Tag: Belonging

Friendship Forged of Steel – In Memory of Jean Buker

Published on by Marilyn7 Comments

At nine pm on October 11, 1954, as tugboats slowly pull a freighter away from the docks in Brooklyn, seven passengers stand together on the deck, watching the lights of the city and the Statue of Liberty fade into the distance. Four more are sleeping peacefully below deck in their bunks and portable cribs, blissfully unaware of how the events of this day are shaping their lives. On the dock where our family members and friends had waved their last goodbyes, a lone man walks to the end. His voice echoes across the harbor waters, over the noise of tugboats as they move the Steel Recorder out towards the open Atlantic: “Grace and peace…Pray without ceasing…Preach the Word.”

Pauline Brown in Jars of Clay

My mom called me yesterday and left a voice message. It was about a dear friend of hers from Pakistan days who was dying.
“It’s not that I’m sad for her,” she said through tears. “It’s that I’m sad. Just so, so sad.”

Mom’s friendship with Jean Buker goes back to early days when the two young families were embarking on a journey that would affect them and their children in unquantifiable ways. Their first forays into friendship began at Hartford Seminary where the two couples, along with a few others from my parents’ mission were enrolled for missiology classes. Those early days of dreaming and planning for their life overseas propelled them forward onto the Steel Recorder – a freight ship that left out of New York Harbor.

I picture my mom and Jean, both in their mid-twenties, beautiful with not a wrinkle on their skin, dressed as one did in that era – in skirt suits with hats and perhaps a strand of pearls at the neck. Jean and Ray Buker had three children while my parents had my oldest brother. The journey by sea to this newly formed country was four weeks long. Four weeks of walking the deck to get exercise, keeping tight rein on their toddlers so they didn’t fall through the huge gaps on the railing of the ships deck, trying to make it through seasickness and the beginnings of homesickness, playing scrabble with a competitive edge in the evenings, singing and praying to a God they loved, then at last seeing the shores of Karachi Harbor in what was then West Pakistan.

How young and naive they all were! And yet – how very brave! They watched as their family members became little dots on the shore, finally looking at each other knowing this was it. There was no going back.

Then those first months in the Sindh region of Pakistan, three couples and six children sharing a two-bedroom house in a questionable area of the city of Larkana because no one else would rent to these foreigners.

Those early days built a solid foundation of friendship. Friendship forged in shared language learning, learning how to cook with unfamiliar ingredients, and all that comes with a cross-cultural move to the other side of the world.

The friendship continued through the years, made stronger as more people joined them. Websters, Roubs, Addletons, Pittmans, Johnsons, Dobras, Salmons, Elkins….names that I don’t think I could ever forget, so much were they a part of our family’s srory.

The Bukers moved back to the United States at one point, Jean’s husband Ray taking a job at the mission. And though the proximity of their friendship changed, every time my parents were in the U.S. they visited the Bukers. Updating each other on life in Pakistan, their kids, what was going on in the mission and sharing joys and discouragements continued to be a part of their friendship.

Jean Buker didn’t stop with my parents. She was Aunt Jean to us, more a relative than any blood could possibly create. Her friendship and love continued on to us kids as she extended her table to feed us too much at every Thanksgiving so we knew there was always a place where the turkey and pumpkin pie would be offered up with friendship and understanding. She provided a home base where we and other members of our family and TCK tribe could stay. Aunt Jean was the one who hosted a graduation party when I graduated as a proud nurse. Aunt Jean was the one who gathered people from all over the Chicago area to shower me with gifts a week before my wedding.

I knew where my mom’s tears were coming from as she cried over the phone. They were coming from a place of sweet saudade, that wistful longing for what no longer exists, no matter how much you mourn or long for it. They were coming from a place of memory, where young hearts and bodies with the world at their fingertips go out to the unknown, and friendship is a necessary ingredient. They were coming from knowing that earthly loss smacks of pain and grief because our hearts are created for eternity.

They were coming from a place of a beautiful, God-ordained, orchestrated, and formed friendship and they reflected the heart of God.

“The shifts of time unearth our longing for a permanent residence, unshakeable, immovable, wholly given and wholly ours. Scattered across this great globe, now and then, we stumble across gifts of happiness from a God who, kindly, with an absolute patience that the trees themselves were taught to imitate, guides us up into the security of his own life”

Laura Fabrycky

This post is dedicated to Pauline Brown, Bettie Addleton, and Grace Pittman – the remaining originals from CBFMS.

Arguments about Origin – a TCK post

Published on by Marilyn5 Comments

I was exhausted. It was yet another argument about where I was from, arguments that I was beginning to call “Arguments of Origin” – perhaps so that they sounded more academic and less fraught with emotion.

But the reality was, they were fraught with emotion.

This particular argument started out as a benign comment by a friend to something I had posted online. I don’t even remember the original post, but it was about belonging and my connection to my childhood home – Pakistan. In the post I called Pakistan “home.”

“But it’s not really home for you.” she stated matter-of-factly.

“I’m not sure what you mean.” I said “I grew up there, so yes, it was my childhood home.”

“But you’re not from there.” she was not going to let this go.

Fair enough, but it really depends on what “from there” means.

I tried to put a different lens onto the conversation. “Well – where do you say you are from.” “That’s easy” she named a small town in one of the New England states. “Okay, why do you call that town home?” “Well, I grew up there.”

The defense rests their case.

When I returned to Pakistan in 2010, I got to walk through the house we had lived in during my junior and senior years of high school. A tsunami of memories came over me as I walked through the large front rooms, around the verandah, and finally stopped in front of my bedroom door. As I pressed my face against the window, looking into the room where I had spent winter vacations, I gasped. There on the bed was the comforter that my mom and I had picked out so many years before. The previously bright green, pink, yellow, and blue patterns had faded through the years, but there was no mistaking it. I never thought something as simple as a comforter could bring on such a profound sense of belonging. It was, after all, an inanimate object. But in that moment, it was confirmation of a life that I had lived, a life relegated to stories, photo albums, and memories captured in the cerebral cortex of my brain.

Despite 18 years of life packed into old passports, photo albums, old journals, and letters that my mom kept through the years, in many people’s eyes I have no right to say that Pakistan was home, even less rights to saying that I am from Pakistan. My rights to the country are defined by outsiders who tell me who I am and where I am from.

It brings up many emotions and deep empathy for the many around me who, in this era of massive displacement, struggle silently in the same way.

In a beautiful essay called “Reconciling with Less Home: Between Haiti and Me” Martina Fouquet writes:

The real question is who determines where we belong?

Martina Fouquet in Catapult Magazine

Perhaps what people don’t realize about their challenges to our concepts of home and where we say we are from are that the challenges act like a knife cutting to the core of who we are. The knife cuts deep, and we are left with our own origin questions, self-doubt raising its ugly head telling us once again that we don’t really belong. The internal dialogue that we thought we had silenced so long ago emerges once again, loud and accusatory: “You don’t really belong. You aren’t Pakistani. You left years ago.”

“But that’s not really home for you” or “That’s not where you’re really from” viewed as benign statements to many presents as a challenge to personhood and origin to another.

I don’t know what the answer is to arguments of origin, other than reminding myself once again that no one gets to tell any of us where home is. It is uniquely ours to determine where and why. Our stories may not fit into tidy boxes that connect within the experiences of others, but that’s not a problem we need to solve or a burden we need to bear.

Despite awkward questions, arguments, and discussions on home and origin, the paradoxical gift of this journey is that sometimes less home becomes more home, our lives richer for the multiple places we are privileged to call home.

Home is more than just a place where we come from, it is a part of us. And the longer we distance ourselves from home, the less complete we are.

Martina Fouquet

What Place or People Made You Who You Are?

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“What place or people made you who you are?”

What place or people gave you your fundamental values and shaped the way you see the world?

A number of years ago when I was worried about one of my children, a wise friend said to me “Every chance you can, remind them who they are.” I remember my silence as I thought about what she had said. It was so simple, but so profoundly helpful.

Remind them who they are. Remind them that they belong to a bigger story. Remind them that they are beloved. Remind them of laughter, of fights, of homes and houses, of moments. Remind them.

I’m thinking about that on this Friday morning. Fall is slowly arriving in our area, evident in the chilly air that greets me each morning. Soon we will see the reds and golds that make this area famous for its leaf peeping. apple picking, and cider donuts washed down with hot apple cider.

I’m in a place of needing to remember what shaped me, remember the stories passed down to me, remember the faith of my father and mother, remember who I am, remember that his mercy indeed echoes down through the generations.

Questions of belonging and identity come throughout life in many shapes and forms. When we are younger, they cause more crisis, more angst. When we’re older, it’s more like a subtle despair and deep longing. We silently chastise ourselves for what we feel is the immaturity of our struggle. We try and push it off on other things like our jobs, our friendships, our churches. But a look in the mirror reveals a more difficult truth. And when, as my friend Liz Rice says, our “umbilical cord(s) of identity”* stretch out to cities, countries, and people who are far away or no longer exist, the result can be a profound sense of loss.

Perhaps the best thing to do is to pause, give thanks and move on to the next right thing. Focusing on the losses has the defeating effect of creating more loss. The older we get, the more unbecoming it is to wallow in self pity or despair. Besides, there are walks to be taken, coffee to be savored, sweet rolls to be made, and pedicures to be had. Wallowing won’t give me any of those beautiful gifts.

And so today I pause and I think about those people and places that have shaped me, that have helped me shape my values, my loves, my longings, and the way I see the world.

*Liz Rice in Rituals of Separation

And So We Gather

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It is late afternoon as I sit on the beach, watching the waves creep closer and closer to where we are resting. I hear sounds from others enjoying the ocean – a father calling his daughter, a grandmother telling her granddaughter not to swim too far, and other quieter voices but none interrupt my deep sense of peace and rest.

It will soon be high tide and the beach area will almost disappear. The tides in our area are pronounced, going out as far as a quarter mile on some beaches. It is amazing to all of us, but particularly to the first time visitor.

We have gathered with family, making sure all are well and virus free. While gathering with family at any time is special, given the loss, stress and sadness of the last months this feels like the best of gifts.

Perhaps this is the biggest lesson or gift of the pandemic. That which we thought was certain is no longer so. That which we thought was negotiable, available, or practical has all changed. We have developed a heightened awareness of what is a right and what is a gift. Most things, I have learned, are not rights.

Perhaps too, we have exchanged expectation for hope – a good and necessary exchange.

On the one hand, gathering as a group may seem foolish in these times. We are, after all, in a world wide season of uncertainty. But perhaps that is exactly why it feels even more important to gather.

A few years ago during my first visit to Iraq, I remember talking to an Iraqi woman who had to flee her home during the time of ISIS. I remember saying “How did you survive?” – one of those foolish things that Westerners sometimes say to those who have endured more than they can imagine. I remember her looking at me and saying “You keep on living, because the alternative is not an option, and it surprised even us how strong we were!”

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

Wendell Berry

And so we gather with good food, the occasional and expected small frustrations, laughter, good conversation and games, ever understanding that we must all keep on living, perhaps the act of resistance and love that is most needed during times of uncertainty.

On Longing

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Longing. What is it? How would you describe this word? Not the dictionary definition, but your own heart definition?

A couple of weeks ago I asked folks how they would define “longing” on the Communicating Across Boundaries Facebook page. Your responses did not disappoint. The thing that made them so significant to me is that I know some of the stories behind these responses. I know the ones with chronic illness who fight against pain and don’t complain, longing for a day when that pain may go. I know the ones who have lost a son or daughter and carry that cruel act against the natural order of life in their hearts. I know the ones who have said too many goodbyes, the ones who have experienced significant loss of place and people. So as you read these, know that they come from hearts and lives of those who have suffered but continue to live. And to you who read this, may you feel hope in our shared experiences of longing.

The ache that lives somewhere between the fossa jugularis sternalis and the solar plexus. It both hurts and comforts – like Chopin’s Nocturnes (see below). It needs no solving – as it cannot be “fixed” from the outside. Only the soul can move things in such a way that longing gets released – either into sadness or into action. – Eva Laszlo-Herbert

I am reading a great book right now, Pilgrimage of a Soul: Contemplative Spirituality for the Active Life by Phileena Heuertz. She has an entire chapter titled “Longing” and here is one of the ways she describes it: “Longings are like growing pains in that their origins can be difficult to trace, and yet they give indication of something deep and profound, something immediately true of us. In that respect, noting our longings and looking more deeply into them can function as a sort of ‘thin space’, in which God pierces our desires and then redeems them with a more devout understanding for how we can live in relationship to God, one another and all creation”. – Dana Miller Baker

At times it feels like a dull ache and at times it feels like a stab in the gut. It is a soul hunger that is ever present. It is both hope and despair. – Joyce Lind Terres

Longing is feeling the distance between where you are and where you want to be – a place, a time, a person, a community, a stage of life, a depth of relationship, or even a version of yourself. – Tanya Crossman

A feeling of being distant…but yearning to be close to something or someone that makes you feel like your most authentic, truly alive, living your purpose self. – April

At the moment I would describe it as an unquenchable ache in the very fibre of my being that sucks the joy out of life. I find it hard to pinpoint where longing ends and grief begins as longing is such a large part of grief. It physically hurts to think about how much Im longing for five more minutes with my mum. – Jo Hoyle

Yearning can be animated or subdued. I sense ‘longing’ as something that might be initially inexplicable because it is “subconscious” in nature, and under the radar of our overly expressed emotions. – Brooke Mackie-Ketcham

A yearning…perhaps for something or someone lost to you, or for something you are working to accomplish. – Betsy Merrill

It’s a reaching with every fiber of your being… – Laurinda McLean

A deep desire for something someplace or someone that doesn’t go away. It is always there consciously, and or sub-consciously. The desire is more than just in your head, it’s in your soul and deep in your bones. To put it in the words of the Psalms, it’s in your innermost being. – Susan Haglund

Missing something so badly it hurts inside. – Laura Keenan

Saudade – Linda Janssen & Annelies Kanis

What do they mean by Saudade? I’ve written a lot about this word, as have others who have lived mobile lives. It’s a Portuguese word that originated in the 13th century by Portuguese diaspora who longed for the places and people they had left behind. 

The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.


A. F. G. Bell In Portugal of 1912

I’m so grateful to those of you who shared these soul-deep responses. What about those who are reading? How would you define longing? Please share through the comments, and thank you – as always – for the gift that you give in reading and being a part of this online space. I will never take it for granted.

A Life Overseas – Capable of Complexity

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I’m at A Life Overseas talking about needing to be capable of complexity when we talk about the TCK experience!

I loved growing up overseas. I loved that I knew how to traverse the globe at a young age, that I grew up on curry and hot pakoras, that I could see some of the highest mountains in the world from the grounds of my boarding school. I loved the colorful stamps in my passport – the story of my life in a legal document; the feel of excitement when a plane took off; the visceral sense of home when I was surrounded by palm trees and minarets echoing a mournful call to prayer. I loved it.

And…..

Ah! That word “and”! That freeing, amazing change agent! And it was also hard. I struggled with belonging, with connecting to place. I experienced long nights where tears of homesickness and grief were shed, with only God and a bunk bed as witnesses. I sat uncountable times in rooms full of people enveloped in a bubble of longing, with the words from Ijeoma echoing through my brain: “too foreign for here, too foreign for there – never enough for both”.

It takes many missionary kids years to accept that their experience was a complicated, beautiful package of good and hard. Owning the hard feels like a betrayal. And might I say, there is nothing that makes an MK/TCK bristle like a condescending adult looking at you and automatically saying “Wow – that must have been really hard. You must be glad to be back in [insert country].” I remember standing up as straight as my five foot three frame could make me and saying, with daggers in my voice and eyes, “I loved my childhood. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” My voice said “Just try me, lady, and I’ll throw that macaroni casserole in your condescending face!”

Okay – that’s harsh. But I was a teenager, and to be told what my life must be was simply unbearable.

For years, all I could do was claim the positive. I was like the Joel Osteen Missionary Kid, except that my teeth weren’t as bright and shiny as his. My childhood was perfect, thank you very much, and don’t even start with the negative.

The problem is that of course, it wasn’t. There was the good and there was the hard. Trying to be fair to both those things felt like an impossibility, so I stuck with the good.

Here’s the thing: When we talk about the MK/TCK experience we have got to be capable of complexity. I’ll say that again: we have to be capable of complexity. As Tanya Crossman points out so well in her book Misunderstood, the third culture kid narrative is a perspective and not a one-size-fits-all single story. Each TCK story contains things that are deeply painful and other things that are incredibly unique and joy-filled.

I recently read a book called All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung. Though born of a Korean family, Nicole was adopted as a baby by a white family. The book is her story of coming to terms with her adoption and ultimately finding her birth family. But it’s much more than that. It’s a story about belonging, about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our reality, about the stories that families tell to make sense of their family narrative. At one point, the author says this:

Family lore given to us as children has such hold over us, such staying power. It can form the bedrock of another kind of faith, one to rival any religion, informing our beliefs about ourselves, and our families, and our place in the world. When tiny, traitorous doubts arose, when I felt lost or alone or confused about all the things I couldn’t know, I told myself that something as noble as my birth parents’ sacrifice demanded my trust. My loyalty.*

Though my circumstances were not those of an adoptee, this paragraph made a deep impact on me when I read it. How many of us as third culture kids, as missionary kids, had our own family lore that we believed? How many of us believed that we must trust our parents’ sacrifice, and wrongly believed that we must not let them, or anyone else, know when things were hard?

In my own journey I have found that the things that I found difficult were also difficult for my parents. I have come to know more fully some of the stories that I only knew partially. I have come to realize that saying something is hard does not mean that it was not good.

Read the rest at A Life Overseas by clicking here.

Born to Belong

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“When you’ve spent your whole life as a cultural chameleon, you end up not knowing what color you were when you started, who you might have been had you been from someplace, what it feels like to belong fully to a people, a tribe, a neighborhood, a city.” from Rachel Hicks in “To My Adult TCK Self: I See You”

In The Weight of Glory, in a chapter based on a lecture called “The Inner Ring”, C.S. Lewis takes a profound look at belonging, specifically at our desire to belong.

“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”(Lewis)

The Inner Ring is that elusive place of belonging that is just beyond our reach, just past our grasp. Because once we have reached that inner ring and we begin to settle and think we’ve finally found a place to belong, we realize there is a ring beyond that —and once we’ve gotten to that ring, there’s a ring beyond that still. It is a never-ending quest.

I write about this in Between Worlds, but just writing about something doesn’t take it away. This struggle to belong is human, hard, and never-ending.

We are born to belong. 

A number of years ago, my husband was dropping off my son at a birthday party. Another kid from the class was in the car as he and my son had worked on a class project that morning. When my husband made the plan to drive him home, it made sense that he would combine the trips. We assumed that the birthday party would just have a couple of kids at it. When they arrived at the house where the birthday party was being held, a huge crowd of boys descended on the car welcoming our son. In fact, it appeared the entire class had been invited except for the boy in our car. The boy was crushed. We unwittingly participated in a kid realizing he had been left out, realizing he was not invited to that particular inner ring. It was completely accidental, but it still happened.

If we’re honest we will admit that we all know what it feels like. The stomach-knotting knowledge that we weren’t invited, that we don’t belong. Our first memories of being left out can be as simple, yet painful, as not being invited to a birthday party or as complicated as becoming a part of a blended family, where suddenly we realize the family we thought we belonged to no longer exists. The desire to belong and the feelings that arise when we realize we don’t are part of the human dilemma.

In elementary school that inner ring and quest to belong is the group of girls that excludes us. They are a part of Something Special and we don’t belong. It’s that group in middle school that get together every Friday night and we’re not invited, that group in high school that bears the name and reputation ‘cool’ and no matter how hard we try, we do not know cool. Though we would like it to stop there, it often continues. It’s college, then young adulthood, then work and getting into that inner, secure, exclusive place. It’s church and those people who are in that inner circle, the circle that seems so godly and confident, the one that we wish we belonged to. And yet when we get close, there’s something beyond that circle, just out of our grasp.

We constantly look to that place of belonging, the inner ring that seems so secure, that tells us we have ‘arrived, yet it continually eludes us.

Third culture kids can find this particularly difficult as they straddle many worlds and places. Each place has its own inner ring, each group its own rules. We don’t belong to our passport countries; nor do we fully belong to those other countries where we leave pieces of our lives. Keeping parts of ourselves hidden becomes a necessity because explaining is too difficult.

And yet, it is such a gift. To be able to know what it is to be other in our world of massive displacement is nothing less than a gift. A strange gift perhaps, but a gift nonetheless. The only way to break this cycle of the inner ring is to embrace the gift of not belonging. This echoes Lewis’ response to the “Inner Ring” dilemma. “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it.” If we break this cycle, we may still find ourselves on the outside, but it will no longer be a burden, we will no longer wear ourselves out by trying so hard to make it inside. Instead we will find a place, sometimes in the most unlikely of circles.

I have slowly come to this place. I don’t even really know when I first realized that I was no longer striving to be part of the inner ring and I wish it had not taken so long. Somehow the quest to belong, that burden on my back since boarding school days of popular groups and cliques, has slowly but steadily been broken. In some mysterious and completely inexplicable way, I belong.

To be sure there are days when I find myself wandering back to the place of inner rings and the quest to belong. But as I begin to try to worm my way into those rings, something always stops me. I remember what it was to strive so hard that I lost my way. I remember that knowing what it is to not belong brings understanding and eyes to see the one at the edges, the one on the margins who sits in the shadows, aching to belong. A voice inside reminds me that my identity is in something so much bigger and greater than any inner ring. It’s in the knowledge that I am loved by God, created to reflect his glory until all inner rings have faded and time stretches into eternity. 

Belonging….doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are. – Brené Brown in Daring Greatly

Thinking of a graduation gift for TCKs? Worlds Apart: A Third Culture Kid’s Journey may be a good option! Worlds Apart v2

On Being Local – A Guest Post

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I’m delighted to welcome Michael Pollock to my blog today! Michael is a fellow ATCK, but he’s also a friend and someone who “gets” this journey. Read more about Michael at the end of the post.  

ON BEING LOCAL

I was fascinated by Taiye Selassi’s Ted talk, “Don’t ask me where I’m from, ask me where I’m local”, which, if you’ve seen it, isn’t really about belligerence over a question of origin, as many commenters seemed to think. Taiye spoke eloquently and passionately about the challenge of highly mobile people to nail down the truth of our origins and belonging; in a sense, the places we own and that own us back.

Identity and belonging is not a simple or straightforward issue if you have moved multiple times throughout your life.  The issues are layered in complexity if those moves were also cross cultural as well as geographic. My own back-story includes 7
different towns/cities and 4 states in the US, a mission station in Kenya and the city of Tianjin in China. That’s not counting places I lived and invested for less than a year. And my story is simple compared to many.

Identity and belonging is not simple

Military, diplomatic, missionary and international NGO, education and business families all understand this well. Our ‘place’ memories are mosaics; the ‘people’ we belong to are scattered, though often inter-connected; and various possessions are strewn along our trail of travel the way American pioneers dumped European furniture to lighten their wagons. Personally, I still wonder who now rides my green Giant mountain bike that I left behind in Tianjin.

Taiye thinks being ‘from’ a country, which is a political idea, doesn’t make sense as the lines are arbitrary and can change.  She raised the point of politics and origin/belonging when she suggested that the question “Where are you from?” can also have overtones of power.  Being ‘from’ Germany, Britain, Japan and the US connote more power, while ‘from’ Brazil, Philippines, Liberia, connotes less power and some countries like China and Russia are more ambiguous. I think there is also a ‘social currency’ factor in which some places are more exotic and recognizable and some simply unknown to the person asking.  To an American, being from Thailand rather than Vietnam or Equatorial Guinea will have a whole set of different images and assumptions.  When your ‘from’ includes a list, how do you know where to start? (If you can’t place EG on a map, that helps prove my point.)

Taiye spoke of being ‘multi-local’ and gave three categories to help determine where that might be.

  1. First is rituals: Where do you prepare meals and eat, say your prayers, visit regularly, do your work?  Those are key routines of our lives.
  2. Second is relationships: Where are you currently connected to people in a regular and consistent way, who do you connect with weekly, where do you meet people regularly?
  3. The third category asks what restrictions you have: What keeps you from being in a certain place over another, such as passports, and what keeps you from feeling part of a community such as racism or mistrust of outsiders.

The three question grid helps determine where you are local and whether you are multi-local, as increasingly many people are.

So when our group of 15 third culture kids (TCKs) and adult TCKs (ATCKs) gathered in early March on the shore of Lake Michigan for a retreat, I asked them to share where they were local.
To warm things up, I shared how I had just come from a funeral service in a community in New Jersey, US, that I had not been in for 40 years. And yet I met person after person who had been part of my childhood there and who welcomed me and shared memories of my family and me. I felt a deep warmth, but do not have regular relationships or ongoing rituals there, so by Taiye’s equation, nice, but doesn’t count.

I asked them to share where they were local.

As our group began to share, an interesting thing happened, people spoke of cities and villages in China, Tanzania, Turkey, Jordan, Uganda, Bolivia, Nigeria and then they began to speak of houses. ‘ My grandmother’s house in Minnesota’ said one, and many agreed. ‘The guest house in Nairobi’ said another and stories were passed around by those who were familiar with its antiquated colonial regimen.

Encouraged, someone went further, more compact, ‘I feel local in the car, on the road between Colorado and Ohio’ and eyes lit up around the table. I laughed because an Australian mom in Wuhan, China had once told me that her children told her the only thing she must not sell, EVER, was their old Volvo with the leather seats. Never. It was the only consistent item in their Australian memory vault.

Then an admission, “I feel local and comfortable around certain pieces of furniture, because I used to have a strong link to my grandparent’s house, but they moved…I love their couch!” And a question, “Does anyone else feel this way?” And yes, there were many heads nodding and even some eyes glistening.

The turns came to my daughter, the youngest of the group, who shyly listed a couple of places on her storyline and then paused. “I also feel local in airports.  Any airport, really.”

Boom. “YES” went up around the table in agreement and laughter, and more stories.

We had left the thoughtful three R’s from Taiye behind, it seemed. What could a car, an old couch, and airports have to do with our rituals, relationships and restrictions?

Much, it seems. If I am in motion between stable points, I might feel multi-local, yes? But what if my stable points are not stable at all. What if my schoolmates from childhood all leave for various points of the compass? What if the community I grew up in is bombed or burned out or no one I know lives there and so it no longer exists as a welcoming lighthouse? What happens when that ‘one dependable summer visit house’ with all those treasured memories is sold? It seems that some global nomads struggle feeling local at all. Why is that?

Where are our regular relationships, our connections? All over the map, and still in motion. It might depend on the week, on the season. We track them with social media and when they disappear for a while, we look in familiar places for them to resurface.  We load into the car with the members of our tribe that we can gather and we stop in and visit the ones we can reasonably reach on the way to and from our destination.

Where do we hold our rituals? We try to carry them with us but we also recreate them as needed.  We find the old couch in our grandparents’ new house and snuggle in for cocoa and movies.  We run our fingers over the antique Chinese cabinet or the Masai stool and say our prayers with old friends.

And our restrictions?  Perhaps we find the most freedom in airports, those interstitial worlds where people are coming from everywhere to anywhere and our own possibilities are only held back by the encryption on our e-ticket. We might know that we can’t get to all of those familiar places and warm relationships because of limits in time, money and visas but we are Just. This. Close. Right through that gate.

So we might envy Taiye, just a little, with three places where her rituals, relationships and restrictions hold her in their warmth and familiarity.

And many of us continue to work to build our localness where we are, with what we have, and deep down, we long with all our heart and soul to be truly local somewhere.

Michael Pollock is  the founding director of Daraja, a TCK care and development initiative. He is a certified teacher and coach and holds a Masters in Education from Loyola University.  The founding Head of Cambridge School in Baltimore, he also spent nine years in China as school principal and founder of Odyssey, a TCK leadership formation organization. He and his wife raised three TCKs in China and returned to the US in 2012. They currently call Muskegon, MI ‘home’.


www.daraja.us 
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