Expat Travel Mom

Quite often over the years, somewhere in the middle of an overseas move, I've stopped and thought to myself, "what in the heck are we doing?" And then, just as quickly, I'm reminded why we're doing it and how great the adventure actually is. This time it happened again, packing up a life in Singapore after eight years and starting over in Valencia. Three moves in now, US to UAE, UAE to Singapore, and now Singapore to Spain, and I've come to realize the same handful of lessons just keep resurfacing, no matter which country we land in.

I've kept a running list of these for years now. It started as a few scribbled notes back in the UAE and has grown into thirteen. Here they are, the things that stay constant no matter which country we're living in.

1. Take or Leave the Pets?

This is a genuinely hard decision for anyone to make. International pet relocation is not cheap by any means, even if you handle all the paperwork yourself, the way we did. Plenty of people will tell you that you can't put a price on your furry family member, but I've also watched friends heartbroken over a move because a surprise price tag in the thousands meant leaving their dog behind. Please, research this before you go, every single time. When we moved to the UAE, our beloved dog went to live with a wonderful family, because we were only supposed to be gone for two years. (When we knew we were staying, we couldn't take her away from a family that fell in love with her.) When we moved to the UAE, we took our new pup with us. And when we moved to Spain, we took both our pups with us. 

2. Take It or Leave It

I've become genuinely good at deciding what's worth lugging to another country, what gets donated or tossed, and what should just stay in storage (although we cleared out and got rid of our storage unit back in 2018 when we knew we weren't moving back). You learn quickly what actually matters to you, what you truly value, and realize how many things you once thought were essential really weren't. One thing we've moved from the UAE to Singapore to Spain is the dining room table. It's been a constant in the kids' lives, one they don't want to let go. I have a few antiques from my grandparents as well. We pared down to a few boxes of our childhood memories (photo albums, yearbooks, etc). But everything else...it can all be replaced.

3. Who Is Worth Your Time

This sounds harsh, but you'll be surprised who stays in your life and who quietly pulls away. It's a sad reality of being the one who moved. Some people simply don't know how to stay in touch across the distance, some are a little jealous, and some just can't seem to fit you into their schedule anymore. You'll find a lot of one way streets all of the sudden, and it sucks. But we have built an International family, and I wouldn't trade that. 

4. Friends Coming and Going

Growing a thick skin was the last thing I expected when we started this, but it's happened slowly, over years. Being part of an expat community means constant turnover. Just as you form a real bond with a new best friend, you're often saying goodbye at a going-away party that came far too soon. Fortunately, we've had some great friends in our lives, continually coming to visit us in our new locations, and that's a blessing to hold on to.

5. Housing

Don't expect every place you move to feels like home right away. You enter a world of villas, flats, condos, and apartments unlike anything you knew in the US. You might end up in a tiny apartment for the same price you paid for a house back home, or you might luck into something massive. It really depends on where you're headed, so if it matters to you, look into it before you go. And it might also surprise you which countries tend to follow rules like, you must repaint the entire place before you leave, or no holes in the walls, or supply all of your own kitchen appliances. Different, but you get used to it all.

6. Know Your Time Zones

I once laughed watching an episode of The Amazing Race where contestants couldn't identify basic time zones. Once you're the one living overseas, having a solid grasp of the time difference makes life so much easier, for staying in touch with friends, family, and business back home. You really don't want to wake your mom with a phone call at 1am. And, military time is what we go by after all these years...it just makes sense, there's no confusion when you're trying to make a reservation somewhere or book a government appointment online!

7. Conversions

Being from the US, we're the odd ones out when it comes to the metric system. I wish I'd known it better before we left. I'm finally getting the hang of it now, and the kids...it's all they know. You'll also lean hard on a currency conversion app at first for whichever country you move to, until one day you realize you've stopped converting back to dollars entirely and just started thinking in the local currency.

8. Geography

If geography wasn't your strong suit in school, brush up before you move overseas. It genuinely helps to know exactly where you are in the world, and it lands so much better in conversation when you can place where the person you just met is actually from. Because once you move overseas, everyone is International it seems.

9. Apps to Keep in Touch

Staying in touch is easy when you're all in the same country. Move overseas, and you quickly realize how grateful you are for WhatsApp, free texting apps, and video calling. The specific apps have changed a bit with every move, but the need for them never has.

10. Residence

We'd lived in the UAE for four years when, on our return flight to the US, immigration forms asked for our residency. I went completely blank for a moment, wanting to write down the UAE, except we no longer lived there. To make it more complicated, we were only in the US for three weeks before moving on to Singapore. We were, quite literally, between countries, and "resident" took on a whole new meaning that day. I felt that exact same blank-page feeling all over again this year, filling out paperwork somewhere between Singapore and Spain.

11. Passport vs. Driver's License

Living overseas, your passport becomes so much more important than your driver's license ever was. That little card you couldn't wait to get as a teenager, the one you carried religiously in your wallet, gets shoved into a drawer, and your passport takes center stage instead. It gets asked for everywhere, especially in those early weeks of getting settled and sorting out life's necessities. (Unfortunately, my US driver's license long ago expired during the Covid years, with no option for online renewal. However, I now have my Spanish driver's license, so all good.)

12. Changing the Meaning of Family

Your blood relatives stay home and remain your true family, but you build another family overseas, the friends who show up for your important events, your celebrations, and the genuinely hard days. There's actually a term for what this does to kids raised this way: Third Culture Kids, coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem back in the 1950s. It describes children who spend their formative years somewhere outside their parents' own culture, and end up building a blended identity that's not quite their passport country's culture and not quite their host country's either, something entirely their own. Watching my own kids grow up this way, across three very different countries now, that term has come to feel like the truest description of who they've become.

13. Patriotism Isn't Just the Fourth of July

I used to think the US had more national pride than anywhere else I'd known. Then I moved to the UAE, and felt it there every single day, not just on a holiday, but in the everyday details of how proudly people spoke about their country. I've felt echoes of that same pride here in Spain too, it turns out that particular lesson wasn't specific to one country at all. It's simply what happens when you finally see your own patriotism from the outside, for the first time.