10,706 km Away
Hardships of being with a humanitarian worker
When Audrey, my wife, left the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to meet me in Colombia after being apart for six months, I never expected we’d have an argument almost immediately. Sitting on bar stools at a simply decorated Japanese restaurant, I remember her asking me about starting a family.
I wasn’t ready to have that discussion.
After 14 years together I still wasn’t ready to have a child. Yet four years prior, when all our friends seemed to have babies, she had already started pressuring me to have a baby.
It was a hard time in our relationship. We had been together for ten years and I still wasn’t ready for it. I felt like I was preventing her from having what she desired most.
At the time, I had two options: have a baby with her even if I wasn’t ready or let her go because I couldn’t give her what she wanted. I hated both options. Outsides of that, we were a perfect couple.
After much thinking, I decided to try for a third option: agree to have a baby with her, but only when I’ll be ready. She agreed, and we had not had the discussion until, five years later, we met up after her mission in the DRC.
To put you in context, while she was away on Doctors Without Borders missions, I was living a nomadic life all around the world. It was a lifestyle that was almost perfect for both of us, except for the fact that we’d always be apart for six months at a time.
If she was to quit doing missions abroad, she needed something equally fulfilling to do to keep thriving. Similarly, I wanted to live somewhere that would feel like I’m abroad.
Her “something” was a baby and a job in public health. That reopened the baby talk. And so, her reentry into my life wasn’t the happy moment I was expecting.
During her last six-month mission, I mostly stayed in Medellin, Colombia. I saw many travelling couples and kept dreaming of the day I’d spend time here with Audrey. I was picturing going parasailing with her, going to the coffee region, going to the mountains and the beach, trying a bunch of new restaurants, and more.
