Separation

Another day gone, making it 128 days until we go home to Canada.  Matt came home last night.  He had been away for almost a month, on and off.  It was certainly nice to have him home again.  Not that  we aren't used to seperation.  We often joke that this is the secret to our success; spending half of our time apart!  A year after we got married, we had to make a decision to live on opposite sides of the country.  Matt got a job working for CIDA, Canada's International Development Agency, which he couldn't pass up.  The job was in Ottawa.  A week earlier, I had been accepted into a teacher's education degree program at UBC in Vancouver.  We lived apart for a year, making the 5 hour trip across the country to see each other every couple months.  It was the start of our life apart.  This was in 1997, when email was still emerging.  It soon became our best friend.  We wrote pages and pages to each other over the course of that year.  I found a printed stack of our correspondence several years later when I was going through boxes of our stuff.  I laughed to think that Matt had thought to print them in case our computer crashed, which it had indeed done. 

After I graduated from UBC, I moved east to be with Matt and we were together for a while there.  That was a record stretch of two years, I believe.  Then I went to Kyrgyzstan while Matt stayed behing in Ottawa to complete a month of language training.  Nice of the Canadian government to be so concerned about Matt's language training and not at all about mine.  I arrived at the airport without a word of Russian and struggled through my first month in Central Asia on my own.  Matt soon followed and, apart from a few short trips in country, we were together for a year.  Then came the UNHCR emergency roster training in Spain. That was a month, and it saw Matthew travelling on September 12th, the day after the attacks on the twin towers.  He was home for only two days before shipping off to Pakistan.  I spent the next two months on my own in Bishkek, while all the "non-essential" expatriate staff were being sent home.  It had nothing to do with Kyrgyzstan being close to Afghanistan though, as most people thought.  They say that it was because of the US Airforce base that opened up.  I still hold to my belief that it was because the country ended with STAN.  I spent my days at school and my nights at the Hyatt either in the gym or marking in the lounge over hot chocolate.  It was a difficult time, but the chocoate helped me get through.

The following year, after our assignment in Kyrgyzstan was over, Matt was posted to Kabul. We were separated for six months then, as I politely declined to join him there.  Post 9/11 Afghanistan really didn't hold an interest for me.  I went home and moved in with a couple friends.  They had an unfinished loft in the house they were renting, so I offered to paint it and decorate it if they would let me move in with them.  Not that I didn't have family in Vancouver, but I was worried about choosing one family over another, and this gave me neutral ground to use as home base.  I went back to school and started my teacher librarianship diploma, and I worked at a famous kids bookstore in Vancouver to make ends meet. 

When Matthew returned to Canada, we had two months together while we waited to hear about his next assignment.  To pass the time, we took a trip down the west coast to Baja California and went kayaking.  Then we spent time with our families in Vancouver and on the island.  We took a road trip with my parents up island, across to the Sunshine Coast, back down to Vancouver and over to the island again.  While on this circle trip, we found the house of our dreams and decided that it was as good a time as any to invest.  It was just after that when we found out our next posting would be to Angola.  Matt was expected to start immediately, but we had to finish the basement on our home so that we could rent it while we were away.  It was decided that I would stay to do this while he went on to Angola to find us a home there and settle in to his new assignment.  This was another four months' seperation.  I think I got the better end of the deal on this one, though. 

I joined Matthew in Angola later that summer, and it was the beginning of the most difficult assignment we had ever been on.  Luanda was a dirty, noisy, angry city.  In my first month there, we were stopped and threatened that our car would be impounded if we didn't pay a fine, I had hundreds of dollars of goods stolen from my car while it was under surveillance, I was attacked getting into my car and I saw someone killed outside our apartment for no apparent reason.  We made some essential changes to our living arrangment, and I purchased some self defence items to keep on me at all times, and that was the only way I was able to cope.  Despite all efforts though, I was eager to leave after a year in Angola. 

Matthew received news of his next post in January the following year, and was asked to go immediately to Geneva, Switzerland.  Talk about exact opposites!  Geneva was everything Luanda wasn't; organized, clean, pristine, safe.  He left in March that year, and so we began another three month seperation.  As a teacher, I had an obligation to the school, so I had to stay in Luanda until the end of the academic year.  It would have been impossible to maintain two apartments in both cities, however, so the school made arrangments for me to move into housing on campus.  It was a whole other world living on a compound.  It helped me to better understand why many expats live this sort of life in dangerous places like Angola. 

In July, I moved to Geneva as well, and we spent the next three years there.  There were short seperations, but nothing compared to those we had already endured.  A month here and there, sometimes more, but never more than six weeks at a time.  It was a time to settle down and learn to deal with each other full time again.  We both felt the void left by not having as much time to ourselves, but quickly found a way to fill this space with our individual interests.  Both of our children were born during these three years, and our lives changed to meet the new parenting roles that we were in.

Just after our son Zachary was born, we found out that we were to be moving to Bogota, Colombia.  After consulting with our pediatrician, it was decided that Zachary might be better off in Canada until he was six months old and could receive his yellow fever vaccine.  So, we began a four month seperation, this time involving the children.  Matt went ahead to Bogota to find housing and check out life in Colombia, and I stayed in Canada with the children.  This was a whole new experience for me, being alone with two small children, rather than being on my own.  Luckily, family and friends were nearby, ready to help.  I don't think I would have survived the seperation without their help.

We are coming to end of three years in Colombia now, and it has been difficult, but not impossible.  Our seperations over the past three years have seemed harder somehow.  I have tried to explain it time and time again to Matthew.  He senses my unrest, but I have had a hard time articulating exactly what the difference has been.  I think that I have finally laid my finger on it, though.  It is a matter of independence, I believe.  I have been struggling with my loss of independence.  When Matthew leaves, it is no longer me on my own in a foreign country.  It is now two children and I coping on our own without him.  This is a hard thing to do in a country where security is such a major issue.  I cannot simply pick up and head out of the city with the children.  A single woman travelling alone with two children?  By car? Something like this requires planning and security clearance.  It requires courage and letting go of my fears.  It is a hundred times more difficult than it was when I had only myself to worry about.  I don't say these things to complain.  I tell you this simply to help you understand why it has been trying for me.  Being a trailing spouse is much easier than being a trailing mother with children.

So it is that we have reached a moment in our lives when we have decided to take a year off.  We have made a decision to stop working for a year and to spend some quality time together as a family reassessing our priorities.  It is something that we need to do together as a family, and something that will help us decide where we should go from here.  All the years of seperation have brought us to a place where we need some time together.  This has also taken courage, and commitment, and I am so pleased that it is becoming a reality.