Third Culture Kids

It's a constant thought in our minds -home, home and home. Yes, I wrote 'home' three times, but I don't mean the same place with that one word. So many of my people consider themselves to be multi-cultural, multi-lingual with a 'double-consciousness' or maybe a multi-consciousness. Recently, my girls and I connected over an article in McCombs Today about a man who considers himself to be a "Third Culture Kid" -with a Togolese father, a Black Texan mother and born in Coite de Ivoire. While some of us disagreed over whether the title was too broad or too limiting, one of the major factors in what brought us together as friends is that shared experience of having many different homes and having to learn how to navigate multiple realities, oftentimes, simultaneously.

While it is certainly a gift in so many ways, it can also be extremely challenging. Sometimes your spirit gets mixed up and you wonder to yourself if you're just falling for the supposed greener grass on the other side of the fence (or world) or if you're legitimately homesick. Either way, the feeling is real. Though I've been back home in New York for a number of months now, I'm still surprised to find that I'll feel strong pangs of homesickness for the Philippines. One day, I felt it particularly deeply and had to write more. This is for all my Third Culture Kids!

~

May 14, 2011

I look out the window as we pass conifers and desiduous trees native to the Northeastern United States finally beginning to bud after a long, cold winter that I had the great luck of missing. As the winter thawed and I found myself back in a world full of frozen, bronzed spirits and surrounded by pure artifice, I thought that the buds of spring would re-energize me and bring me closer to the endless summer that I had left behind.

There are days when it works. When I can breathe in next to a body of water and feel my spirit shudder in anticipation. There are days when it doesn’t. The leaves look tight and rigid to me, as if they are bracing themselves for their impending death in the fall. The branches and trunks, too stiff, too straight, too thin to make my heart beat harder. They stand far from one another –isolated and almost awkwardly misplaced.

Unfairly, I compare those sharp, pale leaves to the expansive, bawdy green of home. The branches that grow endlessly and the trunks that bend under the weight of its fruit. I romantically remember how those trees and leaves disappear into themselves, never letting you see where he ends and she begins, mated restfully until a breeze causes him to turn here and her to shift just there.

I wonder why I torture myself with such comparisons and remind myself that after all, I was born here! Mama wasn’t even pregnant with me when she left home. That I could understand. If I was conceived in the humidity of February and forced to fly to JFK while being jostled in my liquor amnii, I might understand my spirit’s longing to lift itself from my body and visit for a little bit. I almost wish it would, in the darkness of my sleep -just leave and catch its fill of home so this void wouldn’t continue to punch me mercilessly at the most inopportune moments. Fly through the muddy terraces and warm waters for hours only to burst back into my body with my first waking breaths.

Sometimes I urge my spirit to leave while I’m awake. Leave my body in a trance while you collect the remnants of a place I miss so acutely. I won’t mind.

What is calling me home? Who is calling me home? I can’t see their faces. It is my own? Is it simply myself? Will I always feel broken in two when I look out the window? Places that were once so familiar, places that defined me are now secondary identifications of where I came from. Does my ancestry supersede my circumstance? Will I ever just be able to simply exist?

Do I want to?

A bird shrilly calls, crickets chirp and I feel my blood lift in response. At night, I lie awake, straining to hear the bird sing. I know this creature for some reason. It sings alone, reminding me of home, reminding me of myself. Besides the regularly scheduled trains passing, it is the only sound I hear at night. All should be sleeping, but this bird sings as though its breast is sweating under the heat of a noontime sun. It reminds me that somewhere, far from here, it’s daylight. Somewhere far from here, birds and people sing and sweat under the noontime sun. While I sleep, someone calls and my spirit flies to meet itself where dreams and reality merge into one.