GATE WAY
In 1988, I was lucky enough to sit in a window seat on the overnight flight to Madrid. All bouffant bangs and Limited outfit, I was the picture of a white American prep school teenager, bound for two weeks of underage drinking and discotheques on a school exchange program. Until this point I had grown up in the same house for my entire life, had attended the same school since age 8, and hadn’t spent more than a handful of nights away from my parents. Watching Boston twinkle as we took off, I remember clearly listening to UB40 hoot through my SONY and knowing that something was going to happen. Just that ambiguous and just that pristine.
Fast forward twenty-two years (goodness, really?!). I am at the United Nations Day assembly at my children’s school in Costa Rica. UN Day is the school’s celebration of the fact that its students hail from 34 different countries around the world. It is one of those events that make adults teary for reasons they can’t identify, while their children look on with bewilderment. The grown-ups see it somehow as the reason that they have chosen this life for their families. To live every day with this much diversity of color, thought and language is truly a gift and an irreplaceable adventure. As adults we can appreciate this hodge-podge in a way that perhaps children cannot, catching a glimpse of the utopia of nick jr. and undergraduate liberal arts classes.
For the parade of nations (this whole thing is much more akin to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics than any ritual at the United Nations), students get to choose which country they will represent. For the vast majority, this means the country of their ancestry (although, not for my eldest, who chose to represent Costa Rica because it meant she got to wear the traditional dress, a fancy, frilly affair, and much more glamorous than the blue-jean clad Americans). It is both touching and a little sad to see children representing the Greece or Korea or Argentina of their heritage, when they have never actually lived there, as their parents have moved them around the globe every 2 to 5 years throughout their childhood.
There is a name for these children, known as Third Culture Kids, or TCKs. Loosely defined by Wikipedia, TCKs are children who have spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than their own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture. As it turns out there are whole volumes of literature and research dating from the 1950s devoted to these unique specimens. So, curious what my children will be discussing with their therapists in 20 years or so, I dove in.
I began with a memoir of sorts, TCK lite, if you will. Called Home Keeps Moving, it is the history and resulting 20-something angst of a TCK who grew up in 4 different countries from the age of 5, due to the calling of her missionary parents. It was a fairly sad story, but not for the reasons I expected. The author describes with surprising detachment her fear of attachment, wanderlust, and feelings of never quite fitting in anywhere, all of which she ascribes to her transient upbringing. In short, she details essentially the same conversation I had with most of my throughly American peers during our own 20-something angst.
Sigh. I suppose in retrospect what I was really searching for was a clue as to how my own kids would feel about living abroad based on their upbringing, as compared to how I feel about it based on mine. It seems logical that traveling as a child would make one more amenable to it as an adult. Except if you look at my sister, who had all of the same travel opportunities as myself, and who decided to move to Maine in 1991 and will likely live there forever. Or my husband, afflicted with the same wanderlust as myself, who didn’t leave North America until he was 26. We meet legions of travelers here, all who share our love of making room for themselves in another culture, but whose histories vary widely. For every adult who decided on a expat life because of living abroad as a child, there is another who grew up in small town America, and literally spun the globe to decide where to move next, so palpable and all-consuming was the desire to explore.
Most describe a similar feeling to my landing in Madrid. It is just part of them. Something that they can’t imagine living without, despite missing family and loathing immigration bureaucracy. And I suppose from that perspective I can only hope that my own willingness to follow who I am, will inspire my children to do the same for themselves, regardless of which country they choose to call home.