A letter for my daughter, a third generation TCK.
Dear Little One
I stare at your little fingers curled into fists and wonder at the miracle of your life. I wonder with amazement that you are of me, knitted within my womb, stitched together from my flesh and blood into a being all your own.
Your eternal spirit breathed from God. Your soul carefully encased in a body, bright and beautiful and new.
How humbling it is to hold you. How utterly nerve wrecking it is to realise it is now my task to care for and steward you in this fallen world.
I wonder how to protect you.
I wonder how to challenge you.
I wonder how to convince you that I love you without smothering you. I wonder how I will answer you when you come to me with a list of my wrongdoings - all of which will be true I am certain.
I wonder how I will ask your forgiveness when I fail, when I am frustrated and terrified. I wonder how to teach you compassion and mercy without forgoing justice. I wonder how to teach you truth and strength without legalism or stoicism.
I wonder who your friends will be - and who you will be with them. I marvel at the adventures you will have as you discover this world and my heart already breaks with the pain you will find in the corners of this sinful existence.
I wonder how my faith will ever grow enough to let you go.
And as I wonder all these things, the great and small happenings of your days, the momentous occasions before you, the banality of chores and homework and the tedious task of growing up ahead of you, I wonder a little further, at the choices I have made, that will no doubt shape and affect you.
I wonder how I, as someone who grew up in a culture far from my own, in a country I have no claim to except it being home, how can I raise you - teach you to hold these nations lightly in your hands and to cling to the one Kingdom to which we really belong?
A few weeks ago we took you to the US Embassy in London. We rode the train, documents safely tucked in our backpack and you tucked safely in our arms. We waited in the embassy building, its tall windows imposing on the skyline of London below. As we held you and raised our right hands, swearing that we were your parents and legal US citizens ourselves, the enormity of our actions hit me.
And I wondered, were we doing the right thing - raising you in two different countries? Raising you so far from familiarity?
I have said before, regardless of what life you lead, a nomadic one of multilingual schools and frequent airplane rides or a stable one of quiet routine and small town consistency, you will have one parent who will not understand.
My childhood, vastly different from your father’s childhood, will be vastly different from your own. And I wonder how we will relate to you? And how will we teach you to relate to your families? To your friends? To your world?
Should we teach you the American pledge of allegiance in case you have to recite it at some point in your childhood (I did…) or should we teach you God Save the Queen (sorry, King) since you reside in Britain? Do we celebrate 4th of July or Bonfire Night or both? Or neither? Should we teach you how to live and speak for the Southern United States at the risk of making you an outcast in Cambridge, just so you can fit in with your cousins when you visit? Or should we teach you how to live and speak in the culture you exist in, and trust that others will understand you, and even appreciate your differences?
Should we raise you as an expat, the daughter of a father living in a foreign land? Or should we raise you as a citizen, since you have a passport, the daughter of a mother in her birth land? Or should we throw both out the window and raise you as a global citizen, show you the world, share the cultures we both know and let you cartwheel into your own, beautiful mix of them all?
Should I prepare you for the confusion and pain of misidentified culture? Should I tell you that you won’t feel you belong here, or there, or really anywhere, because you’re from a third, particularly nuanced culture?
Or should I let you discover that loneliness on your own, and simply be here for when you see and feel it? Should I point out our differences as a family or let you observe them on your own? Should I prompt you when people ask ‘where are you from?’ Or should I wait and let you answer from your heart, instinctively, as I did growing up…
My answer was always ‘I’m from many places but my home is Heaven.’ Adults would laugh at me, and probe once more for a real answer, to which I thought, Heaven is far more real than anything on this Earth. And my parents would let my answer lie, never asking if I felt more American or British or Angolan or Kenyan - because they knew I felt none of them and all of them - an expat’s beautiful curse.
I wonder, little child, as I show off your passport photos (you have two!) if I’m making a spectacle of your citizenship and someday you will resent the split identity, as I have multiple times.
I wonder which accent you will pick up, I wonder which slang you will adopt, I wonder how fluidly you will shift between languages and syntax.
I wonder how many times you will correct someone when they assume you are wholly American, or wholly British, or wholly something else entirely. I wonder how many times your heart will sigh when you think of all the people you love, scattered from California to Texas to Mississippi to Scotland to Germany to Turkey and beyond. I wonder how to instil in you a resilience, a fortified gratitude, for this international life. How do I show you its beauty and its wonder and its loveliness without discounting that yes, we have lost something else, something stable and known, and you will have to grieve a life you never had the chance to live.
How do I show you how delightful and wonderful it is to celebrate American Thanksgiving in Britain with Italian friends? How do I teach you that to worship on Sunday morning with voices from 50 nations is to mirror the worship we will see in Eternity - and it is a gift to know so many believers from so many places?
And how do I do all of that, while knowing, because I lived a life of travel and change and constant explanation, that you will also always wonder - what would it have been like to have been born in one place, to parents of one culture, with all grandparents living nearby, and to never have to worry whether you need your American or UK passport? To never have to think about saying ‘rubbish’ or ‘trash’ or writing with an 's’ or a ‘z.’
I know you may have all these thoughts, and more, someday, and I only hope to meet them with compassion and with prayer. And I hope for you to meet me with understanding and forgiveness, and perhaps with appreciation that we all, regardless of where we live or grow up, face pain, beauty, loneliness, laughter, disappointment, challenges and growth.
Growing up is traumatic simply because it is change after change after change. It is not made seamless by location. Patriotism doesn't define your faith, and nationality on this earth has no bearing on your citizenship in Eternity.
Life is not always easier in one town versus the other, on one side of the ocean over the other, it is just different.
And different, dearest little daughter, is perfectly alright.
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