So, are you the sort of person who stays put? Who regularly runs into the people you went to kindergarten with?

Or do you find yourself constantly searching for moving boxes, new dentists, and furniture that fits into this house as opposed to the bulky shelves that occupied the perfect spot in your last house?

Melissa Dalton-Bradford is the second kind of person. The catch here is that she not only had to deal with new houses, new towns and new friends, but new languages, new laws, new peoples.

She tells it all in her charming memoir, Global Mom.

As her husband climbed the topmost rungs of his company’s ladder, she played Trailing Spouse. It’s not that she left behind a life of groceries and house-dusting. No, she was a singer who had already cracked through the talent ceiling on Broadway.

In return, she got the world. She learned how to dress in the arctic air of Norway, what school lunch means in France (no dipping greasy finger foods in ketchup, I can tell you that), and how many kilometers in a modest Swiss hike. She picked up friends from Eastern Europe to the Far East. Oh, and she learned languages. Many, many languages.

The downside to all this is a rootlessness which she admits to in the book, but addresses a little deeper in this interview (warning: contains spoilers).

Somewhere in there, the Bradfords hit a particularly bad year. This was not a time for making new friends. What she needed most was old friends, people who could look at her stony face and know that she not unfriendly but that something was very, very wrong.

Dalton-Bradford is especially good at drawing contrasts between the extremes of her life, at finding meaning in the unusual path she and her family followed.

Photo on Visual Hunt