I Went Backwards in Pay So His Career Could Climb. Then Came the Divorce.

I was wheelchaired onto my flight to Hong Kong.

A week before the move, I cleared out our entire apartment in Canada myself. My ex had company movers coming, but someone still had to deal with the small things, the perishables, the cupboards, the cleaning, so I did it all, fast. Then I went to work out the next few days without warming up, did a butterfly stroke in the pool so my dad could show his friends how well his daughter swims, and snapped something in my back. I couldn't sit without pain for six months.

That's how I landed in the city where his career was about to take off. In a wheelchair, for a move I said yes to without a second thought.

We had just put a deposit down on a house in Canada. He hadn't heard back from his boss about the Hong Kong promotion and figured the opportunity was gone. The same day we handed over that cheque, the news came through. For a moment we considered keeping the house: he'd work in Hong Kong, I'd stay in Canada, and as a flight attendant I could fly back and forth. We got the deposit back. We moved.

I even threw myself a "retirement" party. Twenty-five flight attendants at high tea, saying goodbye to my flying career. Halfway through the party I heard that a more junior FA had been granted a leave of absence, so I jumped on it and eventually secured two years off instead of quitting outright. Looking back, a small part of me was hedging. The rest of me was already gone.

Here are three things that move cost me. None of them showed up in the settlement.

1. The career I set down

I didn't look for work for months in Hong Kong. Partly the back rehab. Mostly, I was scared. I'd been a lifeguard, then in the military, then a flight attendant. I had never done an office job in my life. When I finally found one, it was entry level, in the admin department of an international school. My pay went backwards 30% from my flying job, and I was working more. Hong Kong hours.

And I thought that was completely normal. There's a Chinese saying: when you marry a chicken, you follow the chicken. When you marry a dog, you follow the dog. Of course I was going to follow where my husband goes. That's what I thought I was supposed to do as a wife.

The whole point of the move was his ceiling. In Canada, as an Asian man in banking, he was going to hit glass. In Hong Kong he could climb, and he did. Two to three times his old salary within the year. His logic made sense. It's just that nobody, including me, ever asked what I was setting down so he could climb.

2. The years nobody counted

The pay cut was visible. Everything else I gave was not.

I was born in Hong Kong, so I had the documents, no visa needed. My ex was Taiwanese and couldn't speak the local language, so I translated the city for him, in Cantonese, daily. Back in Canada I had paid half the rent on the apartment his mom owned. In Hong Kong, where he was now out-earning me many times over, I covered the utilities. He handled all the investing because he was the finance guy. I always wanted to learn, but he would throw out these financial jargons that sound complicated and never really explain what they mean.

My most fertile years I was with him. I didn't care about the money, I just wanted to stay in the marriage.

About a year into Hong Kong, I felt him grow more critical of me. As if the gap in our earnings was changing how he saw me. That part is my speculation, and I'll never get to confirm it. But I remember the feeling of becoming smaller in a marriage I had crossed an ocean for.

3. The stigma I walked through alone

Then came the part no one prepares you for: being the divorced woman. Our youth as women, the opportunity cost of being divorced, the stigma we had to navigate, all those things are invisible. Society doesn't honour invisible emotional labour as value. There's no line item for it. No form has a box for "she translated your life for a year" or "she restarted her career at entry level at an age when yours was compounding."

The part I couldn't receive

Two months before he asked for the divorce, he started putting money into my account. He gave me some stocks. He told me I should look into higher education, to better my future. When the ask finally came, I didn't care about the money at all. I just wanted to stay in the marriage. He was perfect on paper. I thought we had a great marriage.

He offered me a settlement, on a form he found online. I didn't ask for anything, I didn't negotiate, I agreed to what he paid and I think that was more than fair.

Read that sentence again, because I lived inside it for years. More than fair. As if the years I spent with him was not worth what he was willing to pay me.

Here's what undoes me a little, even now: he gave it without being asked. He paid because he knew what it cost me. The man who was leaving could see the value of what I'd given. The woman who had given it could not.

It took me years to see what he apparently already knew. The career I set down, the years I gave, the stigma I carried, all of it was real value, whether or not anyone ever put a number on it. The settlement was never a measure of my worth. It couldn't be. The things that cost me the most were never on the form.

So let me ask you the question I couldn't ask myself back then: what did your marriage cost you that never showed up on paper?

If you're not sure where to even start with that, take the Glow-Up Quiz. It meets you where you feel it the most right now, whether that's your identity, your body, or your money.

Take the Quiz HERE

Because those were the years no one put a price on. And you get to be the first one who counts them.