What does an expat look like? For a long time, I had a cemented idea of what someone living abroad looked like: adventurous, young, single and – for some reason – they always wore cargo pants. It didn’t look like me at 31 and just married although I did have an affinity for cargo pants. It certainly didn’t look like me 8 months pregnant…and with two dogs in tow. It turns out that expats look like all kinds of people: young people, middle-aged people, first timers, returning expats, singles, couples with children, couples with no children, single moms with newborns, families with teenaged children, grandparents, recent college graduates, ladies with dogs, bachelors with nothing tying them down. Think someone like you couldn’t possibly live abroad… why not? Meet the Expats and discover that people just like you have made the move. Just buy some cargo pants.
Share in their story…
Meet the Expat: Jolene
This is Jolene.
If you met her you might think she was the kind of gal who was a math teacher, a mother, a composed individual. You’d be right… but you’d also be wrong. Very, very wrong.
Let me explain.
A Colorado native, Jolene was an only child, a cheerleader in high school and got good grades. She was your typical kid. So imagine my surprise when at a Lip Sync Battle Party, I watched her perform 50 Cent’s “In da Club” (and an Eazy E song whose title I’m even embarrassed to write) with spot on accuracy. And I wasn’t the only person blown away by the contrast of Jolene and her song choice. No one – NO ONE – saw it coming; she nailed one of the raunchiest songs I’ve ever heard in my life with pure accuracy and didn’t flinch.
So of course when I got to talking to Jolene, I was determined to find out where she got her street cred from.
Her story was pretty basic. Like many high school graduates, she went into college Undeclared because – well, let’s face it – how many of us really know what we want to be when we’re 18. I laugh in solidarity because neither of us ended up becoming what we originally thought we would. She gravitated early on to Electrical Computer Engineering but soon realized that long hours in a computer lab in an unsocial environment was not for her, “I was like… I’m going to kill myself in here. These people aren’t fun. And it’s so intense.” So she switched in a more personal direction to follow in the footsteps of someone she had admired.
“I switched to Law and Justice Studies to be a juvenile probation officer.” Hmmm… That’s interesting. I couldn’t imagine sweet Jolene being a probation officer but that fit more with her tough rapper alter ego. She continues, ” because I… uhum” she clears her throat, indicating that she’s trying to find the right words to say this, “I really liked my probation officer when I was on probation.”
Boom!
I know that people are never one-sided, they are never just one thing. It’s like judging the book cover without reading the story. But still, I’m stunned, “What?! You had a probation officer?”
She calms me down by trying to explain, “It sounds so ‘wow’ like ‘Oh my god you were on probation.’ but the true story was that I was at a party that got busted.
I get that. I’ve had those friends that do the same thing everyone else is doing but that have the misfortune of always getting caught.
She continues, “… and then I continued to get busted. 3 underage drinking tickets. I went through a super rebellious stage my sophmore/junior year: drinking, parties, sneaking out of the house – I kind of took some of it to the next level, refusing to go home with my parents when they found me at a party or sneaking out of the house by jumping out of the second floor window.” She thinks about that one, “That was kind of stupid.”
I can’t help but laugh imagining Jolene, a mother of two, as her younger, cheerleader self, jumping out of her window.
“But I might have ended up in jail at a few different points if it wasn’t for him [probation officer].”
Her wanting to work with troubled kids was what led her into the abroad life though not directly. After switching a few majors and taking on some jobs like the Girl Scouts of America in low income housing projects or working at the Boys and Girls Club After School Program she took a job at one of the toughest middle schools in inner city Denver where guns and knives were brought to school and there were frequent lockdowns. Again, Jolene surprises me when she tells me that she broke up 5 or 6 fights while teaching there. This Jolene is one bad mother….
It was at this school that Jolene’s life would be transplanted from a citizen of the U.S. to a citizen of the world when a trip to São Paulo, Brazil with a co-worker resulted in her decision to live abroad. She came home and told her boyfriend (now husband), Ryan, “I’m going to do this. I have to do this. I will regret it the rest of my life if I don’t do this and I really want you to come but if you’re not gonna come I’m gonna go without you.” Two years later, they were both teaching in Seoul, Korea.
Since this “crazy living overseas” thing was just supposed to be a one-time thing, Jolene and Ryan moved back to Colorado after their two-year contract to “get married, have kids, buy a house, do the American dream” only to discover that something was wrong. “We were both in deep suburb schools and I was just like ‘If I have to teach one more Hailey’… at least when I was teaching in Denver in the inner city it was exciting. But the suburns was driving us crazy. We were supposed to be looking for a house to buy and instead we started applying to the job fair again.”
She thought back to that time when they were back in the States trying to make sense of what happened and what went wrong, “That’s what I want eventually for my boys -there’s nothing wrong with that – but I was so bored then. I would see the same guy walking the same dog on the same street everyday – in this gorgeous neighborhood that I want my kids to live in one day but…”
Trailing off, I know what she’s going to say. If you’ve lived this life, you know too. We’ve all talked about one day. We want “that” (whatever that means) for our kids one day but when we dissect what that really means, when one day is, no one has an answer. We are stuck between two places: a world we grew up with and a life abroad that we’ve grown into.
I realize that that aspect of living abroad is not unlike other aspects of life. We are sort of always stuck between two things. We are never just one thing. We are never just the book cover.
Jolene and her husband, Ryan and their two boys are currently living in Shanghai.
More About Jolene:
JOLENE ACCOMPANIED her high school boyfriend to a college in New Jersey and while that relationship did not work out, it was at that college that she met Ryan. They were engaged in Korea some years later.
SHE LAUGHS when telling the story of how Ryan proposed. He had asked her mom for her great grandmother’s ring before they left but a new country and new job and new friends was a hard adjustment. “It’s not like we fought a lot but our lives – everything – was crazy. So he kept not asking and whenever I would talk to my mom she would ask me, “Are you being nice to Ryan?” Jolene would snap back, “Yes. Of course. Why do you keep asking me that?!”
BOTH KOREA AND DOMINICAN REPUBLIC were big drinking cultures. Although in Korea, it was a bit more sexist. It wasn’t really ok for women to be drunk in public but totally normal for business men to be out drinking at lunch.
SHE HAS REALIZED that the more and more you do it [live abroad], the more you realize what things are the things you have to take with you and want to give to your kids. On some things, you can’t fold.
HER FREAK OUT ABROAD MOMENT LAST YEAR was over plastic Easter eggs. “I wanted plastic Easter eggs for the boys and I couldn’t find them here and then got mad at myself for not ordering them and then I thought why do I care about this.
ONE THING SHE LOVES ABOUT BEING ABROAD is that the get togethers are so casual, “Everyone brings something. We don’t worry about the plates and the napkins and planning a huge meal or organizing so much. We say bring something over and let the kids play together. It won’t be perfect or matching but it’ll be fun.”
ONE THING SHE DOESN’T MISS ABOUT LIVING IN THE STATES is the things you own or the attachment to things. “The whole stuff thing is weird.”
Not all who wander are lost.