In Search of Permanence

During my time at Liberty University, I’ve been lucky enough to make a good friend whose family has become a bit of a surrogate for my own.  I spend most of my breaks at her house since Poland is simply too far to go for Thanksgiving break.  During one of my stays last semester, I found myself looking around the room that had been hers for almost her entire life.  There were pictures on the wall that ranged across her childhood, most of them showing the same group of girls as they all grew up together.  Her desk and dresser boasted several years of basketball trophies and team pictures.  There was a pin-the-tail game hanging on her closet door from a childhood birthday, and some art and VBS mementos that she had collected over time.  In other words, that room provided a fairly accurate history of her entire life. 

As I sat there looking at her room, I was suddenly struck by how much it differed from mine and my brother’s.  Our walls tend to boast posters instead of pictures, and the few photos we do consider putting up were usually taken in whatever place we’re currently living.  There’s rarely anything from before that.  We don’t tend to have shelves of old trophies or still have old artwork hanging on our closet doors.  What we do have is desks covered with souvenirs and drawers full of the physical manifestations of whatever hobbies we happen to be interested in at the time.  In all likelihood our old hobbies probably didn’t make it through the massive sorting process that set up our last move.  We just don’t have room to keep it all.  We move far too much.  By the time I arrived at college I had already moved five times in my life.  Going from Poland to Liberty University in Virginia made it six. 

It isn’t unusual for TCKs to move often.  I saw a statistic somewhere that the average TCK will move four to eight times before they reach the age of eighteen.  The average time a student stayed at our international school in Poland was about two years.  I was part of that statistic, having graduated after those two.  My brother made it three years before our parents moved to another city.  That’s just how our lives go.  Some TCKs love moving.  I have one friend whose family moved so much that she feels more at home in a house full of boxes than in one that’s been fully unpacked.  Others of us hate it with a passion.  I know some kids who swore they’d never speak to their parents again if their family had to move one more time.  Heaven help any parent that tries to move a TCK who is bound and determined to stay put. 

But regardless of how we feel about it, change is something that TCKs eventually just get used to.  In fact, sometimes it seems that change is the only permanence in our lives.  That in turn tends to affect how we see life.  We learn, some of us very early, that nothing lasts forever.  Everything, no matter how good, will eventually come to an end.  Places and people we love will eventually have to be left behind.  It’s inevitable.  Or so we think.  Often that idea leads us to build walls that make us seem distant from those around us.  It isn’t that we don’t want to make friends.  It’s that we’re afraid to pour our hearts into a beautiful friendship that we know we’ll have to leave behind in a few years.  We’ve been there and done that.  We know how much good-byes can hurt.  I heard one TCK say that he’d rather never say hello if it meant he never had to say good-bye.  Older TCKs in particular tend to wrestle often with this idea.  Is it really better to have loved and lost?  Or is it easer just to never love at all? 

This seeming cynicism can be hard for us to escape.  Most people get to a new place and ask “Why am I here?”  TCKs, on the other hand, tend to ask “For how long?”  How long do I get to be in this new place before I have to leave it?  Will it be long enough to make it worth putting down roots that will have to be ripped up later?  Or is it easier to just stay in the safety of my little plastic pot until I’m picked up again and placed elsewhere?  How many times can my heart be torn apart and glued back together before repair finally becomes impossible? 

Missionary and martyr Jim Elliot once said, “Wherever you are, be all there.”  To most people that makes perfect sense.  For TCKs, however, it can be a hard thing to do.  To be “all there” is to pour everything we have into places and ministries that we may someday have to leave behind.  It means being open with those around us, being willing to risk the possibility of an eventual broken heart on the gamble that we just might find a beautiful friendship.  Which will probably be incredibly painful to leave behind. 

There is a saying that the pain of a good-bye lets you know it was worth it.  And honestly it’s true.  Pain tells you that you have poured everything into a relationship and that you were rewarded with a friend so close that you can’t stand to leave them.  But to a TCK for whom leaving is a part of life, that repeated pain just doesn’t sound like a pleasant option.  So despite the fact that humans are social creatures who desperately need relationships and despite the fact that those friendships really may be incredibly beautiful, many TCKs, particularly older ones, are sorely tempted to instead retreat into ourselves and sit this one out.  Instead of living in the moment, we may spend all of our time trying to reclaim the past. 

Most of the college kids around me are busy looking forward.  What classes are they taking next year?  What job are they going to get once they graduate?  TCKs, however, tend to look back.  We look back on the places that we loved and try to find a way back to them.  But the truth is that even if we do get back, we often find that beloved place to be different from what we remember.  Time changes everything.  Including us. 

I myself came face-to-face with that realization this summer when I helped my family pack up our old apartment.  The next time I go home for the summer or for Christmas it will be to an apartment I’ve never seen in a city I’ve barely even visited.  My group of closest friends has now been scattered across the world.  Many of the people that I had come to think of as family are either moving on or moving out.  As I sat in my old room for the last time, I finally realized that there truly is no going back.  No matter how much I loved that place, no matter how much it felt like home, no matter how much of my heart remains there, it will never quite be the same again.  Those days are gone.  And with them has gone the sense of home that I treasured so deeply.  It felt as if a door that I had been struggling to keep open had finally been slammed in my face.  There could be no more going back.  The only option left was forward. 

In my case, forward happened to be returning to college.  I have been truly blessed with the chance to attend a wonderful school full of amazing people.  But as incredible as it might be, it just isn’t home.  As a firm believer in Christ, I know that God never leads me to a place without a reason.  There is always a ministry for me to undertake and a lesson for me to learn.  I know that in my head.  But sometimes my heart forgets it.  Some days it feels like God has led me into the desert for no reason.  Some days all I want is just to go home. 

But how can I explain that to the people around me?  How do I make them understand the overwhelming homesickness that I feel even though most days I don’t even know where home is anymore?  How can I explain to them how deeply it makes my heart ache when someone asks if I’m glad to be “home” and I’m expected to paste on a smile and nod along?  How do I explain that most days I feel like a foreigner in my own country? 

I should clarify here that I am by no means lamenting the childhood I was given.  Quite the opposite.  I loved my childhood.  I have been to so many amazing places and met so many incredible people.  Just the other day I was explaining to one of my friends that my family has visited so many castles in my life that my brother and I actually began to view Saturday trips to see yet another one as severe violations of our day off.  I can’t even count the number of times we asked my dad, “You seriously want us to get up at nine in the morning on a Saturday to go see another castle?  Are you crazy?”  Most of my college friends have never even seen a castle.  But to my brother and I, that was just a part of life. 

As much as I might have complained on those mornings when I had to roll myself out of bed and stumble down to the car to see yet another medieval fortress, there was always a part of me that knew I was beyond blessed to have that opportunity.  I will forever treasure those memories and experiences, and I can honestly say that I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world.  But sometimes there are days when I’m looking around at the room of a friend who has spent their entire life in the same town, and for just a moment I find myself wondering what it might have been like to have spent my entire life in one place.  To have grown up with the same group of friends.  To have never had to leave.  And despite how much I loved my own childhood, there are some days when that life of permanence makes a small part of me jealous.  Because for all my incredible experiences, that person has one thing that I don’t.  They have always known exactly where home is. 

If there is one thing TCKs crave above all else, it is belonging.  We long for the knowledge that we have found a place that we truly fit, a place where we are both wanted and understood.  But a close second is our desire for permanence.  We want to be able to throw caution to the wind and pour our heart and soul into friendships that we know won’t have to end.  We want to be able to find a place where we can put down as many roots as we want without having to worry about if and when they’ll have to be ripped up again.  We want to find a place that feels like home and to know that we will never have to leave it unless we want to. 

And yet as desperate was we are for permanence, I’m beginning to discover that many older TCKs, particularly those going into college, share a deep fear of being trapped.  For most of us it’s a fear of being trapped in the United States.  We don’t really know why.  We just know that the idea of being stuck in this country for the rest of our lives is utterly terrifying.  If we dig a little deeper, however, I think that fear is actually much bigger than just having to live the rest of our lives in the United States.  No, I think what we’re really afraid of is becoming trapped in a place that we don’t feel we belong.  We’re afraid of being stuck forever in a culture that isn’t our own with people who will never really understand us.  We’re afraid of having to spend the rest of our lives in one place while our hearts are in another.  We’re afraid that we’re doomed to be forever torn in two. 

As a way of staving off that dreaded fate, many of us become something like global nomads.  We end up constantly wandering (physically, mentally, and/or emotionally), constantly searching for that special place that will finally make us feel like we belong.  But the truth is that no matter how hard we look, we will never find that place on this earth.  We may find a place that comes close, but so long as we live in this world we will never find a truly permanent home that we completely belong in.  The reason for this is simple: we weren’t made for this fallen and broken world.  We were made to live in a perfect world bathed in the glory of our creator.  Because of that we will never truly belong here. 

            On the days when I’m desperately craving a sense of home, that thought can be pretty discouraging.  But I can take heart in the knowledge that there is a day coming when those of us who have given our lives to Christ will finally stand before His throne and step into the world we were created for.  On that day we will finally find the belonging that our hearts so desperately crave.  I can only imagine how wonderful it will be to know that not only are we finally home, but that we will never ever have to leave it.  There will be no more good-byes, no more searching for the place we belong.  When that day finally arrives, we will at last be home to stay. 

 

-Ash

A Barrage of English

I will never forget the first time I ate a meal in the cafeteria at Liberty University.  Nor will I forget the killer migraine that accompanied it. 

By that point I had been back in America for about a month.  In that time I had managed to completely avoid the mall, and had almost escaped the nearby super Wal-Mart.  In fact, I had made a point of avoiding any loud places full of people as if they all had the plague.  As I sat down in the cafeteria with the chicken salad I had managed to cobble together (everything else was either drowning in grease or salt), I suddenly remembered why I had made such an effort to avoid these places.  It wasn’t because I’m an introvert who doesn’t always do well when surrounded by large groups of people, although that definitely may have played a part in it.  No, the real reason I had avoided such populated places was because of one simple side effect of having a large room full of American college students: everyone was speaking English.  Loudly. 

For most Americans, there isn’t a problem with that situation.  If you get a group of people together, they’re going to talk.  It’s inevitable.  But I had just spent two years out of the country.  After being surrounded every day by a variety of languages that I didn’t always understand, my brain had trained itself quite by accident to automatically pick up on any English nearby.  Then I was thrown back into an environment that was all English all the time, and suddenly I could understand everything that was going on around me.  My brain, trained to pick up on any and all English, was trying to process every single word it heard.  Needless to say, it went into overload.  As a result of that, I endured more than a few bad migraines during my first few weeks in the school cafeteria.  While my ears have grown accustomed since then, I still to this day don’t stay in the cafeteria any longer than I have to. 

The noise level also drove me crazy.  Sometimes it still does.  Americans are, quite simply, loud people.  Since they live in a loud culture, I doubt many of them even notice it anymore.  But having just come out of a much more reserved culture whose people generally only got loud when they were either drunk or over-excited about soccer, entering a place full of talkative Americans was like stepping into a room where someone had a stereo on full-blast.  I felt like my eardrums were about to explode.  I can still remember eating lunch with a friend in the cafeteria and having to use all of my concentration to drown out enough noise that my brain could actually process what she was saying to me. 

As annoying as the noise level can be, however, what really gets to me is the simple fact that it’s all English.  When I’m constantly surrounded by a barrage of language that I can understand effortlessly, I find my ears longing for the beauty of foreign languages.  English has become a flat language to me.  There is no longer any beauty in the sounds, no magic in the understanding.  It takes no arsenal of mental tricks to figure out what something means, and there is therefore no inner triumph in finally figuring it out.  A sentence in English is not an intriguing puzzle waiting to be solved.  It simply is, and that’s that. 

English to me is like a delicacy that has lost all flavor.  It lacks the firm assuredness of German, the posh nonchalance of French, the noble romance of Spanish, and the reserved dignity of Polish.  As a writer, I have been gifted with an ability to use English to create captivating works of verbal art.  But while the whole may be beautiful, the words themselves still seem bland and stale.  Even the foreign words whose meanings I know so well they take no thought to use still hold a spark for me.  There is just something beautiful about foreign languages, even those I don’t understand.  The idea that there are more ways to communicate than just my own is, for lack of a better word, magical. 

Living in a place that for the most part speaks only English, I have begun to desperately miss the music that is foreign languages.  In particular I miss Polish.  Despite all our efforts, my family is by no means multilingual.  When people ask how many languages I speak, I tend to tell them one and a half and a half.  (English, some Spanish from high school, and some leftover Croatian from my childhood.)  But our home is by no means strictly English.  We make a point of using the foreign words we do know in our everyday conversations.  When my parents call across the house for me, I tend to answer in Polish.  Sometimes we even call each other the Polish versions of our names.  When my brother and I are arguing for the sake of arguing, we often slip into Polish.  We also insult people in Polish, although neither of us knows how to say anything truly offensive.  Mostly we just call people blonde.  My family also says simple things like “hello”, “good-bye”, “thank-you”, and “I love you” in Polish.  In fact, we do it so much that I often have the urge to use the Polish versions with my American friends.  I have to continually remind myself that they won't have any idea what those words mean. 

During my last year in the U.S. I’ve had to find ways to surround myself with foreign languages.  When I get stressed, I listen to Polish worship songs.  When I get frustrated with America, I pull together all the foreign music on my computer and let it roll.  When I get homesick, I grab my DVDs of the first season of a brilliant Polish TV show and let myself drown in the language.  I even considered taking an extracurricular course in Russian until I saw the price tag attached to it.  While there is absolutely nothing on this earth more frustrating than attempting to communicate with someone in a language you don’t really know, there is also something incredibly nostalgic for me about being able to just sit back out of the way and listen to foreign languages flying by around me.  Something that makes me just a bit homesick. 

Worship is another area where I crave more than just English.  During the convocation services at Liberty, I often find myself longing for Polish songs.  I desperately miss the feeling of singing an English song that had been translated into Polish and being able to step back and just listen as the voices of the Poles mingled with those of the American missionaries singing the same song in their own language.  It’s a small glimpse of what it will be like when we finally stand around God’s throne and every nation from this earth comes together to praise Him in their own language.  I can only imagine how beautiful that will be. 

Missionaries often refer to something called a heart language.  Typically they mean the language a person grew up speaking.  Another definition I found, the one I prefer, described a heart language as whatever language makes a person feel most at home.  I’m not entirely sure what my heart language is, but I get the feeling it isn’t English.   If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably something Slavic.  Maybe even Polish, although I’m the first to admit that I speak very little of it.  Plus the grammar is a foreigner’s worst nightmare.  And yet despite all of that, there’s just something about the sound of Polish that I find beautiful.  But English is the language I’ve been given, so for now that’s the one I’ll use.  Maybe someday I’ll find a way to put the magic back in it. 

-Ash

Three Questions TCKs Hate

As a TCK, I’m used to people asking me questions.  Especially when they find out that I’ve lived out of the country.  Some of these are intelligent questions that I enjoy answering.  “What’s your favorite Polish food?”  “How many languages can you speak?”  “How do you say this in this language?”  And then, of course, there the ones that leave me torn between the desires to laugh out loud or cry.  “Did you live in an igloo?”  “Do you know what email is?”  “Do they have cars where you come from?”  Sometimes, when I’ve finally had it with the absurd questions, I’m highly tempted to tell people (with a perfectly straight face) that I live in a house made of snow with my pet polar bear in a place where everyone dresses in animal skins and goes ice-fishing on the weekends and dinner consists of whichever student did the poorest on their math exam.  But, unfortunately, my conscience won’t permit it.  So instead I just answer politely, and later when the person is finally gone I relay the story to my parents and we all laugh until we cry.  A wise person once said that there are no stupid questions, only stupid people who ask questions.  On days like that I’m inclined to agree. 

Yes, TCKs are used to being asked questions.  But there are three of them, particularly for missionary kids, that we hate above all others.  The first of them, ironically enough, is the one we get asked the most.  This is the dreaded origin question, the one that every new student gets asked about five hundred times on their first day.  “Where are you from?”  For someone who has lived in the same place their entire life, this question is fairly simple.  But for a kid who needs more than one hand to count the times they’ve moved and whose list of former places of residence includes two countries or more, answering that simple question quickly becomes a nightmare. 

Most TCKs I know, myself included, have no set answer to that question.  Instead, our answer is determined by the situation.  As soon as someone asks us the dreaded question we immediately begin a dizzying round of calculations.  “How well do I know this person?  How often am I likely to be around them in the near future?  How much time do I have to tell my story?  How much of it do they actually want to hear?  How much of it will they understand?  How much do I even want them to know?  Do I tell them where I was born, where my parents consider home, where I consider home, or just the last place I lived?  Do they expect me to give a certain answer?  Do I feel like answering more questions if they start asking, or should I just tell them what they want to hear?”  If that isn’t enough, each of these questions has to be answered and evaluated and all of them pulled together into a concrete verbal answer in about three seconds or less if we want to avoid looking like mute idiots.  Now you know why we sometimes stutter or our eyes glaze over when someone asks. 

The main problem with this question, however, is not how many options are available for us to use as answers.  The real problem is simply that half the time TCKs don’t even know where they consider to be home.  Our birth certificates say one thing, but our hearts say another.  So which of those is it?  There simply is no easy answer.  That doesn’t mean you should never ask a TCK where they’re from.  Just make sure you have sufficient time for us to fully answer the question.  And don’t get frustrated if it takes us five minutes to come up with an answer that then takes ten minutes to explain.  The fact that we can give you an answer at all is pretty remarkable. 

The second question that can quickly become a problem is “Which place do you like better?”  Now this question is fine if it comes from someone who is close to us or has a similar background or is interested in the profession that took us to that place or is just genuinely curious.  The problem comes in when the asker is an overly patriotic person who has obviously never left the country (possibly even their own county) and clearly expects you to answer the question with “America.”  I cannot even begin to describe how infuriating that is.  When asking this question of a TCK it is absolutely vital to remember that we’re green people at heart.  There is definitely some blue in there, but some of us are totally convinced that we should have been born yellow.  And the truth is, we may very possibly love our second country far more than we love America.  It isn’t a reason to get offended.  It’s just who we are. 

Myself, I would usually far rather be in Poland.  As much as I respect the ideals that America was founded on, I find the country we have become to be slightly over-rated.  I miss good Polish food that wasn’t drowning in grease or salt.  I miss the beautiful architecture and the sheer magic of a world where to call a building “old” meant it had been around since the middle ages.  I miss the cobblestone streets and the public transportation.  I miss the beauty of being able to listen to a flurry of different languages all around me without my brain being overloaded by the ability to understand every single word.  Even as I write this paragraph I find myself getting a bit emotional.  Poland may not be my birth country, but I love it and its people in the way one loves an old and dear friend. 

And yet I am a Third Culture Kid.  We have been raised between two cultures, and regardless of how we feel in our hearts many of us are convinced that by choosing a side we are somehow betraying someone.  To choose our “foreign” country is to betray our extended family and the expectations of our birth culture.  But to choose America is to betray the people and places that we consider home.  Either way, we lose. 

Keep in mind that the problem is not the question.  The problem is how it is presented.  A genuinely curious question will give a TCK a chance to truly express their heart and will probably earn you their friendship as a result.  But a tone that clearly expects them to choose a particular answer will do more harm than good.  I have seen TCKs mentally shut down or even write a person off entirely for asking the question in a way that is clearly waiting for a particular answer.  Be open.  Be willing to listen to whatever answer we give instead of automatically writing us off as unpatriotic.  Because while most TCKs crave belonging above all else, the thing we want second is someone who will simply listen to us.  Someone who will at least try to understand, even if they never really do.  Someone who won’t try to make us blue or yellow, but who will instead accept us for the people that we are, green shirts and all. 

But the question that most TCKs, especially missionary kids, hate the worst is “Aren’t you glad to be home?”  After the last few paragraphs, you can probably see the fatal flaw with this question.  It makes the automatic assumption that the kid in question thinks of wherever they currently are as home.  But that isn’t necessarily the case.  And when it isn’t, this question doesn’t help matters.  More often than not it just worsens any homesickness we’re already feeling.  Sometimes is may even make us feel guilty.  Are we supposed to think of America as home?  Why don’t we?  Does that make us bad people?  Unless you really have managed to hit the nail on the head and this kid does in fact consider America to be home, this question will only make them feel more alienated and out of place than they probably already do. 

Personally, my answer to this question is always a loud “No.”  Now I may not actually voice that answer out loud depending on the situation.  But that’s still my answer.  My reason?  I don’t think of America as home anymore.  I don’t necessarily hate it.  I just have days where I don’t feel like I fit, days when I’d rather be anywhere else but here.  As Thousand Foot Krutch says in one of their songs, “This place is many things, but I can’t call it home.”  In fact, some days I don’t even know where home is.  Some days I love where I am.  Other days I would give anything to go back to Poland. 

But how can I explain that to someone who has never left the country?  How can I make them understand that I get a headache from sitting in a loud cafeteria where I can understand every word of every conversation surrounding me?  How do I explain the annoyance of having to drive to Wal-Mart when I’m suddenly craving a good candy bar?  How can I make people understand how much I miss the beauty of standing on a balcony that looks out on of a string of other cement apartment buildings?  The truth is, I can’t. 

Maybe that’s why that question can cut so deep sometimes.  Because it takes everything I feel for that beautiful country and pretends none of it exists.  It assumes that just because my passport says United States of America that I am somehow obligated to walk around proclaiming how much I love my birth country.  It assumes that the words on my birth certificate are somehow more meaningful and important than what I feel in my heart.  And that thought is crushing.  That isn’t the intention, of course.  Nobody who asks that question is ever out to make a TCK feel bad.  But regardless of their intentions, that’s often the result. 

The moral of the story, then, is to make no assumptions.  Don’t assume that you know us or where we consider home.  And don’t get tired of listening to us talk about that place either.  They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.  Well, the way to a TCK’s is through the country they consider home.  We are who we are because of where we’ve been.  Blue doesn’t become green unless you throw in the yellow.  So if you really want to know us, you’ll have to take it all.

 

-Ash

What It Means to Wear a Green Shirt

Imagine for a moment that you’re in a large room full of people.  Upon entering, every person in the room, including you, was given a shirt of a specific color.  At some point a loud voice calls across the room and asks for everyone to please divide up into groups according to the color of their shirts.  The people in the room quickly divide themselves into two groups.  On one side of the room are people in yellow shirts, and on the other side are people in blue shirts.  As you look down to see which group you should be in, you suddenly make a shocking discovery: your shirt isn’t yellow or blue.  It’s green.  What are you supposed to do now? 

This is the world TCKs find themselves in.  Third Culture Kids, as the acronym stands for, are kids who have been raised in more than one culture.  Typically this means that their parents are citizens of one country, but, for whatever reason, the child has spent part or maybe all of their life in another country.  Most children, if left in this second culture long enough, will begin to blend in with it and may even come to think of it as their home culture.  Occasional visits and stories from parents may be the only thing linking them to their original “homeland”.  In most cases it is fairly obvious that the child is not, in fact, from this second culture, but somehow they blend in regardless. 

And then comes the dreaded day when the child is forced to return to their home culture.  Typically this comes when they graduate high school and are sent back “home” to go to college and find a job and begin building their own life.  Everyone just assumes that because this child has a passport from that country and was born to parents of that nationality that they should automatically fit in.  There’s just one (big) problem: this strange land is no longer home.  It’s like being born in a blue place to blue parents, but then spending a vast chunk of your life living among yellow people.  What results is a person who is really neither blue nor yellow.  No, we are something entirely different, something somewhere between the two.  We are the kids in the green shirts. 

I myself am a missionary kid, and I spent six years of my pre-college life living in Europe: almost four years in Croatia and just over two years in Poland.  Before, after, and in-between there was life in the United States.  That makes me a bit of an oddity among TCKs.  I was only out of the U.S. for two consecutive years before I graduated high school and returned to my native country.  Most people would assume, then, that culture shock on the return trip would have been minimal.  They couldn’t be more wrong. 

I have been back in the U.S. for just over a year, and there are still days when I feel like a foreigner.  I don’t know all the new songs or why it is that everybody just has to get the new I-Phone.  I have yet to see a single episode of “Friends” or “Smallville”, which means that any references to the characters go right over my head.  When my friends talk about actors or sports teams, it isn’t unusual for me to have to ask who they’re talking about.  In fact, it happens so much that we’ve made a sort of joke out of it.  Whenever one of them gives me that look that asks if I’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, I remind them with a smile that I was raised in a foreign country.  It’s not entirely true, but at least it earns a few chuckles and turns the focus away from my apparent lack of any relevant cultural knowledge. 

Despite having a passport that clearly says United States of America on the cover, most days I feel far more European.  I followed the 2012 Euro Cup religiously, and spent a good deal of time talking with my family about who would win each match.  When the Super Bowl rolls around I’m lucky if I know the name of even one of the two teams before the scoreboard gives it away.  After two years in Poland I only speak a bare fraction of the language, and yet I find myself yearning for the Polish worship songs that seemed to so perfectly capture my heart despite the fact that I could barely understand them.  I also have a tendency to make unconscious comments about “the Americans.”  At which point my friends have to laughingly remind me that, despite all of my valiant denial, I am in fact one of them. 

And yet, at the same time, I’m not.  Not really.  There may have been a time when I was American, but those days are long gone.  There’s too much yellow mixed in with the blue.  No matter what anyone says, the truth is that I’m green now.  TCKs come in all shades of green.  Some of them are die-hard blues with just a few years of yellow added into the middle.  Some of them are almost completely yellow with the only blue being the letters on their passport and the relatives they visit every three years.  But regardless of how much of each color is mixed in, none of us is really one or the other.  We’re all something in the middle. 

It’s always interesting to watch TCKs interact.  You could take two TCKs who grew up in completely opposite environments, and if you put them in a room together it’s almost certain that they will not only find each other, but that they will bond with each other on a deeper level than either of them does with anyone else in the room.  Even someone with whom they have the exact same interests.  Why?   Because we as TCKs understand something about each other that no one else can.  We understand that strange betweenness, the strong need to belong somewhere when it seems we belong nowhere.  No matter what the exact shade, we realize that we are all green.  And since we don’t seem to fit in with any of the other color groups, we might as well form one of our own. 

My name is Ash, and no matter what my passport says I’m not an American.  Neither am I a European.  I’m a TCK, a proud wearer of the metaphorical green shirt.  And this is what life looks like through my eyes. 

-Ash