I was writing an email to a friend today and I was finally able to express what it is that I have been feeling since we have been in Thailand. Loneliness. I am lonely. It is frustrating because here I am in a beautiful, fascinating country and I cannot appreciate it. I have hired help to enable us to free up our time and to really experience what life is like as an expat, yet I am still stressed every afternoon when Marcus comes home, the kids still frustrate me and I still find myself losing my patience everyday with them and Marcus. He on the other hand has changed, he is much more relaxed and carefree which only adds to my frustration. I am still calling myself the "physco bitch" still snapping and yelling and nothing seems to be good enough for me, I am still searching for that "something" and the problem is I don't know what that "something" is.
I can imagine my friends back home reading this and saying to themselves "come on Ally, get real, look at where you are and what you are experiencing and you are still complaining!" But here is the clincher, the source of all this frustration is loneliness, I have none of my close friends around me or even nearby, I cannot just pop out for a coffee or a play date, I cant just drive down to my mother in laws house to say Hi. I share a glass of wine with myself. I have no one to gossip with, no one to laugh with, you know the type of laughter that makes you pee. I miss everything about home. I seem to have simply picked up my whole life and routine and put it all on a plane and dumped it in another country, the same stresses and worries and arguments have followed us here. When we made the decision to take this trip we were both secretly hoping to leave all of the niggling little worries and fights behind and start a new and exciting chapter. But it has not happened like that, we have a house that looks like any house from Australia, the weather is exactly like North Queensland and if I stay home for a few days and don't venture out past my front gate I swear I could be living in Cairns.
I remember reading a book about Thailand and it saying that expats have 2 ways of living in Thailand, Encapsulation, where you become a part of the community of travellers or expat community, where you live in your big house, eat imported foreign food, watch satellite TV, join expat clubs and shop in expat supermarkets. The only Thais you converse with are the maid, the driver, the gardener or the nanny. It is very easy over here to recede into your own little bubble or world and live exactly like you would if you were back in your home country.
Or there is Integration, where the visitor removes the barriers that separate him/her from the Thais and slowly stops using the expat community for friendship and entertainment and feels increasingly more at ease with the Thai people and culture. It says that the person has everything to gain this way and little to lose but their intolerance. However to integrate you need to be able to speak the language much better than I do at present and you need alot more confidence than I have.
When we moved here I imagined us to be adventuring every weekend, visiting wonderful and interesting places. But we mostly hang out at home or go to the shops, we stopped doing the tourist thing months ago. Thailand is not a country built for children, the sidewalks are for selling things on and not for walking on, the streets are very dangerous to cross especially with a pram and a small child, the public transport is even harder. I don't even know how to call a cab, there isn't a dispatcher like back home, you actually need a drivers personal phone number or if you happen to be by yourself you can take the risk of hailing down a taxi motorbike and pray you don't get killed. But since I have the kids it really slows me down in what I can do each day and I end up doing the least stressful option and go shopping in the super huge multi-story shopping complex where everything is twice as expensive as home. Whoever said Thailand is cheap was fooling themselves.
I find it hard simply to meet new people. I tried the other week at a mothers group, but most of them seemed so pretentious (or maybe they thought I was) but I only really got to talking to one other mother and that was through an introduction from a mutual friend and we happen to be from the same city. She seems really down to earth and normal so I hope to be able to develop more of a friendship with her and she also has a son who is about 4 so I am also hoping Judd can make a new friend since our only friends with kids left for home last week. It was really quite sad as Judd was really good friends with their 2 boys and they played so well together, he talks about them everyday and asks me when they are coming back. Poor kid, it must be so hard to be taken away from not only your friends but your family as well. I need to make more of an effort to make new friends not just for my own sanity but also for the kids as well.
I had these grand ideas of taking time each day to exercise, meditate and to research more about Buddhism and the art of meditation and to write, write about not only my experiences but my self discovering along the way. Well at least I have managed to write, the other stuff I still hope to do but I seem to be very stuck in my everyday routine.
I am tired of complaining, of bitching and of snapping at everyone. I feel so shallow and empty and I wonder how much longer it is going to take to fill this gaping hole I have inside and I wonder where and how this hole got there in the first place?
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