Rewriting the Footnotes

About seven years ago, I began corresponding with an old college friend, a refreshing midlife reconnection that has become a valued and supportive friendship. But something he wrote recently seemed so untrue that I couldn’t help but feel an immediate detachment: “Your husband has given you such an interesting life.”

He’s not the first to voice this fantasy. Last year, we were entertaining a visiting Nashville couple at a gorgeous, candlelit jazz bar in downtown Bangkok, where we have lived for eight years, when the man — a powerful, intelligent, and well-respected friend of ours — leaned across the table, clicked his gin and tonic against my husband’s glass and said, “Curt, you’ve given your family such a wonderful life.” This man is progressive, thoughtful, funny, someone I admire deeply. But his words landed like a gut punch.

I can conjure in my mind’s eye a man reading this essay — brows furrowed, head atilt, two fingers of his right hand resting on his forehead — and thinking, Where the hell is she going with this? But the women are nodding, knowingly anticipating both my befuddlement and the quiet truth I’m about to articulate.

We have lived abroad for 15 years. First, seven years in France. Now eight years (and counting) in Thailand. The kind of places that would make Christmas cards look exotic and Instagram posts appear smug — if I had the energy for either of those. But the reality is a lot less glamorous: climbing the Paris Metro steps holding a sleeping toddler, drying clothes on radiators in a tiny frigid apartment, being dressed down by a stranger in the Monoprix for buying milk chocolate instead of dark, and trying unsuccessfully for nearly a decade to identify the bleach in Thai grocery stores, as the state of my white T-shirts could attest. And not least, the packing and repacking of a life, the folding of a career until it fits neatly into the overhead compartment of someone else’s dream.

I was once an editor with deadlines who nurtured and published the kinds of stories that sought to serve up justice. Now I teach teenagers who yawn in three languages and whose digital lives are so all-consuming that they struggle with basic social interaction. I have coached varsity track and field in 107-degree heat, my ambition wilting on the asphalt like a neglected petunia. I have launched a series of reinventions that would make Madonna tired. I became a teacher not so much because I have always dreamed of shaping young minds, but because teaching is one of the few professions that travels as easily as a diplomat’s wife.

Don’t get me wrong. My experiences with young people and the relationships I have with talented educators have been enriching and interesting, and I have discovered much to cherish in my shape-shifting career and my adventures with my family — including traveling to more than two dozen countries and making lifelong friends around the world. But this full life also represents yielding to someone else’s opportunity and an acceptance that I will probably never experience the professional apex that I was still climbing toward when I left the United States. I left behind a well-established career and deep roots, not just for my husband but so that my children would have more opportunities than I did and a more expansive worldview.

In between career shifts, I have translated phone bills I didn’t understand and made appointments with pediatricians in languages I struggled to speak. I have found plumbers, tutors, speech therapists, and occasionally myself, wandering unfamiliar streets looking for a taste of home.

He has given you such an interesting life.

No one ever means any harm by these remarks. But they never quite recognize the arithmetic of it either — that all my husband’s gains, our family’s gains, have been quietly balanced against my own personal losses. Over the last decade and a half, I have faded into the cultural periphery, becoming a footnote. And the irony — the sweet undeniable irony — is that my family couldn’t have had this life without me.

My perspective is my friends’ observation flipped on its head. I have been the invisible infrastructure holding up the adventure — the sherpa of our international lives. I have coordinated international moves, managed commutes and drop-offs, fashioned balcony gardens from drawers discarded on a Paris street, learned how to papier-mâché to save money on piñatas, and taken work that didn’t conflict with anyone else’s schedule. In Paris, I once had a freelance gig with a Microsoft magazine working on California time, which meant taking team calls at 1 a.m.

We packed up our lives in six checked bags and set out on a new life in which I found myself raising children in an aggressive, unfamiliar city while my partner was often off traveling the world. It was all my choice. And I don’t regret it. I’m even a little nostalgic for that drab fifth-floor furnished flat with the Naugahyde couch. I only note how easily society mistakes my sacrifices as his gift to us all. I don’t resent my life, only the impression some people seem to have of it.

I’m now 56 and invisible in many ways. But that invisibility has its advantages. It allows me to observe, to really see, the absurdities of power, the way the world discounts the work that doesn’t appear on CVs or award lists. It gives me a vantage point from which to notice all the ways women’s unpaid labor quietly makes possible what society loudly celebrates in men.

There is also a freedom in being discounted as the trailing spouse. No one expects much of me. I’ve been given permission to forsake ambition.

People tell me I should feel lucky. And I do, in the sense that I’ve seen the world — though often while managing chaos, frustration, and the occasional lonely afternoon in a foreign city. But luck is not the point. The point is that my part in this life is no less essential than my husband’s — and that countless women everywhere are keeping the world spinning with work no one bothers to notice.

Maybe I didn’t discard ambition, after all. I just rewrote it — in smaller, quieter margins. The footnotes tell a story, too. You just have to read them.

 

Copyright©️ 2025 by Liz Garrigan. All rights reserved.