Country-Hopping Gen X'er, Tabitha Sowden, on Straddling Cultures [Ep 41]

Tabitha Sowden's story of country hopping is reminiscent of today’s Gen Z digital nomads. But Tabitha’s a Gen X’er, born in 1966, and as a young adult in the 1980s, she was moving with ease between countries, not with her laptop and IPhone, since there wasn’t the technology that’s available today, but with her handcrafted jewelry, which she made in Brazil, and sold at markets in London, Milan, in Germany and back in Brazil. She says it was all a bit hippy’ish, but in-keeping with the time. Now living in Lisbon, she says she's too used to upping and moving to put down roots, but nevertheless, she's not feeling the urge, even after 7 years in Portugal, to move again, well, not yet, anyway.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I'm Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I'll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who've made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom - reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com. 

[00:00:47] Louise: Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 41 of Women Who Walk.

[00:00:52] Louise: My guest today is Tabitha Sowden. Tabitha's story of country hopping, as she refers to it, was intriguing to me because as a Gen Xer born in 1966, Tabitha's chosen lifestyle reminded me of today's Gen Z digital nomads. 

[00:01:13] Louise: However, Tabitha was country hopping, not with her laptop and IPhone, since as a young adult in the 1980s, there wasn't the technology that's available today, but with her handcrafted jewelry, which she made in Brazil and sold at markets in London, Milan, in Germany, and back in Brazil. She says it was all a bit hippy-ish, but in keeping with time. 

[00:01:40] Louise: Her ease moving country-to-country, and her creativity seems to have found its origins in her early childhood when her artist and designer parents moved their family from London to Milan, the capital of 20th century design. 

[00:01:59] Louise: From the age of two, Tabitha straddled Italian and English cultures. Never quite feeling she belonged to either, but traveling between both with some frequency. 

[00:02:11] Louise: Last December I met Tabitha at a Christmas bazaar in Estoril, outside Lisbon, where she now lives. There, she was selling her sculptured jewelry. 

[00:02:21] Louise: I subsequently met her and her mother for an afternoon tea early this year. Tabitha's Mother now country hops between Portugal and the UK, escaping the cold, gray English winters for the mild temperatures of Southern Europe.

[00:02:37] Louise: In some ways, Tabitha's life and story carries forward something of the choices her parents made back in the cultural revolution of the sixties, when after a decade of post-war austerity, a generation of young people began experimenting with music, fashion, and so on, leading to what is referred to as the swinging sixties counterculture. 

[00:03:02] Louise: I was curious to meet Tabitha's mum. I had images of her as a free-spirited mini-skirted mod, but of course, it's 2023 and Tabitha's mum is now a sweet, conservatively-dressed septuagenarian Grandma.

[00:03:18] Louise: Tabitha sent me a picture of her and her mum, taken just after their arrival in Italy. I've embedded it it in the transcript to this episode on my website. It's a fabulous black and white photo of Tabitha as a toddler and her mum, a model of 1960s hip and cool.

 [00:03:49] Louise: Welcome, Tabitha. You are currently living in Lisbon, but you were born in the UK in the mid-sixties, and then when you were two, your parents moved the family to Milan. Why did they make that move to Italy? 

[00:04:02] Tabitha: Hi, Louise. Nice to be talking to you. Yes, that's the beginning. That's where all my moving about started. My parents, both British, had met at art school a few years beforehand. My father is a designer, and in 1968 he got a job in Milan, and Milan being the center of design, that was all very exciting, and so off we all went. 

[00:04:27] Louise: And you said both your parents were artists, so your mum was an artist? 

[00:04:31] Tabitha: My mother studied fashion at art school. My father did actually study architecture, although he went on to do industrial design, furniture design.

[00:04:39] Louise: The mid-sixties, so London was really swinging at that point. And were they hip, cool, groovy, 1960s parents when they moved to Milan? 

[00:04:51] Tabitha: Definitely, it was the hippie movement. They were into the art world. Everything about them I think was very much living the sixties. When we moved to Milan, I don't have particular recollections, but as I got a little bit older and my memories start forming, I can definitely relate to memories of colorful clothes and my mum making me lots of things with flowery inserts and very flared jeans, mm-hmm, things like that, yes, definitely. 

[00:05:21] Louise: I think, what I was trying to learn from you is whether or not they were bohemian parents. 

[00:05:28] Tabitha: My memory of comparing to other parents was comparing to Italian parents. So I don't know whether my parents were bohemian because they were bohemian even in England or whether they were bohemian, just because they were British and not Italian. 

[00:05:44] Tabitha: My earliest childhood memories are in Italy and going to local Italian schools and other people's parents were all Italian and they were definitely not bohemian. They were definitely not flower power. But as I said, I wouldn't be able to say whether that was because of a different nationality or whether it was because my parents were particularly bohemian.

[00:06:09] Louise: At two, you're in Milan and you attend a local Italian nursery, and then you go into the state Italian primary school, do you have recollections of what that was like? For instance, were you the only non-Italian kid in nursery and then in primary school. 

[00:06:25] Tabitha: I went to very local schools, first it was a creche, and then it was Junior school. I was the only foreigner. I was the only one who had the bohemian parents you were referring to earlier. Everything was more unusual about my family. This is early seventies in Italy. Italy had always been a country of emigration until then, so immigration was quite an unusual thing, and something that only started in the seventies. I was the only foreigner, albeit a privileged foreigner, immigrating as a Northern European white family. In that sense, I'm aware of being a different kind of immigrant to other people, but I felt that I did stand out. I was different. My parents were unusual. They looked different. They dressed differently. And also I went to school and learned the language, my parents didn't, not immediately. So I think the first couple of years I was possibly acting as some kind of communicator. 

[00:07:26] Louise: Yeah. That, that would make sense because as you talk, I'm imagining that you were acculturating to a, a Italian culture and certainly Italian school system, and your parents were, presumably, maintaining their Britishness. Do you recall if that was in any way confusing, particularly when you went into secondary school, were you feeling torn between the two cultures? 

[00:07:54] Tabitha: It was just the way I'd grown up. I was the English girl in an Italian context. So I didn't have anything to compare it to. I spoke English at home and I spoke Italian at school. And at school, my friends were all Italian, the outside world was all Italian. That's all I knew. Then what happened is that at the age of 12, my family moved me to a British school in Milan. And so suddenly I went into a situation where theoretically I was going to be mingling with a whole load of like-minded families.

[00:08:29] Tabitha: But that wasn't the case for different reasons. One of the reasons is that the English-speaking children tended to be from where maybe one or both of the parents moved around for work, so diplomats, or children of very wealthy Italian families who wanted their children to have a British education. There was a minority of let's say, ordinary English families who happened to be living in Milan, which is what I was. 

[00:09:01] Tabitha: There was also an element of it that was to do with wealth and while I certainly did not come from an impoverished background or anything of the sorts, I also didn't come from a super wealthy family. Everyone else houses by the sea and houses in the mountains and all that kind of thing. So that was quite, I remember feeling quite uncomfortable about that.

[00:09:24] Tabitha: The whole identity of being just an ordinary British family who just happened to be living in Milan. I didn't meet other people like that. I did make three or four life friends there, people I'm still in touch with from 40 years later, or 45 years later. That makes it very special. But that didn't solve my identity. I still didn't fit in. 

[00:09:45] Louise: Yes. It's very clear as you talk us through this early phase in your life that you were definitely straddling cultures and that despite being in a British school you still were not part of a system that mirrored back to you a sense of who you are and perhaps where you came from. So then do you finish up school in Milan? 

[00:10:07] Tabitha: My family decided that I would go and finish my last year of high school in the UK. I was 17, quite young to go off and do it on my own, but my family did not move to the UK with me, they couldn't. So I spent a year going to a British school and I lived with a family in the UK as a paying guest. Something that used to be done fairly frequently. Boarding school was out of the question, I think mostly financial reasons, but also out of choice.

[00:10:38] Tabitha: So I spent a year in the UK, finished school, then I applied to art school and stayed there. Here I was going back to the UK where I would finally fit in, with British people and that didn't happen. So having spent the first 16, 17 years of my life feeling like the British girl in Italy, I then became the Italian girl in England. I stopped telling people I was in English cuz nobody believed me because I didn't speak quite like an English person. I guess my approach to life, my attitude, my expressions, my gesticulating was Italian. So I just started saying I was Italian, as a way of not having to answer questions or deal with complicated situations. I became the Italian girl in England and that's what I remained more or less. I spent five years in the UK from the age of 17 to 21, 22.

[00:11:40] Louise: Mm-hmm, and did you finish up art school there? 

[00:11:43] Tabitha: From finishing high school, I did a foundation course in an art school, and that was great. I always did lots of odd jobs as most students do, especially in the UK. In between, I applied to do a Bachelor of Arts in film. And in the summer, the end of my foundation course and the start of the Bachelor of Arts, I decided that I was going to do some traveling. Most people took gap years and went traveling. And I didn't know where to go and one evening in a social context, I met a girl who'd just come back from Brazil and she'd spent three months traveling by herself and she raved about it. And I said, right, that's where I'm going to go too. 

[00:12:25] Tabitha: So I did. I booked a three-month ticket. We're talking times where there was no mobile phones, no internet, I bought a copy of the South American handbook, got on my flight, and went off with my backpack, to a country I'd never been to, to a language I didn't speak on my own. I was 19 and it was life changing. It was amazing. 

[00:12:46] Louise: Can you talk us through then the next few years then, after this life-changing trip and perhaps what was life changing about? 

[00:12:55] Tabitha: I think it was amazing because it's an amazing country. It's beautiful, welcoming and the music, it was tropical, there were palm trees. From the most picture postcard, photographic opportunities, in Instagram opportunities, we'd call them these days. 

[00:13:10] Tabitha: I'd been told to be careful and I was, there were lots of things I didn't do as a young woman traveling on my own, but I never had any issue of any description. It was very liberating. Finally it felt like it was okay just to feel foreign. I did learn the language quite quickly, certainly enough to get by, probably my Italian, helping with that. I think it was just the freedom and the welcoming people that I met.

[00:13:37] Louise: I wonder if the culture had some familiarity after growing up in Italy.

[00:13:43] Tabitha: I don't know. I think it was so different culturally, and I went to lots of small places. I tended to stay in smaller villages. Lots of them were beach villages, very, very beautiful. I met other travelers as well. I met locals. It was just a taste of being young and being somewhere completely different. 

[00:14:01] Louise: You said a three month backpacking trip, but did you end up staying?

[00:14:05] Tabitha: I tried to say to my family, I might not come back and finish my degree, but that didn't go down very well. So I did go back. I didn't finish my degree. But I carried on with my life, but I told myself there and then that I would go back to Brazil one day and I would only go back when I could stay for as long as I wanted.

[00:14:26] Louise: When, when did you go back? 

[00:14:27] Tabitha: I went back about three years later. I'd started my Bachelor's, didn't finish that. Then I started working. I started a normal life. I got quite a good job, but the Brazil thing, it was in my head. I couldn't get it outta my system. In the meantime, I'd moved from London back to Milan, went back to being the British girl in Italy, having been the Italian girl in England for ages. And one day, I handed in my notice and bought a one year open ticket, and off I went to Brazil. 

[00:14:57] Louise: And what, what did you do there during that one year? 

[00:15:00] Tabitha: The first month I traveled with a friend. We had a very adventurous time, started in Venezuela, and then she went off to carry on with her life and I traveled overland, down through the Amazon to Manaus and then into Brazil to stay with a friend, a girl who I'd met on my first journey, who I still know today, very close friend, and then took some long overnight buses to different places, and met somebody who would turn out to be the father of my daughter, my husband, and stayed the full year with him. We lived in a small village on the beach in Brazil. 

[00:15:40] Louise: Is he British, Italian, Brazilian? 

[00:15:44] Tabitha: He's Brazilian. Originally from Brazilia, but we met in this small place called Trancoso, by the beach and that's where we lived and that's where we stayed. It was very exciting. It was a big love story for me. Definitely. Well, for both of us. 

[00:16:01] Louise: That sounds very sweet. When we started, I said, you're living in Lisbon, so at some point you're no longer in Brazil. Where did you go from Brazil once you left? 

[00:16:13] Tabitha: After my year with my partner, I had to leave the country cuz my ticket was running out and for visa purposes, I couldn't stay any longer in Brazil. Went back to Milan and he joined me shortly after. We got married quite quickly. There was an element of that that was paperwork. It's impossible to live in the same country unless you have tied the knot, unless you got official bits of paper. And then we spent the next four or five years traveling between Brazil and London, and Italy, and Germany. 

[00:16:48] Tabitha: There's a reason for all of this. We made Handcrafts together. We made jewelry and all sorts of accessories made from different types of coconut and different types of wood and some soap stone. It was a little bit hippie, hippie, but it was very creative. It was very good fun. It just about earned us a living. And it gave us the, the freedom, even the necessity, to move around because we would make things in Brazil and then we'd need to sell them and we would go to where there was an opportunity, either because there was big markets. Friends would say, there's a big fair going on here. Come to Germany for a while. Milan, we knew all the different places to go and sell and the same in London. Quite a lot of country hopping over three or four years. It became a kind of lifestyle. 

[00:17:38] Louise: And perhaps something that you were used to because that really is how you had led your life.

[00:17:43] Tabitha: Yes. It didn't feel at all unusual. There was nothing bizarre about it. It's just the way that our life was and that's just what we did. It did all come very naturally and there wasn't huge amounts of thought behind all of that, like planning.

[00:17:57] Louise: And you took your little girl with you? 

[00:17:59] Tabitha: The first four or five years were just the two of us. And then she was born in Germany in 1995. We would go selling at markets, she'd come with us. In between all of that, I decided to do a jewelry and silversmithing course in London cuz I wanted to perfect my manual skills. Although I'd learned a lot from my husband, I still felt it was a little bit limiting in terms of being able to move more upmarket, more sophisticated. And I loved the manuality of it, but I wanted to actually be taught something. 

[00:18:32] Tabitha: So I did a two-year jewelry and silversmithing course in London with my young daughter. I started it before she was born and finished it after she was born. It sounds crazy, but I was commuting between Germany and London because my course was in London, but my husband, he'd got himself set up with all the markets in Germany. He was based there, he was working there. 

[00:18:54] Louise: Mm-hmm. I'll have you tell us about your jewelry later on, but that's actually how we met at a Christmas bazaar where you were selling your silver sculpted jewelry. We'll get into that in a little bit, but, you'd had a cross-cultural childhood, what about your daughter? Did you end up putting her in school in Germany or in the UK or in Italy?

[00:19:17] Tabitha: When my daughter was two, I realized that the marriage wasn't really working. I felt the need to do things differently. I moved back to Milan and I moved back without my husband. I found myself on my own with my two-year-old who had a Brazilian father, a British mother, she was born in Germany and here we were in Italy and that's where I was going to raise her. I decided that I was going to stay put and give my daughter some roots. I just felt I needed to compensate by creating something that was day-to-day and some fixed reference points, I think. 

[00:19:59] Tabitha: We lived in Milan. She went to the local nursery school, one minute walk. Then we moved her to the local creche, that was two-minute’s walk. Then she went into elementary school, that was five-minute’s walk. We built up a complete local community. Everyone knew us, all the neighbors, we lived in the same house. All her friends from school went through the same system. And it was great. There was definitely some sense of belonging there. Not identity necessarily, but belonging. And I thought that's what she would do right through to 18 and then possibly move away for university. But that didn't happen. 

[00:20:39] Tabitha: When my daughter was 16, she said to me one day, Mum, can't we do something different? Can't we go somewhere else? I don't know where that came from. 

[00:20:49] Louise: From you, probably. 

[00:20:50] Tabitha: Maybe I do. In the meantime, I didn't carry on with the crafts, or at least I didn't, in terms of earning a living. I couldn't survive off that. I couldn't bring my child up and move away and go off and do markets. I worked in an office for the whole time that she was at school, that we lived in Milan. I had a part-time job in an office, and doing work that I could do from home, and that was translating. I started through word of mouth. I was fairly good at it. I was very punctual. I got better and better. I built up a strong portfolio of clients. So when my daughter at 16 said, can't we go somewhere else, I was in a position work-wise that, yes, we could just go somewhere else and I could take my work with me. We wrote a couple of emails to a few different schools in London, and went the next day to see them, and two weeks later, she started school in London and stayed with a friend of mine. I stayed in Milan to finish things off and then I went to join her and we spent the following two years in London while she finished high school. 

[00:21:59] Louise: That's exactly the same situation that you experienced when you were her age. 

[00:22:04] Tabitha: Yes. By complete coincidence, maybe people would think differently. She also left at 16, 17, and finished high school in England, except I went with her. 

[00:22:15] Louise: Just to clarify, the translating work is uh, Italian to English. 

[00:22:20] Tabitha: Italian to English, yes. 

[00:22:22] Louise: You end up here in Portugal where you've been for eight years. How did you find your way here? Why did you decide to come to Lisbon? 

[00:22:31] Tabitha: When we moved to England, when my daughter went to university and changed, she changed the city for that, so she went off and started her own life journey, I had the freedom and the independence, because of my work that I can take anywhere, to do something different.

[00:22:46] Tabitha: At first I went back to Milan again. I was there for a while, but having moved again after all those years of trying to give my child some sense of belonging and to create some sort of roots, when I went back after we'd made this change and lived in London, it all felt a little bit small and claustrophobic. And I realized I didn't want to just stay put, I didn't want to consider that the rest of my life, back in Milan and carrying on with things. And I had the freedom to be able to move because of my work so I packed a suitcase and I went to Berlin. 

[00:23:20] Tabitha: I'd never been to Berlin. I'd heard a lot about it and I thought, I'd really like to see what Berlin's like. By this stage, I was no longer a 19-year-old backpacker in Brazil. I was a 49-year-old. I hadn't been so far out of my comfort zone for a long time. The move to England with my daughter was structured. It had a purpose. It was taking her to school, finding a flat to live in. My mother lived in England by then. My brother also lived in England. There was certain reference points, but Berlin was just me and I'd never been. 

[00:23:54] Louise: From Berlin then you come to Portugal. Could you tell us about that and, and the reason behind that move?

[00:24:00] Tabitha: Berlin was a fantastic experience. It gave me the confidence of being able to uproot again. I probably realized this many, many moons beforehand, but this whole sense of identity was no longer important. I'm so used to not fitting in a hundred percent. That actually the positive side of that is that I can quite easily feel at home anywhere. But Berlin was a city for young people and I was not, I mean, definitely not old, but I wasn't so young anymore. I wasn't looking to start a career and a family. 

[00:24:32] Tabitha: The reason Lisbon came up, was chatting to a friend, the fact that I'd already spoke the language, from all my Brazilian connections. I thought, well, it would be great to try somewhere new and to try somewhere where knowing the language breaks down some of the barriers. So that's what I did. I packed my suitcase again. I think Berlin was four, five months and I moved back to Milan and packed my suitcase again and came to Lisbon and I've been here ever since. This is the one time that I don't have the urge to move so much at the moment. Mm-hmm. I haven't had for several years.

[00:25:11] Louise: Do you feel as though you've finally found somewhere where you can put down roots?

[00:25:15] Tabitha: I'm too old to put down Roots. I won't do that. But I do feel that I'm somewhere that so far, in the seven years I've been here, I've had no desire at all to leave yet. Not at all. No desire to move back to Milan, which has been the place I've always gone back to in all my other moves. This time I don't feel that. I feel like my umbilical cord with Milan is finally severed, in a nice way. I mean, I have loads of friends there. I still have a flat there. I love going back, but I don't want to go back and live there. 

[00:25:50] Louise: That's an interesting comment you made because I would often associate it with someone in their twenties who might say, oh, I'm too young to put down roots, because when we are young, we're a bit more restless and we like to explore and move about and travel the world. But you said, I'm too old to put down roots. Now what do you mean by that? 

[00:26:10] Tabitha: What I mean is this, trying to find a sense of identity, I think I did spend a lot of time searching for when I was younger and trying to decide whether I felt Italian or whether I felt English, and why was I the English girl in Italy and why was I the Italian girl in England? Slowly over the course of my life, I've stopped. It doesn't matter anymore. I won't ever feel a hundred percent Italian, a hundred percent English. I won't ever belong anywhere a hundred percent. And in that sense, I think I'm too old. I think I've moved around too much. And therefore I just have to look at the positive side. And the positive side is that I'm so used to having that element of feeling foreign somewhere that it doesn't affect my feeling at home and comfortable somewhere. And I feel very much at home and comfortable in Portugal. 

[00:27:02] Tabitha: It's got elements of Brazil, for obvious reasons, but it's European and ultimately, though I have a huge amount love for Brazil and it's meant a lot to my life, my heart and in my essence, I know I'm European. And I think Portugal has that best of lots of worlds. It's Europe, it's Brazil. There's a lot of magic here. There's certainly enough magic for me to feel content and want to stay here. 

[00:27:30] Louise: Enough magic for you to create too, your sculpted wearable jewelry, or how would you describe it? Wearable sculptures, I should say. They're mostly rings, aren't they? 

[00:27:41] Tabitha: It's something that I've been working on, developed all along throughout all these years. I always keep it going. It's in the background, my translation work is what I've developed into something that pays the bills. It's allowed me to move and travel. It's been great to have that. And my wearable sculptures, it's my creative outlet. I have a website. I sell them, uh, to sometimes directly to clients, sometimes at market. Sometimes people contact me through my Facebook page.

[00:28:13] Louise: Perhaps you would like to share with listeners your website and your Facebook page in case they would like to check out your wearable sculptures. 

[00:28:22] Tabitha: All of it is my name and surname, so my website is TabithaSowden.com. The Instagram is @TabithaSowden and the Facebook is Tabitha Sowden Jewellery, jewellery written in the British way.

[00:28:36] Louise: And, and Sowden, how do we spell that? 

[00:28:39] Tabitha: Sowden is s o w d e n. 

[00:28:42] Louise: Okay. Thank you Tabitha. I will link to your social media and website in the transcript to this episode. And, and thanks for sharing this very restless journey of yours from one European country to another and down to Brazil and the UK and back again. 

[00:28:58] Tabitha: It probably sounds more restless than it actually was. I had that long, 14, 15 year gap where with my daughter, we kept very still, but it's been very interesting and very exciting and I'm so, happy about all the things that I've learnt and seen and discovered. I wouldn't change it for anything. Thank you for having me, Louise. 

[00:29:19] Louise: Thanks so much, Tabitha.

[00:29:21] Louise:Thank you for listening today. So you don’t miss future episodes, subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel @WomenWhoWalkPodcast. Also, feel free to connect with comments on Instagram @LouiseRossWriter or Writer & Podcaster, Louise Ross on Facebook, or find me on LinkedIn. And finally, if you enjoyed this episode, spread the word and tell your friends.