Merry Christmas! This essay from the December 2012 issue by Deb Kartheiser is a reminder that gifts are not always wrapped in paper and ribbon. For TCKs, it is not always easy to know your extended family – and this essay is not just for TCKs, but to those who raise them as well.
In the Midwestern town I now call home, my friends talk to their mothers nearly every day, as they have all their lives. They argue and cajole on the phone, or drive over and take care of things after work. What would that be like? I have no idea.
As I write this, my own mother and father are in Japan for an extended stay, giving transitional counseling to a church group there. When they are back in the United States, Mom still cross-country skis, works outside the home and travels extensively throughout the country. I’m not sure I could keep up with her. I’m sure my more traditional monocultural friends have no idea what this would be like, either.
More than fifty years ago, my parents decided to leave their close-knit, small-town Iowa community for a life in Japan as Christian missionaries. That decision transformed our family’s dynamics for me and my siblings, and for our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Rather than being defined and surrounded by our family, we missionary kids were the “different” ones.
When we children were young, the missionary lifestyle meant our family had shrunk to a small, cozy unit: siblings and parents. Grandparents and other extended family–once so close in our passport country– seemed far away. I remember feeling lonely for my favorite cousin (we had been inseparable before the move) and wondering if this was all a dream. Maybe I would wake up and we’d all be back in Iowa!
Later on, boarding school took me away even from my parents and siblings. The normal sibling squabbles were replaced by careful, polite distances even when we all were home during school breaks; nobody wanted to mar our rare times together.
But on the upside, as children of missionaries we learned a spirit of inventiveness and adventure. We were not bound to live in a certain place or lifestyle because of family tradition. We kids did not give a hoot about the way the “home community” viewed us and our reputation. In fact, we grew up blissfully unaware of such constraints.
Even when we moved “back” to our passport country, we did it independently: siblings as we each graduated from high school, and then our parents when they retired. It took us a long time to get used to the idea of all being inside the borders of the same country again!
Now my parents live semi-retired in Iowa and we siblings are in our fifties, scattered geographically across the United States. We’re glad to see each other when we do get together, but it doesn’t happen often.
We respect each other’s independence and avoid giving unsolicited advice or trying to control each other. We converse by phone rarely, unless it is to plan logistics for a visit. When our children were younger, we all visited Iowa several times a year. Now that this generation of grandchildren is grown, we siblings still make it there about once a year-but usually at different times.
We don’t really keep up with the minutiae of each other’s lives. And we mostly keep our needs to ourselves; we still don’t like to ask for help, even from our own family. In some ways, my adulthood friends seem closer and more sup- portive on an everyday basis than any of my biological family. This might seem cold and distant to someone more used to a lifetime of just-down-the-street closeness with parents, siblings, grandparents and cousins. I’ve sometimes envied my friends who have this closeness. But make no mistake: when a need is seen, our family is unquestioningly there for each other.
My first summer back in the United States as a new college student without my parents, I lived with Grandma and Grandpa in their old farmhouse. Despite my loneliness and culture shock, I always felt safe and accepted there. My aunt and cousins, in the farmhouse up the road, also went out of their way to include me that summer even though, like many TCKS in reentry, I was culturally awkward.
My mother and the grandmas had kept up faithful letter-writing relation- ships sharing details about what we were doing and thinking. (What would they have done with Skype?) Every Christmas, we received carefully wrapped brown-paper packages full of goodies and gifts that Grandma had mailed months earlier to make the long ship’s voyage to us. I always had believed my grandmas were watching over us from thousands of miles away.
That summer in Iowa, Grandma included me in all her life’s happenings from baking to attending quilting bees to picking fresh produce from her huge garden-and gave me the extra gift of many family stories. “When grandparents make attempts to get to know their grandchild even while living far apart, there is a unique foundation of relationship that begins. When the child goes ‘home,’ he now has someone who accepts him, loves him,” writes TCK consultant Libby Stephens on her blog, Humanizing the Transition Experience. Addressing the parents of TCKs, she continues:
In this way, grandma and grandpa’s house can become an oasis. It often gives [your children] something to look forward to when they return to your passport country.
Since a TCK’s sense of rootedness is in relationships rather than in geography, it becomes all the more important that relationships with extended family…be strong. Parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, great grandparents give the TCK a family line he belongs to. Not just by blood, but in relationship.”
During all my years of early adulthood when my parents still lived overseas, I always knew I was welcome in Iowa. I found unconditional acceptance there. Of course reentry was a painful and difficult time, but I had this safe haven even when I didn’t realize I needed it. I appreciate this even more, looking back, now that my own kids have left for college.
Years later, when my younger sister was diagnosed with cancer and my parents brought her back to the United States for treatment, they lived in this same community where we all were embraced and cared for. Despite the tragedy of my sister’s illness and death, I remember it as the time my family was closest in geography and relationship. For her funeral, members of our missionary family and Japanese church family traveled long distances to stand with our Iowa family in support.
Growing up a world away from my own extended family, I missed out on much of its shared history. I’m still catching up. Many a visit to my parents’ home now includes long after-dinner conversations as I tap into their memories and insights about how we became the way we are today.
I used to wish for a tightly knit hometown family like the ones I imagined most people had. I grieved my own loss of history and identity. Now, in the process of rediscovering, I think I appreciate my family even more than if I’d never left.
Deb Kartheiser is an ATCK who has lived in Japan and the United States.
*Libby Stephens, “Grandparenting over the Seas,” Humanizing the Transition Experience (blog), May 24, 2011, http://www.libbystephens.com/blog/third-culture-kids/32-grandparenting-over-the-seas.
