How My Friend Helped Me Make Peace With My International Life
After much moaning, griping, and resisting
Flying across the Atlantic is one of my favorite things to moan and gripe about, so one day last winter, I found myself moaning and griping about it to my dear friend Rosi. I’d just flown to Wisconsin from Jordan by myself, because my husband Raja did not have a visa to enter the US at the time. I didn’t want to go alone while he stayed in Jordan, but I also felt a near-desperate need to see my family and get a break from Amman, so I went.
In Wisconsin, a few days after completing the dreaded flight, I sent Rosi a voice note on WhatsApp. She herself travels a lot for work, and I had no idea where she was.
“I had a meltdown last week when leaving Jordan because I didn’t want to travel without Raja and I was stressed about the trip,” I told Rosi. “I don’t know, I think it might be the cumulative impact of throwing myself across the Atlantic Ocean so many times in the past six years?
“The first time I flew across the Atlantic it didn’t really register as anything. It registered as excitement, adrenaline, adventure, ‘I’m going to take this job.’ The jet lag, the tiredness, the coffee, the time working in Zaatari, the stress, the burnout, it was all part of this grand adventure, you know?”
Rosi and I met while working together at RWG, so perhaps more than most people, she knows.
“So that was time #1 that I flew across the Atlantic and back. But now I’m on number, I don’t know, maybe 50? Ha. Probably not that many but it feels like a lot. I somehow feel that those 50-or-whatever times have this cumulative impact…
“Every time now I fly across the Atlantic, I dread the flight, I dread the separation from whomever I’m leaving behind. It’s an uprooting of self, it’s packing, it’s figuring out, ‘What do I need for the next two months of my life?’ It’s re-sorting all my time zones, updating all my devices…it’s a Whole Thing, you know?”
I went on, telling her what she already knows from living in Amman herself: “It takes like 20 hours to get between the US and Jordan. My two homes! I hate that the journey between my two homes is upwards of $1,000 and 20 hours.”
A few minutes later, she sent me a voice note back. “Hearing you say that about flying across the Atlantic, I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God. Yes, that sounds so intense and overwhelming and so hard. So much space between the two homes.’”
Then she went on to blow my mind with a new way of thinking about it that had never occurred to me.
“But also the image that comes to mind is… stitching across a gap. And every time you go across, you are weaving the next line of… think of it like shoelaces! You are weaving the laces back and forth, and stitching together these two places more and more and more. And so each journey is not a cumulative splitting but a weaving.”
Her message shifted some tectonic plate inside me. Weaving. Shoelaces. I had never thought of it that way before.
I’m 11 years into learning Arabic, six years into my relationship with Raja and nearly three years into our marriage. My life has completely changed since my first-ever flight from the US to Amman nearly nine years ago. I can get myself around Amman just as well as I can navigate my hometown of Milwaukee.
Am I myself not a connecting thread between these two distant places? I am, I realized. My marriage, too.
M y friend was able to catch a hard thing from my audio messages and throw it back to me with a little bit more light. Her message, which stuck with me for months and shifted my way of thinking about flying back and forth, was delivered with a lot of background noise because, she explained, she was standing in a very long line at Ace Rent A Car in Los Angeles on her way to a work gig in which she would create art for one of her clients.
(Rosi also happens to be an incredible artist. She’s one of the most creative people I know, which probably explains how she was able to produce some beautiful imagery out of my moaning/griping.)
So please consider this an ode to shoelaces, an ode to my dear friend, an anti-ode to having a spread out family. Raja and I have been together for exactly six years today. Six years of weaving back and forth across the ocean and creating our own family with threads of both our families woven snugly through.
A few days ago, we finished packing up our giant suitcases with some clothes for our two-week visit to Amman and some Legos to give our little nephews here. We were dropped off at the Boston airport by my sister, and on the other side of the ocean, we were picked up from the Amman airport by my sister-in-law.
In another few days, we’ll pack up again, and fly back across — this time west — home to Boston. Reverse the airport rides, unpack the suitcases.
I’m sure I’ll have that panicky moment five hours into the flight (see my last story!) but I’ll think of the weaving, I’ll try to sleep. I’ll be glad this time Raja and I are at least flying together.
More on my love-hate relationship with international travel:
Rather humorous details from expat life:
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