Finding Fulfillment in the Everyday

I don’t write these rambling blogs any more. But this is how The Expat Mummy started. As a late night, homesick cry into the unknown. Occasionally, just occasionally, I like to go back there again.

Sometimes, you are just tootling along – content in the mundanity of everyday life. The unrecognised comfort in the routine of school runs, work, drinks parties and camping trips, when something comes along that shakes you out of your routine and makes you question everything.

These last few months have been turbulent in my life.

There have been a series of events that have made me feel old and question my mortality. The weight I have upon this world.

I have friends with life-threatening illnesses, those with deeply sick children, friends getting divorced, friends wrestling with unhappy marriages. My children are growing older, less communicative, and things are subtly harder than they have been. We are selling our house in the UK, losing the peg that has tied us to England for the last 10 years. The future suddenly looks uncertain… unfriendly.

As a person with an anxiety disorder, these minor fractures in the solidity of my life have made me question my status quo. My carefully structured day, which is crafted to fill my time, to provide for my family and to look after my friends, feels shallow and pointless… and this, I suppose, is the cross that the unworking expatriate has to bear.

I can count very few women that have followed their husbands aboard and found fulfilling careers here in Kenya.
There are myriad factors behind this: some of us are mothers and use this as an opportunity to full time raise our children without guilt. Some of us look for work but can’t find a job. We struggle with visa issues, with a lack of experience in the region, with pay and working hours, and confidence too. In the end, many of the women who are here and don’t work settle into a routine that they consider fulfilling.

And some of us don’t find that fulfilment at all. There are so many desperately unsatisfied people here. Filling lives with lunches and coffee. With chatter and gossip. With diets and drinking. High school gone mad. There are cliques, fights and wild adventures, but more often there are days where there is nothing to do at all. And it’s these quiet days that are the enemy.

The days when the pieces of your puzzle don’t quite align. When you realise that your life is a series of shallow fripperies designed to pass the time.

I have lots of working mum friends that would kill to have the spare time that we do, but even they recognise the price of loneliness. Working, achieving and being financially independent builds self-esteem, confidence and a network of colleagues. As the working mum falls asleep into bed every night exhausted, the SAHM puddles herself in wine and wonders where the ‘real her’ went to.

I am lucky. I sit somewhere in the middle. Occasional freelance work that gives me a confidence boost and still time to exercise every morning, pick up my kids and meet a friend for lunch, but occasionally something stops me in my tracks and makes me take a bird’s-eye view of my life and question all my decisions.

Is this the right life for my kids?
Are we being fair to the family and friends we have left behind?
Are we making the right financial decisions for our future?
Is this the right life for me?

A decade spent fighting loneliness and trying to find meaning in the small things.

Life is so short. Am I making the most of the time I have left?

The answer is yes, I think. I am winning. I have an incredibly fulfilling life surrounded with friends and family in a way I have never had before… but spending so much time alone in my head. Sometimes, just sometimes. I wonder.

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