Posh is a good role model for expat wives

Celebrity expats have been in the news a lot over the last few days. Hugh Laurie has been discussing life in LA (“Do we still drive on the left? Do we still have pounds?”) and Kelly Brooks has decided to become a “trailing girlfriend”, moving to Australia with Danny Cipriani when he starts with his new rugby team, the Melbourne Rebels.

But of all the high-profile Brits living abroad, Victoria Beckham has to be the expat’s expat. She was seen organising another children’s birthday minus her husband last weekend in Los Angeles. Ok, her husband is playing football in Milan, not working at a mine in north China, but I’m sure many expat women can identify with her. She’s managed to carve out a career while relocating to Spain and then America, raising a family and keeping her marriage going; no mean feat in modern times. The much-derided Posh is a great role model for women living abroad. Even with her platinum-gilded brand of expat life, the same issues affect her as the rest of us. Birthdays are missed, schools are changed and relatives in Britain miss them, especially at critical times when people are taken sick.  Expat women have to be super women, often dealing with their husbands or partners being away for long periods doing the  jobs they relocated  to do. Although life abroad can be enriching and enlightening, women often struggle to match their skills sets to their new foreign climes. And if they have children, they have the extra challenge of providing as settled a home life as they can, whilst people come in and out of their lives. Janet Moxham is a committee-member of Brits Abroad,  the Shanghai expat group nominated for a Telegraph Expat Best of British award. Her husband works in north China for a petrochemicals company, while the family is based in Shanghai. “I’m lucky if I see him for a day every other week. Many people can’t live like this,” she admitted. And while Janet may not wear Louboutins for the school run, or hang out with Katie Holmes, she knows what it takes to make life abroad work. “You need a good support network. You need your friends, here. It was very daunting for me when I first arrived.” Three hundred families are registered with Brits Abroad and they enjoy a range of helpful services and events including orientation sessions, coffee mornings and even mahjong (Chinese chess) competitions. “We have informal coffee mornings for people new to Shanghai, where you can ask questions like ‘Where can I buy a jar of Marmite?’,” she said. And – who knows? – maybe even Posh has asked that in her time. Return to the Expat front page