Travails of a Trailing Spouse

by Stephanie Suga Chen

  She avoided the women in the building who worked full-time, like the graceful British woman who ran strategic planning for a cable programming channel, or the striking American woman with smoky, dark eyes who had moved her family for a one-year management post at a large pharmaceutical company, her husband taking a sabbatical from his tenured university position to be her trailing spouse. These were women whom, if she were back in the US and still working, Sarah would have been drawn to immediately – smart, talented, no-nonsense executives who got things done. But now, seeing them in their business clothes, carrying their travel mugs of coffee and leather laptop bags, made her both annoyed and depressed.

  Sara, meanwhile, had no trouble lining up interviews; she had worked at two Fortune 500 companies, managing large-scale ecommerce, sales and marketing, and product development initiatives. Her first meeting was with a Singapore-based shopping site backed by an Internet giant, who was looking for someone to head a new private label initiative, from product development to final manufacturing and marketing.

  Clothing design was not an area that Sara had worked in before, but she was interested in fashion and thought it might be a nice change of pace from the wireless telecom and software industries in which she had spent the last 15 years or so.

  She came back from the interview in high spirits, telling Sarah all about the company’s history, and her potential new boss, an American who had been a retail executive in Italy and India previously. Sarah was happy for her friend, glad to see her excited about something that would improve her confidence and feeling of self-worth. Sara went back for another round of interviews, this time having to take both a personality and aptitude test.

  The next day, Sara received an email from the company’s HR director saying that they were prepared to make her an offer and they wanted to know what her last salary had been. She asked Sarah for advice, what should she tell them? She knew the salaries were lower in Singapore for local hires. It was a strange phenomenon; somehow, companies were willing to offer premium packages for people they had to bring in from other countries, but for those people who were already here, on the ground in Singapore, they were offered much lower wage rates. Sarah thought about it and suggested that Sara just be honest; what else could she say?

  Sara went in to meet with the HR director. The woman sat across the table from her and explained, quite honestly, that they were very interested in hiring her, but could not match the salary she had been earning at her previous position. Sara had expected this, and said as much, asking what salary they were prepared to offer her. To her dismay, it was less than half of her prior salary, much less than what she had hoped for. She reported back to Sarah that she had politely ended the meeting, saying she would be in touch.

  They discussed the offer over coffee; Sara was pretty adamant that she couldn’t accept an amount so low, especially given the scale of the project she would be heading. It was the first time Sarah had seen Sara so fired up, and she liked seeing her friend this way.

  “Well, why don’t you keep looking?” Sarah said. “This was just your first interview, I’m sure there are a lot more opportunities out there.”

  “Yeah, although this whole process has just turned me off on working at all here. I mean, it just sounds like so much work for so little pay. I have a feeling all the jobs are going to be like this,” Sara replied.

  It was a sentiment that Sarah had heard expressed often from other expats – the trailing spouse, usually the wife, finding it difficult to find commensurate positions and salaries compared to their prior lives. Many spouses just ended up becoming active in their children’s schools, volunteer organisations, private clubs, and the like.

  Sarah encouraged her to keep looking, and Sara did, even talking at one point to John’s manager about a possible opening at his company, but after several weeks, nothing encouraging had surfaced.

  Sarah was even more dismayed when, about a week later, Sara told her she had decided to take a receptionist position at the medical offices just up the street from their condo. She was making an hourly wage, with no benefits, working three days a week with an hour lunch break and every other Saturday morning. It was a far cry from the teams of people she used to manage.

  At dinner, Jason congratulated Sara-without-an-H on the new job, to which John had jumped in, saying, “Yes, we have a regular working girl on our hands now,” and patting her on the back. Once again, Sarah couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or serious. After the whole hooker revelation, she really couldn’t even look him in the eye any more.

  Sarah understood why the other Sara had taken the job, and she couldn’t blame her, of course; it brought in money and had set, part-time hours, but it certainly didn’t utilise all the skills she had. Sarah didn’t know how to reconcile how she felt about her friend taking a low-level, mindless job compared to Sarah herself not working at all, under the guise of “finding her true passion” – which was better?

  chapter 13

  RAINY DAYS

  AND LAZY EYES

  FEBRUARY SAW RECORD rainfalls, with torrential downpours occurring frequently, sometimes twice a day. In between the rainstorms, the kids found the condo pool too cold to swim in, a fact Sarah would have found unbelievable when she had first arrived. She learned that since their pool was located on the fifth floor, it lacked ground insulation, making it a few degrees colder as compared to its ground-level counterparts, deterring all but the most serious lap swimmers from entering. Even when she convinced Ruby and Eric to go out and just splash around in the baby pool, after about 20 minutes or so, they would ask to come back in; Sarah could almost see their teeth chattering, they were that convincing.

  The lightning that preceded the daily thunderstorms was surreal, like a jigsaw puzzle Sarah had once done as a teenager, which depicted giant white slashes across a purple sky; the world would be lit up, bright white, for a split second, then switch to black. The thunder that followed was deafening, an explosive crash lasting for up to five seconds; the kids had learned to immediately cover their ears when they saw lightning in anticipation of the coming boom. At night, Jason and Sarah would often be woken up by the loud rumbling; they would sit up, expecting the kids to come running into their room like the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music.

  Sarah was deeply troubled by Sara’s predicament, wanting now, even more, to intervene, to empower her friend to take action. Somehow, the fact that Sara was working a receptionist job seemed to make it all even worse. She just couldn’t fathom being so dependent on her husband, to the point that one would put up with so much nonsense. She mentioned it to Ashley one morning as they were watching the boys play at the kiddy gym outlet located in the mall, thankfully indoors, as the rain pelted down outside. Lucas, barely nine months old, had just started walking and was already trying to follow Eric up the play structures.

  “I mean, I would leave the cheating bastard, wouldn’t you?” Sarah asked Ashley.

  Ashley shrugged. “It’s really tough. It sucks, yeah. But I’m not ever getting divorced.”

  “Even if Chad has to go to prison?” Sarah asked, half-kidding.

  “Yeah, even if that happened,” Ashley answered.

  Sarah was surprised, although she had heard this before from friends who were the children of divorced parents. She herself had always had a running joke with Jason, really not funny any more in light of recent events, that if Jason ever cheated on her, she would leave him in a heartbeat, emptying the bank accounts and leaving him to have to ask friends or family for money until he sought legal action against her. If she ever cheated on Jason, though, Jason would just make her feel really bad and be granted unlimited beer passes.

  Ashley was strong-willed, highly opinionated, and independent, the last person Sarah would have expected to be a “stand by your man” kind of gal. She asked Ashley what was behind her thinking.

  Ashley’s own parents had divorced when she was 11, she said; it was an ugly, bitter affair, with plenty of sh
outing, name-calling, using the children as messengers, and the like. There were outside factors, she knew; her father had likely slept with his secretary, although this was never confirmed and frankly didn’t matter to her. Neither parent had remarried, and there was plenty of money to go around, so Ashley and her younger sister had spent the rest of their childhood shuttling back and forth between their parents’ two estates.

  Worried about a potential scene at her wedding two years ago, Ashley had given her mother a stern warning not to cause trouble at what was to be one of the biggest events of her life, to which her mother had promised, “I’ll be on my best behaviour, cross my heart.”

  During the wedding reception, as Ashley was coming out of the bridal dressing room after freshening up her make-up, she caught sight of two familiar figures across the room sitting at the bar; it was her parents, cosying up to each other over mint juleps. Infuriated, she walked over to them, grabbing her skirt in one hand and waving her pointer finger with the other, saying, “You two are unbelievable,” and refused to speak to either of them for the rest of the night.

  Sarah was somewhat confused – wasn’t the fact that her parents might get back together a good thing? Isn’t that what all children of divorced parents want?

  “Hell, no,” Ashley responded. “They made my childhood a complete mess; they acted like children and they are still acting like children, to this day.” She breathed heavily and gritted her teeth, obviously still feeling very emotional about the situation.

  “I think when you decide to have kids, you have a greater responsibility to work things out, to be adults, even if it’s ‘hard’,” she continued, using air quotes around the last word.

  “But don’t people say, better to have parents who are divorced and happy rather than married but fighting all the time?” Sarah asked.

  Ashley answered that she thought, as parents, they had a duty first and foremost to guarantee the well-being of their children, and that meant overcoming whatever issues they had with each other, no matter how large: neither fighting all the time nor getting a divorce. In her opinion, she didn’t think people who had children should be allowed to get divorced, unless there were extreme circumstances, like physical abuse.

  Sarah listened intently, gaining a newfound respect for the “Asian marriages” she had often come across – parents of her friends who appeared to be stuck in loveless marriages, together only for the sake of the children. Hearing Ashley explain it in different words was enlightening. She might have to reconsider her firm position of certain divorce if Jason were to ever cheat on her, Sarah thought.

  Lunar New Year festivities had begun and Ruby’s school invited all the students to come dressed in traditional Chinese clothes. Sarah went to Chinatown and bought outfits for both kids, snapping a quick photo of them before Ruby headed off to school. As she was posting the photo on their family blog, she noticed that Eric’s right eye was turned in towards the centre. She sent the photo to Jason, asking what he thought. Jason shrugged it off, replying that even Sarah herself looked a little cross-eyed sometimes in photos; after carefully reviewing photos from the past few months, however, Sarah was sure there was something wrong.

  She took Eric to an ophthalmologist, and sure enough, the diagnosis was amblyopia, also called lazy eye, a condition in which his eyes were not properly aligning with each other. It was not uncommon, affecting as much as 5% of the population, and the treatment was to wear an eye patch for three hours a day over the strong eye, to ensure the weaker eye was working. Eric was also extremely far-sighted, they discovered, needing bifocal glasses to help him focus his eyes when looking at things up close.

  Eric was a stubborn child, easily angered by small things Sarah did or didn’t do; the “stern voice” method she had used on Ruby at the same age was completely ineffective with her second child. She could not conceive trying to get him to wear an adhesive eye patch, even if it was decorated with cool “boy” graphics like planes and basketballs, over his left eye every single day. The paediatric specialist, a kind, round-faced Singaporean who had trained in the US, stressed to her the importance of wearing the patch; it was critical to address the problem early, she said, as the risk of vision loss in the lazy eye was not to be taken lightly.

  And so, Sarah resorted to the only method that worked: pure and simple bribery. Eric was allowed one piece of candy when he put on his eye patch, and if Ruby was home, she also got one, in the spirit of camaraderie. By the second week, whenever Sarah called out, “Time to wear the eye patch,” Eric had already been conditioned to answer, “Then I get a candy,” heading straight for the bowl of sweets she had placed on the counter next to the box of adhesive eye patches. One day, Jason questioned whether or not giving a two-year-old candy every day was a good idea and Sarah exploded.

  “Why don’t you try getting him to wear his eye patch just once,” she said to him, sharply. “You didn’t even think he needed to go see the eye doctor!”

  Jason quickly backed down, although he didn’t truly understand the situation until one Sunday afternoon, in a show of support to little Eric, he decided to try wearing an eye patch himself. He didn’t even last five minutes, saying to Sarah, “Man, it is really hard to function without both eyes.” Feeling truly sad for the little guy, he took Eric out to the convenience store that afternoon and let him pick out anything he wanted to add to the candy bowl.

  Of course, it was a treatable disease and fairly minor if Sarah compared it to hundreds of other, more serious, conditions some parents had to face. She was hyper-sensitive to other people’s stares, though, preferring to keep Eric at home or with close friends when wearing the patch. Still, there were many occasions when they had to go out, eliciting constant commentary that she had to address. Some people were genuinely concerned, asking if he had had an accident or recent surgery, some were reassuringly supportive, saying that they themselves, or someone they knew, had worn a patch when they were young and were fine now, but most just stared without saying anything; even Eric, at age two, was perceptive enough to notice the ogling.

  His thick glasses were the cause of even more remarks; they had let Eric choose his own frames, a red bendable pair with a head strap, an Italian brand only available in a few spectacle shops in Singapore. Because he required bifocals, the lab was unable to make them using the ultra-thin lenses that were ubiquitous now in Asia. So, little Eric was now walking around wearing bright red, thick-lensed bifocal glasses, drawing the attention of people everywhere, especially well-meaning, but poor-mannered, older people.

  Singapore had one of the highest rates of myopia in the world; it was a nation where 80% of people over the age of 18 required glasses, yet locals stopped her constantly, amazed that a boy as young as Eric would need glasses, asking annoying questions like, “So young, wearing specs already, ah?” or “Why your boy wearing glasses? Because doctor say so, is it?”, as if there was the possibility that Sarah had gone out and purchased glasses of her own accord for her two-year-old son.

  At the beginning, she resisted the urge to respond with a sarcastic comment, but still felt the need to explain that he was far-sighted; he was born like that, it wasn’t because she had allowed him to play video games for hours on end. Eventually, though, she got to the point where she just nodded without answering or pretended not to understand when people asked her questions.

  She worried for Eric, nevertheless, as she looked forward a few years to when they returned to the US; kids could be merciless, she knew, and a boy with Coke-bottle glasses would certainly not be spared. In contrast, she observed the local students here, in their white school uniforms, girls with loose ponytails and make-up-less faces glistening in the Singapore heat. They sat in group circles at the mall, with their backpacks and school books behind them, talking and drinking bubble tea out of fat straws in cups with sealed plastic lids. She wondered if there was some logic to staying here, in a country where the smart, nerdy guy with glasses was the most popular guy in the class.


  chapter 14

  TOP GUN

  AFTER THE MESS of Chad’s birthday night, the Crew took it easy for a while, continuing with trivia nights but generally lying low on the weekends, avoiding Club Street and definitely not going anywhere near Orchard Towers. One Sunday, Carys invited Jason and Sarah to go see Top Gun with her and Ian. It was playing at Fort Canning, an open-air area located at the top of a hill in a small historic park, requiring climbing about 100 steps if you were walking, or accessible by car up a winding, narrow road.

  Things were still icy between Jason and Sarah, Sarah still fuming over (1) Jason’s decision not to come home with her the night of the arrest, and (2) indirectly, his drinking. She was not a heavy drinker herself, and couldn’t sympathise with him in the least. To be fair, he wasn’t asking for any sympathy; he recognised he should have gone home with her, but he also didn’t think that his drinking had been the cause of him getting pulled into the brawl and getting arrested that night.

  When he tried to vocalise this belief, Sarah shut him down, reading the arrest record back to him, “You were arrested for ‘Misconduct in Public by a Drunken Person’! How can you say your drinking had nothing to do with it?”

  In any event, Sarah thawed enough to agree to go to the event; it was one of Jason’s favourite movies, and Sarah confessed that she had never seen the film from start to finish, and had watched only clips here and there. She had once had a paralegal, though, who had had the entire script memorised – some kind of fraternity hazing – so she knew more or less how the story went. Jason was shocked when he found this out; he couldn’t believe that they had known each other for so long and he had not known that fact about his wife.