases if you were to take the quote unquote “trailing spouse” out of the equation and ask the employee to do all of those things for him or herself, I believe that a significant level of stress would be added to the employee and especially if they were trying to do that with children, their job or productivity on the job would be significantly affected.

So I don’t want to hear any of this “trailing spouse” nonsense. And I am on a mission to redefine the term or maybe I should say rename it entirely. I have thought of things like “trailblazing spouse”, Chief Coordination Officer (that might be a bit much), but I continue to draw a blank.

One thing that does keep coming to mind, is something that my friend, Erin Lashmar, who is a brilliant teacher and gifted artist, said to me one time when we were talking about motherhood (or parenthood really). I was pretty down and feeling overwhelmed with my responsibilities and apparent (to me) ineffectiveness, as a mom. And Erin said to me, in her beautiful British accent, “You know, what you do, is the only irreplaceable thing.” And it stuck with me SO much that I stopped right there and wrote it down in the Notes of my phone. Erin, if you’re listening, I hope you’re not offended by my accent, but I love your accent so much and wanted to try to capture some of it.

But she’s right. And I think that her sentiment can also be applied to what we do as the non-employee spouse. To hire out what we do, would be (in my opinion) a nightmare. I can’t imagine a nanny wanting to be woken up in the middle of the night by my four children when they are all having bad dreams or aren’t feeling well, and then having to get up, still exhausted, in the morning and cook them breakfast, prepare their lunches and walk them to school. And then come back and start all of the cleaning, cleaning up, laundry, grocery shopping, etc… before heading back to pick them up again from school a few short hours later.

Don’t get me wrong, this is my life, I am not complaining about that, I’m just saying, I don’t think you can hire all of that out to ONE person. I don’t think you could find someone qualified, and even if you did, it would cost you a fortune.

What you are doing, when you care for your partner, your family, it is irreplaceable. “Trailing Spouse” simply doesn’t cut it from any point of view.

So what do you think? I’m not loving “trailblazing spouse”, even though that is an attempt to make a play on the original term and Chief Coordination Officer doesn’t fully flesh it out. What about something like VIP, but instead of Very Important Person, it could be CIP, Completely Irreplaceable Partner.

What you do think? I’m still working on it. I had hoped to have it nailed down by the time recorded this episode, but maybe that’s ok. Maybe what I really need, what we really need is to work together. Not only on a name, but also on building each other up. Reminding each other, that this is a hard job, and it takes someone special like you to be able to do it.

So I’m asking for help! If you have an idea for a replacement term, I’d love to hear it! You can DM me at Expatriotical on Instagram and share your idea with me. While you’re there, if you would like to follow me, that would be amazing. For now though, I think I like the title of being the CIP, Completely Irreplaceable Partner, of the family. Let’s see if it catches on.

Ok! Now, for a fun travel story. I actually hadn’t thought if this in quite awhile, but it happened almost exactly five years ago.

My mom had come out to visit us, for the first time, in Italy in February of 2019 and she had said that she had always wanted to see Rome. So, she and Caleb (who was 3 months old at the time) and I rode a bullet train from Milan to Rome for a long weekend trip, while Chris stayed home with the other three kids.

This was also my first trip to Rome, because we had still only lived in Italy for less than 6 months at this point. We arrived at Roma Termini, Rome’s main train station in the afternoon on Friday and took a taxi to our hotel, the Le Meridien Visconti.

An important piece of information to add now is that my mom had recently found out that she had type 2 diabetes and was struggling with learning the balance of how to regulate her food intake/blood sugar levels with her energy output. In other words, she would get exhausted quite easily. She was also dealing with chronic pain in both of her knees and walking was no longer her strong suit, the problem was, she was not yet used to these limitations, because when I was teenager though she is two inches shorter than me and almost a foot shorter than my brother (sorry for not using the metric system, all of my non American listeners, that’s about 5 centimeters and 30 centimeters), she could out pace the two of us when walking, no problem.

So, I had planned to only do one major thing each day and she assured me that she would be able to do the walking as long as it was at a reasonable pace. The first night we ate at an amazing restaurant, and unfortunately I don’t remember the name of it, but I am almost positive that it is located on Via del Seminario, between the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain. Afterward we walked by Trevi fountain. Which is a standout memory to me as it was lit up at night, with majestic the Greek god, Oceanus and his horses of stone rising above the glow of the turquoise blue waters. It was absolutely mesmerizing. Then we walked by the Pantheon and that was our night. All was well.

The next day we planned to do a 3-hour tour (which said it had a scheduled break) of the Vatican. I was really looking forward to this, because I had specifically always admired Michelangelo and wanted to see the Sistine Chapel.

We took another taxi to the meeting point and when our tour commenced we began walking up a hill just to get to the entrance of the Vatican. Seeing my mom, make her way up, I started to worry, but she assured me she would be ok, since we would be inside and there would not be hills in the buildings.

Hills there are not, but stairs there are. Apparently lots of them. Which for those of us that don’t suffer from mobility issues, we don’t really notice them, nor the lack of places to sit down. If Caleb had been in a stroller, I would have definitely noticed, but I was wearing him in a baby carrier. These two things, the stairs and lack of places to sit, became very evident to my mom as we worked our way through the seemingly endless halls of precious paintings, tapestries, and sculptures.

We were arriving at the 2 hour point when our tour guide said that here we would take a 15 minute break, people could use the bathrooms and also use this time to see Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Seeing the color drain from my mom’s face, I knew she needed to rest and thankfully she found a chair near the restrooms where she proceeded to sit, eyes closed, not moving a muscle.

I, on the other hand, had been feeling a growing warmth between Caleb and myself and felt like his diaper may have leaked a bit. When I got into that small bathroom stall I discovered that it was not a leak I was dealing with, but a “pooptastrophe” a phrase lovingly coined by my dear friend Tasha, many years before. Let’s just say it was everywhere and I was so thankful I had packed not only another change of clothes for Caleb, but an extra shirt for myself as well.

15 minutes and an entire container of baby wipes and later, as I washed my hands and headed out to get my mom, I heard on my tour headset our lovely Italian guide say, “Ok, we are ready to go. Has anyone seen the lady with the baby?”

So I proceeded to make my way, mom in tow, through the  extremely crowded Sistine Chapel as quickly as I could, so that we would not be left by the group. I stared up the whole time at the ceiling trying to capture the exquisite work in my memory in 30 brief seconds.

I am not going to lie and say I wasn’t disappointed, but such is life. The life of a mom, the life of a daughter, living as an expat, trying to show her mom something she would see only once-in-a-lifetime.

Thankfully, by the summer of 2020 my husband had not yet seen the Vatican, so since we couldn’t travel to the U.S. that year we did a Tour of Italy, which included Rome, and I got to see that gorgeous room, which had been painted by a genius on wooden scaffolding using only candle light, for 15 uninterrupted minutes. And due to Covid I had it almost entirely to myself. This also is the life of an expat.

Blessings and burdens, all rolled into one beautiful crazy life.

Ok, so now it’s time for this episode’s “Chan Select”. To be totally transparent, I feel like there are so many wonderful things that I could mention, so today I enlisted the help of my daughter, Lilliah, for a top recommendation of something she loved doing or seeing in Italy.

It took her a minute to think about it and the first thing that popped to her mind  was Ristorante Borgo di Vione, which I mentioned last week in Episode 1. So I asked her to think again and she said the Aquarium in Genova (or Genoa for most English speakers). She said she chose it because of the amazing photos we still have from our first time there.

And she is right, the photos really actually did capture the beauty of it. It is one of the best aquariums I have ever been to. From walking under the shark tank and watching the dolphins play and chatter with each other up close and in person, to petting sting rays and observing the life cycle of a jellyfish. The Aquarium of Genoa is a world of amazement for all ages and I highly recommend visiting it!

Alright guys, I think that wraps up our time this episode, but before we part, I want to share a fun quote from an extremely well known expat, Mrs. Julia Child. The quote itself is not super inspiring, it’s just one of my personal favorites, but her story is. As a 6 foot 2 inch tall American woman in Paris, Julia Child stood out from the crowd. No pun intended, but truly, as I walk through Paris, though I am not as tall as she was, if Parisians hear my American accent, it definitely turns heads at times.

Julia, moved to Paris for her husband Paul’s job. She spoke no French so she quickly got to work learning the language, by taking classes 6 hours a day. She also tried to adapt by taking cooking lessons and graduated from the famous Le Courdon Bleu culinary school and she started a small business teaching American women how to cook French cuisine. She was known for her jovial attitude, her persistence, and her love of life and food.

To me she seems like she was a pretty light-hearted person. And I think that in life in general and especially as an expat, you need to keep that in mind, to be light-hearted, because things can just naturally get heavy. So cheers to Julia and to my favorite quote from her which is, “ I enjoy cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food!”

Ok everyone, that’s a wrap! I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and if you have, would you please share it with someone you think might like it as well? And one more thing, if you haven’t done so already, if you would take the time to hit subscribe in your podcast app and to rate and review Expatriotical. It helps more people find us here and I would so greatly appreciate it.

Also, I am really looking forward to reading your DMs on Instagram with new names that your going to come up with to replace the dreaded “trailing spouse” term. I know they are going to be great! I’m super excited.

Thank you all for letting me join you on your journey today. I’ll meet you here next week with another new episode. But until then, this is Chandra Alley reminding you to “Live and Travel in the Know with Expatriotical.”