A former life...

When you move to a new destination as a trailblazing spouse, your social circle tends to build up around the kids' school. All of a sudden you become mum of... Never mind that you used to have a career and were actually quite good at what you did.

You jumped on the bandwagon to follow your husband and when you stop to look around, you find yourself the other end of the world in a school ground and everything that was before no longer counts. It's the here and now! The word that reaches your ear more than ANY other one is... "Muuummmmyyyyyy".

It is a privilege to be able to spend lots of time with your kids and watch them grow up and undergo their own little experiences and "Aha" moments every time you move to a new country.

Your former life seems to shift further and further away from your memory and as you gradually get to know the other mothers a bit better you realise they feel the same way.

We all had a life before we were married and had kids. An independent, interesting, career-orientated, ambitious, hard-working life. I still like to think of ourselves as such. Just let me repeat that to myself again: independent, interesting, career-orientated, ambitious, hard-working women. The difference being we are either working on our husband's career or we have gotten to the stage in our expat life where we have decided it is time to build a second career.

I have had many a project in my mind, have brainstormed numerous ideas and scribbled down a multitude of charts, even written a few business plans and contacted one or two fiduciaries for professional guidance.

There was the objective to open a Kindergarten in Madrid where English speaking nursery schools were scarce,  the visualisation of an indoor toddlers' playground that Lugano was so dearly lacking, a concept for a children's party service organised by theme, something unheard of in the Ticino at the time, and - my latest project - the project of Expat coaching for foreigners in Paris.

Somehow, we seem to move before I get my enterprise off the ground and every country seems to instil a fresh idea or present a new market niche opportunity.

For the time being, I guess, I will just continue writing my blogs and remain the strong, wise and hard-working woman standing behind my successful husband.