Outlawed Grief, A Curse Disguised

August 18, 2013January 9, 2014 / trotters41 / 34 Comments

by Jonathan

[Note: For an expanded version of this article, click here. The expanded version appeared on A Life Overseas in December, 2013 and is geared more for a missions/TCK audience.]

Someone dies, or gets cancer, or gets cancer and then dies. Someone else says something eminently useful like “All things work together for good” or “He’s in a better place” or “I have a time-share in Florida and the carpet’s getting replaced this week.”

Someone moves to a foreign field, and it’s hard, and it’s sad, and they have kids. And the kids feel it too. They’re sad. They miss grandma, and McDonald’s, and green grass. Someone tells them, “It’s for God,” or “It’ll be ok someday; you’ll look back on this as one of the best things that ever happened to you.” Maybe their parents tell them that.

And grief gets outlawed, and the curse descends. And the child understands that some emotions are spiritual and some are outlawed.

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Revolving Door, Revolving Heart (Looking Back on a Year in Asia Part 5)

February 8, 2013August 18, 2013 / trotters41 / 15 Comments

by Elizabeth

Missionary culture is very transient. People are always arriving; people are always departing. Arrivals and departures are never on the same schedule. The fluidity and inconsistency of this relational landscape reminds me of the military culture in which I grew up. And although I “knew,” coming in, about the mobile nature of expat workers, I am still surprised by what it does to me on the inside.

I’ve only been in this country one year. In that time I’ve met plenty of people who moved here after me. I’ve met other people to whom I’ve already had to say goodbye. People I had just barely started to get to know. People I had started to pour my heart into. People with whom I had hoped to build a relationship. Poof! And one day, they’re gone.

And that’s only in one year. I dread this happening to me over and over again, for years on end. I say this because I do not like Goodbyes.

And in addition to my excessive fears and worries, my dislike of Goodbyes was actually one of the reasons I didn’t want to move to Cambodia. I didn’t want to MOVE, period. Growing up, I moved a lot. Moves (nearly) always entailed traumatic Goodbyes, and they always entailed traumatic Hellos. So now I just like to stay in one place. After we moved to the Parsonage in 2006, I told Jonathan, “I am never moving again!” That didn’t exactly pan out for me.

Leaving America — and the Parsonage — in January 2012

I lost a best friend once, during an Army move. I didn’t have another best friend for three years. And for reasons totally unrelated to being a TCK, reasons I’m still not quite sure I understand, I eventually lost that best friend too. The loss shook my world – a double whammy in the middle of my Year of Anorexia. (More on that in a future post.)

When I was heartbroken over this friend — and I mean heartbroken — my parents assured me that high school friends generally aren’t lifelong friends, but college friends can be. I must have internalized that pretty well, because I didn’t have another best friend until college, five long years later. It was then that I was finally able to form a lasting female friendship. (Hooray! We’re still friends.) When she got married and moved away, my new husband learned just how unexpectedly unstable I can be when faced with a Goodbye.

During some of our missions training, an adult TCK shared that there was such a revolving door of people in his childhood that he eventually closed his heart to new people. He just flipped a switch, and turned it off.

I have not yet closed my heart to new people . . . because I really like people. But when you really like people, saying Goodbye is something you really don’t like. And in this transient missionary community, no Goodbye is ever your Last.

I have a remedy for Goodbyes. It includes copious crying and hugging and hand waving. There is a prescription for Getting Lost in Jane Austen. On occasion a secondary prescription for Anne of Avonlea or Jane Eyre might be filled (as there is a Hierarchy of Needs which takes into account the depth of sorrow, time available for mourning, and whether or not the husband is out of town).

You may have a more effective remedy for Goodbyes; this is mine.

Implementing our “I’ll be waving as you drive away” philosophy.

For all of us, though, friendships are seasonal. And as we edge ever closer to the date of our death, we must all say more Goodbyes than Hellos. For military and missionary wives, and their husbands and third culture kids, those Goodbyes are simply accelerated and multiplied. In other words, we bid farewell early and often.

The task of the human heart, then, should any of us choose to accept it, is to open ourselves fully to new people, with the certainty that we will, at some time in this earthly life, have to say Goodbye.

Mrs. Trotter’s Neighborhood

December 1, 2012March 23, 2013 / trotters41 / 2 Comments

–by Elizabeth

I love my neighborhood. I really do. Come with me, look past the trash on the streets and the smell of funky Asian food, and let me show you my neighborhood.

Every day the kids next door greet us with a “Hello Jonneeeeee!” They think that’s especially funny because Jonathan’s nickname, Johnny, is a brand of whiskey: Johnnie Walker. (No one in this country can say his name, and they can’t say Nathaniel or Faith either.)

We play outside on our street regularly. (No worries; it’s a dead-end.) Our boys ride their scooters and race up and down the street. Then they share their scooters with the neighbor boys. They play Frisbee, and sometimes the neighbor boys join in. If our regular tuk tuk driver happens to pass by and see them playing, he’ll stop and throw the Frisbee too. (He’s new to Frisbee-throwing.) And if we forget to take our frisbee with us when we go inside, the neighbors put it on our doorknob for later.

Our neighbors have a push toy for their baby. Faith is in love with this push toy. So our neighbors let her push their baby in it, and they push Faith in it too.

The neighbors also have a plastic chair that is just the right size for Faith. She’s in love with that as well. They don’t even stop her when she drags it over to our door to sit on it.

The kids next door speak a little bit of English. Our kids speak a little bit of Khmer. And everyone knows Gangnam Style. The recipe for a budding friendship, right? Sometimes my boys play with Legos in their top-level bedroom while the neighbor kids play on the shared roof. Listening to them talk back and forth through the open window is one of my favorite things.

I just walk down the street to buy water. If I accidentally leave the money at home, it’s no big deal. I can pay the guy later. I can’t think of a place in America that would ever let me do that.

It feels like a village. (In fact, we even have a village chief — I know this because he had to sign the papers for us to rent our house.) I love my village. I love my neighborhood. And maybe you remember this song about neighborhoods:

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

I am glad that mine have answered with a resounding yes.

Third Culture Thoughts Part 2 (On My Childhood)

August 3, 2012February 8, 2014 / trotters41 / 4 Comments

— By Elizabeth

I’m a third culture kid myself. I didn’t realize the uniqueness of my upbringing until we started preparing for Cambodia, but life as a military kid gave me a TCK experience. Until I was 5, I lived in West Germany – yes, it was so long ago that Germany was divided into East and West. We ate pomme fritz (fries) with miniature plastic forks. I wore a German dress called a dirndl. My dad would call out “auf wiedersehen” as he left for work.

The next five years were mainly civilian while my dad taught Army ROTC at an American university. But the next few years were highly mobile, including 4 school moves in 4 years and life “on post.” The school moves were hard — at each school I was the “new kid” for several months, and other kids picked on me. Until the next school year began, anyway, because by then we were all friends. Sometimes half-way through that next year I would have to move again, starting the whole painful process anew.

I was 12 when we left military life and began “re-entry” into civilian life. Civilian life is different. Even the vocabulary is different. Instead of living in quarters, I now lived in a house. Instead of shopping at the PX and the commissary, we shopped at Wal-Mart and Hy-Vee. I didn’t swim at the Officers’ Club pool during the summers anymore. I kept calling policemen “MP’s” (military police). I wondered where all the black people were. (I came from a multi-racial military installation, but the Kansas City suburb where we settled was primarily Caucasian.) And I was the new kid yet again, ripe and ready for being made fun of.

The question “where are you from?” is hard for TCK’s to answer. I had always had difficulty answering that question. Where was I from? I wasn’t sure. For many years, I didn’t really feel like Lee’s Summit, MO (where my parents moved after the Army) was home. I hadn’t lived there long enough to feel at home. It certainly wasn’t any of the other places I had lived either. Sometimes I answered that I was from Kansas City. Sometimes I listed all the places I’d lived. Other times I said that my parents were from a small town in central Iowa.

Growing up, this quote from Bernard Cooke was always hanging on the walls of my many homes.

Fast forward to last year. Now I’m a parent of future missionary kids, so I read Pollock and Reken’s Third Culture Kids book. All of a sudden I identified with these TCK’s. Even though it didn’t span my entire childhood or take me to a third world country, I realized that my transient young life, coupled with an entirely different American military sub-culture, gave me insight into what being a TCK will be like for my kids. Reading about TCK’s helped me understand more about myself, and assured me that I would be able to empathize with my children in their difficult experiences.

TCK’s often feel homeless. They are moving, or their friends are moving. Constantly. They don’t have roots in one place, but have connections all over. They feel at home everywhere, and they feel at home nowhere. This was a big concern for me as a mom. Home is important to me. I want my kids to feel at home somewhere.

To me, though, home is where family is. It’s where memories have been made, and where they will continue to be made. I think you can have more than one home. And really, don’t we all have another home in Heaven?

My parents’ home town in Iowa still feels like home to me – the place and the people stayed constant throughout all my moves. My parents have lived in their current house for 12 years now (their longest stay), and it feels like home. Today, I live in Phnom Penh, Cambodia with my husband and 4 children, and it feels like home. In the words of musician Alex Ebert, “Home is wherever I’m with you.”

In the end, the best part about being a TCK for me is the nebulous definition of home as everywhere and yet nowhere. How wonderful that my Heavenly Father could use a few uncomfortable years of my childhood to help me fully embrace wherever He puts me in His wide world.

Third Culture Thoughts Part 1 (On My Kids)

July 29, 2012February 8, 2014 / trotters41 / 4 Comments

— By Elizabeth

A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background. (Definition from the book Third Culture Kids by David C. Pollock and Ruth Van Reken)

Third Culture Kids don’t live in their passport country, or the country of their parents’ culture. They live in a host country. They don’t belong to their parents’ culture (the first culture), nor do they truly belong to their host culture (the second culture). They are in a culture all their own, a third culture. Their life is both global and mobile. My kids are TCK’s now. In early May I recorded some of my concerns for them:

———-

It’s still a common occurrence for our kids to talk about missing people and places “back home,” but they are becoming happier here as well. They get sad A LOT about missing home, Grandma mostly, but also saying that our new home will NEVER be as good as our old home.

I recently learned more about missionary kids (MK’s) from another missionary who is himself an adult MK and currently works with teenage MK’s. He said that the culture that most affects an MK’s stability and happiness is the culture of the family’s home, not the host culture. He also told me that 8 out of 10 times, an MK’s attitude toward language learning and the host culture comes from the mom, simply because of the extra time kids spend with their mom. He said those pieces of information are either encouraging to parents, or discouraging to parents, depending on their situation. I found it to be encouraging because our home is a happy place — Jonathan and I work hard to make our family fun, open, and loving — and because I am no longer the “trailing spouse,” as of 2 years ago this month.

Sometimes, however, I wonder what I am doing wrong and why my good attitude isn’t rubbing off on my kids like it should. I like it here, why don’t they?? That other missionary said they would, right!!?? But then I realized that I have been in the process of transferring my heart from America to Cambodia for the last 2 years. Although our family talked a lot about Cambodia and why we were going, their little hearts simply lived where they had always lived until they stepped on that plane in mid-January. I sent my heart ahead of my body, so I’m a bit ahead of them in my adjustment. Their bodies travelled first, leaving their hearts in America with friends and family. They need time, and I will give that time to them.

I tell them a lot that nothing will ever replace home, or Red Bridge, or Grandma, or Susan, or cheese bagels, or our awesome yard. Just because we were happy in America, it doesn’t mean we can’t be happy here. We won’t ever try to take away from the good of our life in America, but I want them to have hope that life can be good here as well.

———-

In our training we were told to say goodbye well, and that it’s ok to grieve the loss of people and places when we make an international move. We’ve tried to be very understanding when our kids get sad and talk about home. We let them talk, we look at old pictures, we let them Skype family. We hug them when they’re sad. At the same time we are making new memories here. We take them to the park, we take them swimming, we play badminton on our roof. We make jokes and laugh uncontrollably around the dinner table. Our kids’ lives have changed drastically, but one thing has not changed: they know they are immensely loved.