If you have ever packed up your entire life – your career, your friendships, your routines, the coffee shop where everybody knew your order – and moved to a new country because your partner got an opportunity too good to turn down, then you are in exactly the right place.
Welcome to One Trailing Spouse. This is a blog written by a woman who followed her family to Nairobi, Kenya, and found something she did not expect: a continent so vast, so beautiful, and so endlessly surprising that the act of following someone else’s path eventually led her to a life she would have chosen herself.
“Trailing spouse” is a funny phrase. It implies you are behind, catching up, one step removed from the person who made the decision that changed both your lives. And honestly, in the beginning, it feels that way. There is a particular kind of disorientation that comes with arriving somewhere new where you do not have a role yet, where you are not a professional or a colleague or a neighbour – you are just someone’s partner, introduced at events with a half-sentence of context and expected to figure out the rest.
But Kenya has a way of waking you up. The size of the sky. The Maasai Mara at sunrise. The chaos and warmth and extraordinary food of a Nairobi Friday evening. The first time your child comes home from school having learned a word in Swahili and taught it to you. These things do not fix the displacement, exactly, but they replace it with something better: a genuine life in a genuinely extraordinary place.
This blog is about that life. It is about travel – safaris in Kenya, weekends on the coast, school holiday trips across East and Southern Africa. It is about family – raising children abroad, navigating expat schools and new friendships and the particular challenge of parenting in a country you are still learning yourself. And it is about the slower, less Instagram-friendly work of building a home somewhere new.
If you are a trailing spouse, a travel-curious parent, or simply someone who has ever wondered what it is actually like to live in Africa rather than just visit it, pull up a chair. There is a great deal to talk about. And the view from here is extraordinary.