Facts

Carmen was born in Spain and spent the first part of her life in her hometown Murcia until she was 20.

She is a mum to two children and works in the oil and gas industry.

Until now, Carmen moved countries four times and she can imagine to move again.

Carmen is another mum I got to know through my son’s Spanish football friends in his year group in school.

Normal life

Carmen used to live a rather “normal” life. She spent her childhood and youth in Murcia and then started to study physics at her home town’s university. The last two years of her studies she spent in Madrid, well aware of the fact, that this was only possible, because her sister already lived and worked in Madrid by that time. Otherwise, her family would not have been able to pay for the expensive accommodation in Madrid!

After getting her degree in physics in 2005, Carmen was not sure what to do next, so she applied for several options.

1. She applied for a grant to stay in the research team of her university, where she was a member of the last year of her studies anyway.
2. She applied for a grant to train and work in an oil company.
3. She applied for a job to work on microscopes.

She was lucky, as she received the possibility to stay at her university and continue working in her research team. Only, when she was offered that possibility, she already had changed her mind! She did not like the research to be so slow and bureaucratic.

Carmen then received another acceptance and started to work on the microscopes, but after working for that company in Madrid for a month, she received the grant to work and train within the oil company!

As with that grant, Carmen would have the possibility to study in English for the first time in her life and to even go to Edinburgh for 3 months, so she quickly handed in her notice in her “old” job and decided to go with the oil company!

Now she says, back then, she did not even really understand what it meant to work for an oil company! She took that decision purely for the English and the entirely new possibilities for her and she was right, as this decision changed her life completely!

It was still at the interview process, that she met that young interesting man from Madrid. Both of them made it through the whole process and both of them started to train and work for the company. Only at the end of the one-year Master program, they fell for each other!

It was an intense year for Carmen, as she had to study whenever she could! The first three to four months, they were learning a lot, as all of her co-students were from all sorts of different backgrounds and they had to reach a common level first, before going deeper in the subjects.

For the first time in her life, Carmen was surrounded by people from a lot of different countries, they were all studying together in English and she loved it! She loved it to deepen her English and she loved it to be surrounded by everyone from all the different cultures!

New life

After finishing the Master program, Carmen received the offer to go to Argentina with the oil company and lucky her, her new boyfriend received an offer to go to Argentina too!

She was very excited for the opportunity to live abroad for the first time in her life, but because it was for the first time in her life, she was also rather anxious! For the first time, she would be far away from her family and even her boyfriend would not work in the same city as her!

In the end, she was not going completely alone, as others from the Master program were offered a job in Comodoro too.

I was writing about Comodoro in Ivon’s story (who Carmen met there eventually) already and Carmen likewise says, that it is not her favourite city, as especially back then, it was really very remote! It is also definitely not easy to get used to the weather, because the constant wind is quite challenging and there is no proper summer nor winter!

Nevertheless, Carmen enjoyed her experience in Comodoro very much! Because of its remoteness, the city had a lot of young people coming for work from all over Argentina and from other countries too. With their families being far away, the youth built up a lovely community, where they would stick together and support each other. They were young and carefree and enjoyed each other’s company in their free time!

One negative aspect of the remoteness of Comodoro for Carmen was, that although Carmen and her boyfriend were in the same country, it was not easy to see each other! The plane connections between Comodoro and Neuquén, where her boyfriend was working, were not very good, and so they spend hours and hours (up to 15 hours!!) on the bus to see each other at least every second month!!

After three years of living in Comodoro, Carmen was finally allowed to change jobs within the company and was then able to work in Neuquén too. That was wonderful of course, lastly, she was able to see her boyfriend every day! The city of Neuquén was also much more enjoyable, there was more to see and to explore and the weather was better there too! They stayed together in Neuquén for two more years.

Back to “normal”

In 2011, Carmen and her boyfriend moved back to Madrid, as Carmen’s first niece was born and she was missing her family a lot by that time. As Carmen is a family person, who is very close to her loved ones, she felt that she needed to resettle within her broader family again!

Still, returning to her “old home” was hard! People had moved on of course, as she had and although she lived in Madrid before, a lot of things had changed in the last five years! Carmen was struggling to reconnect with her friends and even with family, but in the end, she was happy, because her family and friends back home were exactly what she had missed and dearly needed!!

Life in Madrid went on, Carmen and her boyfriend both continued working in the same oil company and finally got married. They bought an apartment in the outskirts of Madrid to settle down and soon had their first child.

Maybe it was then, that Carmen started to notice how much time she was loosing, because of Madrid being that huge city as it was, where everything was moving super-fast! Besides work, there was not much time to see friends, as the working hours they had were very long!

Maternity leave back then was only four months, so Carmen took all of her holidays in addition to that to spend more time with her baby. After that, her mother in law took over, until her first child was able to start creche.

It was not easy for Carmen to hand over her little son to day care for such a long time that her working day was! So in the end, after struggling with herself, she asked for shorter working hours to be able to pick her child up from day care in reasonable hours.

Although her boss was being really nice about it, what is not very common in Spain, Carmen was still working more than her hours would have made possible and was send on business trips up to 10 days too…

With her second child, Carmen was already more informed and had learned from her experiences with her first son. This time, she did not reduce her working hours, but asked for home office for the remaining hours, which she would not work in the office because of picking up her children.

Carmen was lucky that just recently another woman had asked for the same, so for her it was a lot easier to get that allowance. She would work her remaining hours when the children were in bed and she stayed longer in the office on Fridays, when her husband was able to finish early.

Her children were growing and Carmen was trying to be with them as much as possible, always being in a hurry for pick up whilst managing commute and traffic.

At some point, Carmen’s and her husband’s job were getting a bit boring, as they worked in the same positions for a lot of years by then! They started to fantasize about going abroad again and soon they began to apply within their company for international jobs. As they needed two jobs at the same time, they had to reject some offers, but in the end, they both were offered jobs in Stavanger!

Expat life

Prior to moving to Norway with the whole family, Carmen had a few business trips to Stavanger. She knew, that Ivon, who she met in Comodoro, was already living there, so she received all of the first-hand information she needed.

Carmen and her husband were excited for the move and were looking forward to that opportunity, but especially with her older son, it was a different story!! He seemed to be very unhappy and sad, that they would move! He did not want to leave his friends behind and was being upset a lot!

As the children had changed Carmen’s mind setup, she started to question herself, whether they were doing the right thing! She definitely did not want her son to be unhappy! In the end, they took on the challenge and moved to Stavanger in summer 2018.

Their start in Stavanger was not easy at all. Surprisingly her older son settled in into school really quickly, maybe because he was in an English school in Madrid already.

It was her younger son, that Carmen got really worried about. He did not speak any English at all, when he started in the international nursery. He struggled a lot with his new surroundings and did not enjoy the huge amount of nature play with all the heavy rain gear at all! In Stavanger, children learn quickly, that rain is a part of the day and that the rain gear is their second skin!

Her son had a rough time and Carmen was feeling anxious for him, but on the other side, she had to put on a happy face at work and prove herself in her new job! This lasted until Christmas and only then Carmen was able to begin to relax, as finally her younger son got into a routine and started to enjoy his new life.

In the end, Carmen and her family had a really good time in Stavanger! They found a lot of Spanish friends and they also got very close with Ivon and her family! They enjoyed their jobs and also the fact, that in Norway, your job is not everything! They were able to spend more time with the children and enjoyed family life!

Carmen and her husband also appreciate the fact, that their children had the opportunity to live abroad and experience a multicultural international school. They learned to be open minded and how to be friends with children from loads of different cultures!

Carmen’s family was supposed to stay in Stavanger for three years, but because of COVID-19, they had to leave earlier like most of her Spanish colleagues in summer 2020.

The goodbyes were sad as always, but at least her older son was to return to his “old” school in Madrid and to his “old” friends. Carmen was very sad to leave, as she enjoyed the beautiful nature and she will definitely miss the work-life balance Stavanger was giving her husband and herself. On the other hand, she missed her family a lot once more, so she was really looking forward to seeing them more often again!

Home again

Carmen and her family moved back to Madrid nearly two months ago. Her husband and herself are working again, still in the same company and the children just started school.

For Carmen, it is very important to stay connected with her home country and she also wants her children to know where they belong/ where they come from. She wants her children to be as connected with her family in Spain as she is!!

Although Carmen enjoys living abroad, with all its opportunities, there is always a part of her suffering and missing home and her family a lot! That’s why she finds it very important, to come “back home” after each adventure!