Another personal essay about how airports have influenced TCKs. Melynda Joy Schauer shares how, even from a young age, airports were part of her life. This is not because she was a TCK, yet, but from another influence.
My feelings toward airports have ebbed and flowed throughout my 37 years, as they’ve been both a major and minor backdrop to the story of my life. I’ve experienced a full spectrum of emotions upon pulling up to the “departures” gate: excitement, elation, dread, worry, anxiety, apprehension, even something like apathy or indifference during my years of frequent travel.
Airports became a world of both/and features. Goodbyes on one side, hellos on the other. Farewells and greetings. Grief and anticipation. Tearful hugs and happy reunions. My arrivals and departures were often colored by extreme emotions and dulled by jet lagged exhaustion.
Airports for me, like many other third-culture kids who grew up between two (or more) worlds, represent the both/and features of this life.
Melynda Joy Schauer
Beginnings:
My earliest memories of airports were simply the place where we watched the planes take off. It was pre-9/11 days when one could walk to the gates without a ticket, just for fun. And since my grandfather worked for Delta Airlines, he would take my brothers and me often. He’d tell us that he spent his days doing “everything but fly the planes.” Standing before huge windows, we witnessed the magic of flight before our eyes. My young mind asked questions like, “How could such a giant, heavy contraption lift so easily into the air?” What a mystery, only recently solved in human history, so often taken for granted in our age.
I didn’t know then just how significant the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport would become in our family’s life. I was seven when I took my first flight — an international flight. We flew over the Atlantic Ocean, first to Amsterdam, then on to Nigeria, where my dad filled in as a medical doctor at a missionary hospital for three weeks. My brothers and I played in a treehouse with the missionary kids next door, walked through the jungle to the river to swim, and caught translucent geckos that clung to the walls of our house. It was a blast!
That fall, in my small Alabama town, my teacher asked us to write about what we did over the summer. I wrote about going to Africa. At first, she didn’t believe me, but my parents confirmed my story. It was one of the first times my experience of traveling for my parents’ missionary work would be hard to explain to those back at home.
Airports as home:
When I was 11, the Birmingham airport became the scene of our first major goodbye to family. I felt my idea of home torn in two, like the paper tickets we handed over to the airline employees, receiving back just a stub. As we traveled to many countries over the next 10 years, I kept many of those ticket stubs as proof of where I had landed. Eventually, though, airports became the place where I strangely felt most at home.
In airports, I was surrounded by fellow travelers, strangers who, like me, were on a journey between two worlds. It became the portal through which I transformed from one version of myself (either American from Alabama or TCK from East Asia) to another—never fully losing either. Subconsciously, I would shift part of my personality forward in order to better relate, understand, and feel at home when I reached the arrival gate. The other part of me became dormant as I packed away that piece of my identity until the next cross-Pacific flight.
After graduating from my international high school, my friends and classmates scattered across the U.S. and the world. I, too, left, and I grieved a gate through which there was no true return trip. That gate led to a shift in how I saw airports. It was now a place to reunite with friends and family, though those reunions were few and far between.
Feeling Grounded:
During my senior year of college, my family moved back to the U.S. My parents bought a house and I experienced a true sense of home again: a place for us to eat dinner together on a Sunday night before starting our weekday routines at work and school. Once, while standing in my parents’ yard, I distinctly remember looking up at the sound of an airplane and feeling grateful that I was on the ground and not traveling 30,000 feet above the world.
But that feeling didn’t stop me from flying. My first flight with my husband was for our honeymoon. On that travel day as a newlywed, I felt bliss and joy in the happy knowledge that airports meant adventure again, as well as a place to come home to, where our life together would begin.
Next Generation of Travelers:
We took our three kids on a flight last summer and I felt a surprising sense of pride as I watched them walking through those familiar (and since renovated) airport hallways, their large backpacks filled with favorite toys, snacks, and activities for the plane. I watched their excitement and delight as we took off and flew among the clouds, a feat that still fills me with amazement (and honestly, some terror) each time.
These days, I’m grateful for both the mystery and fun of flight, the connections airports enable, the relief of landing on solid ground, and a place to put down roots with my husband and our children.
Although now most of my old luggage is filled with baby clothes kept in storage in our closets, I am reminded that airports have connected my family through the generations. From my grandfather working for Delta, to my parents’ bravery to trust the Lord by taking their three young children to live in different countries for over a decade as they followed His plan for our lives, to now my husband and I instilling adventure in my children as we fly to visit new places. Airports will always have a special place for me as a TCK.
Throughout my frequent travels as a child, teen, and young adult, I found great comfort in the promise of Psalm 139, remembering that wherever I go, God Himself is with me:
“If I ascend to the heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” (Psalm 139:8-10)
Throughout all of the literal ups and downs, arrivals and departures, tears and joy, God Himself has led me and leads me still, holding my hand all the way home.
Melynda Joy Schauer is an adult TCK who grew up in Macau, Taiwan, and Alabama. She now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and three children. She keeps her international side alive by meeting international students in her city and finding the best bubble tea everywhere she goes!
