My husband’s contract in South Africa ends at the end of June. As in, this June.
Three and a half months away. We’ve given notice on our gorgeous house, and I’ve started preparing the Pitter-Patters for our next amazing adventure. Except we don’t have any clue where “next” will be yet.
Major freak-out time, right? Time to put therapists on retainer, employ a life coach, call your friends and blubber about how you just can’t cope, while doing yoga and intentional breathing? In fact, no. Instead, I like to deploy a handy little expat life trick called “living in between”.
Living in between is something we’ve all faced at some point. Those moments when you feel your safety net slipping, but you take the leap anyway. You quit your job before you’ve found another one, you book your holiday before your bonus comes in, you find out you’re pregnant at the worst possible time.
For expats, it’s the no man’s land between one contract ending and the next one beginning. It’s the phase of maybes, mights, and possibles, of what nows, what ifs and WTFs, and it’s quite possibly the most stressful time of the transition.
During the move, relocation and settling in phase, you have purpose, you have an aim, you’re on a mission to find out, try out and get in your groove. In my case it’s: supermarket, playground, bookshop. If I have those three things I’m set. And if the bookshop serves good coffee, major bonus. But during the in between phase you have nothing.
No set plans. No destination to research. No expat blogs to obsess over, no Google groups to join. You know your new life is coming but you can’t picture it, can’t rationalise it, and can’t prepare for it. It’s terrifying, yes. But it’s also liberating.
It’s a hard concept to grasp. Liberating? Are you insane? To our well-trained, routine-loving, comfort-zoned brains, the concept of living in between is utterly bizarre, too foreign to compute.
We are calibrated to find stability in predictability, meaning in routine, and identity in the repetitiveness of our lives. But when you shake it up a bit, take away the definites and throw in a whole load of infinites, you have a chance to really discover who you are and what you’re made of. And more importantly, you give Life the chance to open up before you in a way you’d never have experienced otherwise.
My husband pitched up in London a decade or so ago, having quit a promising corporate job in South Africa. I was like, “fantastic, love it, now how are we going to eat?”
We found an apartment, and put the deposit and first month’s rent on a credit card, with no clue how things would work out. Two days later he landed an awesome job that would lead to us living all over the world. We’ve always lived on a bit of a wing and a prayer, us two.
As students we took out student loans and blew every cent on a two-month trip around Thailand. We had our priorities straight even back then! I remember arriving in Istanbul on day one of our life there, and being blown away by the breathtaking natural beauty of the city, the ancient monuments, the rude chaos of the streets, the collision of ancient and modern, and feeling utterly overwhelmed.
I was seven months pregnant with Pitter-Patter N when we moved from Istanbul to Durban. Pitter-Patter S was just two. We had nowhere to give birth, no doctor, our shipment was delayed, and every pre-school turned us away (who knew pre-schools had such long waiting lists!). Talk about living in between!
But we can all be hardcore when we need to be and over the years I have learned two things:
1) Never take no for an answer.
2) There is no shame in pestering someone into submission.
By the time Pitter-Patter N was born beautifully and naturally, our boxes were unpacked, and Pitter-Patter S had a place in a top pre-school.
If we think back over our lives, we can all recall times when we’ve been living in between. You’ve given notice on your flat, but your new house isn’t ready; your visa comes through on the morning of your flight; the champagne-coloured French chiffon you insisted on for your dress arrives three days before your wedding.
These situations seem so stressful, so consuming that they threaten to bury us. But they never do bury us do they? Because living in between is not life threatening, it’s life affirming. Living in between forces you to live in the moment, because really, what else can you do?
It’s an exercise in letting go, in relinquishing the power you think you have, and trusting that you will be fine. If you do what needs doing, the details will take care of themselves. And so five countries, three continents, eight houses and two children later, I find I’ve become limber at living in limbo.
I can’t control the future, but I can appreciate the present, and what is going on around me now. Coffee on the deck before the kids get up, sunsets over the beautiful Indian Ocean, the monotonous school run, the sand between my toes, making dinner in our kitchen. These things will change, and I’ll miss them when they do.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not always pretty. Tears flow, brows furrow, days are defined by the tense lump in the pit of my stomach. But beyond these symptoms I have found power in the unknown, peace in the uncertainty and a freedom that will not be compromised.
Next time you find yourself living in between, let go a little, control things a little less, allow the unknown to fill you with power instead of fear, and you might find that you actually enjoy the ride.
Not being able to focus on the future makes you live only in the now, and work only with what you’ve got. And that’s a gift.
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