Garden leave / Gardening leave

As most of you know, my husband is in-between jobs and was put on 3 months Garden leave from July to September.  It's been an interesting period, coupled as it's been with us relocating, settling into Singapore and the kids starting a new school - actually it couldn't have come at a better time.  His big dilemma has been from the start how to make sure he doesn't "squander" this perhaps once in a life-time chance.  I'm there with him, having been on circumstance imposed garden leave for the last 10 or so years.

Suddenly he's seeing how easy it is to be busy all day every day, all month and not really have very much to show for it.  Sure the plants are potted (yes he has actually been gardening a bit) and the pictures are hung and the house is looking pretty much sorted out.  His in-tray is pretty empty, and miracles upon miracles he's actually even learned how to use the printer and scanner (I kid not, usually I did that for him at home and his secretary at work).  It was a little more difficult to try and teach him where to find the files he'd scanned or otherwise created, but we even managed that one rainy afternoon.  He's not quite at the point where he'll google a solution, he'd far rather shout for me to come and sort it out for him.  Amazed too at the fact that the "shift" button (to select multiple items) seems to work only when I'm in the vicinity ... but that's another story.

A few weeks back we had some friends over for dinner and one of them told how he'd had a year's garden leave.  The rest of us couldn't imagine the luxury.  He was regretful.  He'd wasted the entire year he admitted.  It had just slipped away much to his frustration and he regretted not using it.  That is much of the gist of one of the few articles I found on garden leave.   It seems that men, as is their habit don't really like seeking out advice from those who've been there before to see the what's and how's of it all.  God, I could point them to a couple of ex-career women with kids who'd be very happy to explain the ropes.  Including the emotional nooses around your neck.

I'm extremely surprised that someone hasn't come up with the idea of using something like Volunteer spot where people on garden leave can sign up to do some meaningful charity work pro-bono which wouldn't be in breach of their contracts.  Most of the websites I did find, dealt with the legal ramifications of garden leave and working or not working during it.  Seems like it's really hard to let go of the work thing.  Even while you're being paid not to work.

Next week my husband is off to do a 10 day silent retreat.  I'd dissuaded him from the consumptive alternative of traveling the world or yet another vacation.  I don't think he wanted to do that type of travel anyway - at least not on his own, and let's be honest all of his mates are currently working.

Garden leave.  I think that's how I'm going to see my time not working.  Ties in with my pruned tree feeling.

choosing your analogy ...

it could make all the difference.

The last few days, I've been doing the rounds of coffee mornings (2 kids, 2 grades 2 trips), meet the teacher, AWA (american woman's association) newcomer event.  I'm a bit fatigued out on that type of thing. It's not my kind of thing to start off with - I usually just end up talking to one person the whole time, but I had my husband to bolster the process.  I was about to chicken out the other day, and in the end said, if you go I'll go.  If it were up to me I'd not go on my own.  I just feel awkward and out of place and don't know how to start conversations and how to get them anywhere beyond how long you've been here, what your husband does etc.  Sometimes though, you do scratch the surface.

Maybe it's better not to.  It's raw inside there.  "I don't exist" is a common lament.  I can't sign for anything as a dependent, I have no function, I've given up my career, my job, my car, my home...

The hardest I guess is the people in their mid-life who are doing this for the first time.  They've not been endlessly re-starting, re-creating, re-establishing themselves since a little past pre-teenage years.  They've arrived here, often with teenage kids and wow.  What a shock.

Another friend of mine has just relocated to part of north america.  We've been getting missives from her too.  It's tough.  In a way I have to smile.  Often this type of mail comes from people who never replied to your own missives at the start of your expat career.  When you met up with them, could never understand how you could complain that life was a tad difficult.  That it wasn't that simple fitting into a new culture (even if they supposedly spoke the same language).  That things were different.  Just different enough to make things take a lot longer.  That the local people weren't lined up with flower garlands waiting to invite you into their lives.  That sometimes the best you could hope for was to be treated with polite indifference.

I was thinking about it.  I seriously advised one lady that she'd have to let go of all of her attachments to everything at home, in herself and in life and do some meditation as it would make it all easier for her in the long and short term.  She looked at me as if I was a half crazy hippy, but hopefully it did sound a chord with her (I wouldn't advise this to just any old person - she looked like she was half receptive to the idea).

When you move you have to choose your analogy.  And I think there probably are several to choose from but I think I've come across two dominant ones.

The first is that your life has become a shattered mirror.
So you spend all your physical and emotional energy in trying to pick up the pieces and glue them back in some semblance of what it all used to be like.  It's very time consuming. It's frustrating, tough and at the end of the day, there are going to be cracks.  Bits that didn't quite fit together because micro pieces that make it complete went missing along the way.  It's a nobel cause of course.  And it keeps you busy.  And if you're busy, you don't go insane from inactivity and uselessness and boredom.

The second is that you are a pruned fruit tree
As good gardeners and farmers know, in order for a tree to grow, thrive and be productive pruning has to occur from time to time.  Out here in the tropics that pruning may appear really severe.  Each pruning season I'd walk up Mount Davis Path, and the senior citizens would have done the necessary on my favorite trees, the ones that have leaves of white and pink.  And I'd think, this time, they've gone too far.  Impossible that there could be any regrowth.  Oh how terrible. How ugly, how bare.
But regrow it does.  New and beautiful and fresh leaves.  Abundant flowers, fruit, if it's a fruit tree.  Not little bitter, sour, shriveled fruit but fruit that is large and luscious and the way it should be.

I'm trying this time to let go of the mirror and embrace the fruit tree.

I wish someone had said this to me years ago.  I don't know that many organizations give the right type of advise to expats.  It's all about finding the supermarkets with your home produce and how to reproduce a life lost.  Where to find the glue for the broken mirror and to buy extra bits for the fallen and lost.  Or maybe I don't hang around long enough at those newcomer events.

yoo godda bamboo pole?

No I didn't.  He looked at me in amazement as if my life, my very existence here in Singapore could not be justified without the necessary bamboo pole in my possession.  It was the pest control man.  The bees before breakfast had gone beyond a slight amusing anecdote on living in the jungle.  Now that school had started, it meant that the household too had to start around 6am.  A good hour before the sun started.  And that meant that each and every light that got switched on (even inside) was swarmed by bees within seconds.  I put on my best, bossiest, I've lived in Africa tones of voices and declared that I didn't care what pest control had said before about bees and jungles and nature, if they had such a super-fast response time, they had to be nesting REALLY close to the house, particularly to the master-bathroom.  I insisted that the man of the house contacted the landlord and pest control and pulled out all the stops to protect kith and kin and particularly my fragile sanity at that ungodly hour of the morning.

I know all about how useful honey bees are, and I'm all for them.  I agreed with both pest control companies and the Singapore government, that the bees would not, should not be killed.  But, I added, if we carried on the way we'd been going I was having a couple of hundred dead kamikaze bees each morning, which was hardly good for the morale of the hive in any event.  Not to mention my kids freaking out as bees got tangled in their hair on the way to their breakfast toast.

In the end they came, and hence the need for the bamboo pole, to attach to other poles to paint a substance over and around the house where they'd been hiving and nesting away all these months.  Apparently this substance advices them that they'd be better off re-establishing themselves elsewhere, and then everyone will be happy.

This morning a few solitary loners passed by and got shooed out the window from me.  The first calm morning in weeks.

Later, we went to the Whampoa market and found buckets like this one full of poles.  Even brightly decorated ones.  I didn't buy one. I wasn't in a pole buying kind of mood today.   But we couldn't find what we really wanted - an old fashioned broom for sweeping up the many leaves around the house and in the gutters.  The old shop keepers one after another told us that they used to have them, but they're all sold out and they can't find any suppliers anymore.  Sad.

Fertilizer ...

It's my new mantra for when I'm feeling like things are getting on top of me and exaggerating the importance of issues.

I went for a long walk in the cemetery near our house the other day.  All those tombstones and graves, one after another.   Little clue with most as to who the were and what they'd achieved. Whether they'd been happy or sad, frustrated or fulfilled.  Some (according to a piece of paper) had taken care and decided in detail how they were to be buried with which ornaments.  I guess more than one had given thought to this. And then, I came across this one.  It relativized everything.  You plan, you sweat, you worry.  And then after a few decades what does it all matter, you're dead and there's a huge tree growing right through the middle of your grave.  Fertilizer. That's all it's come to.