A career abroad is two careers

Our second daughter was born in January 2025. Two daughters, born two and a half years apart, in a country neither their mother nor I was born in.

Here is something the glossy version of expatriate life never mentions: how hard it is to raise a family this way. In Namibia, and in South Africa, a young family is rarely alone. There are grandmothers and aunts within reach. There is, for many working families, practical help with the children and the house that makes the double load of a career and small children carriable.

We had none of that. We had each other, and that was the whole of it. No grandmother down the road and no help arriving in the morning. Just my wife and me, two children who needed everything that children need, and the ordinary weight of two careers on top of it.

It is exhausting. There were seasons when we were both running on nothing, when the absence of the support we had grown up assuming sat like a constant low pressure under everything.

I have come to believe that a career in a foreign country is two careers, not one. The visible career is the one with the office and the title. The invisible one holds a family together with no help, and in the expatriate home it is not a background task. It is the main event.

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Underneath the exhaustion runs a question I have not stopped asking. What country will my daughters think they are from? Their father is Wambo. Their mother is Xhosa. They were born in the Netherlands and speak Dutch as easily as breathing. I do not know which of their three inheritances they will one day call home.

I have decided that the not-knowing is not a failure of the parenting but the beginning of it. My task is not to settle the question for them. My task is to make sure they have all three inheritances to build their answer from.

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What I learned

If you are the one whose job did the moving, do not look away from the invisible career. Name it, share it, defend the time it needs, and understand that the person carrying most of it is doing the harder of your household's two jobs.

And the question of where your children are from does not have to be answered to be honoured. Give them all of it, so that whatever answer they build, they build it rich rather than deprived.

Adapted from Learning to Belong, Chapter 8, "Building a life in a foreign country". About the book