The STILL Global

The ‘act’ of repatriation is well behind us. The stories of those who are still global – but no longer living a mobile life – are a collective of voices relatively unrepresented. We are the quiet ones for whom ‘repatriation’ happened a long long while ago.

That doesn’t mean we are done or feel comfortable or entirely at peace with our lives in our passport country. Ruth van Reken answers that question simply: “When do we adjust to repatriation? We never adjust. We adapt.”

Global Minus the Mobile
So where are our stories? How have we adapted? 'We' being the-global-without-the-mobile?

Like me, you might never have lived in your passport country until you were 18. And like me, your path likely followed a unique set of sequences that landed you, well – landed in your passport country as an adult.

That belief that we are the TCKs who chose stability and rooting? This story does not necessarily represent us.     

We are those who ‘returned’ and through the quick-sand of circumstance, remain. There is pleasure and love for my life here. And still, a certain sadness. The Families in Global Transitions conference awoke me to my false sense of aloneness in an experience within the global community: the voices of those of us who are STILL globals, those who are not currently mobile... we have a place at the table too.

We carry a different form of grief – not better or more or less – just different than other groups of globals: the TCKs-turned-expats, the trailing spouses, the freshly repatriated. We are the-STILL-globals and we need a place to tell our stories too.

#globalminusthemobile

Sarah Stoner is an American-born writer who was raised in Uganda, Morocco, Belgium, and Thailand. Her descriptive nonfiction has appeared in a variety of local magazines and national journals as well as the anthology The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (a Skipping Stones Honor Award Book). Recognition for her work includes first place in the National League of American Pen Women essay contest and selection as a featured author for the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs project, TreeStory.

Her family’s roots run four generations deep in the Pacific Northwest where she now lives—on a 20-acre land trust property with her husband and two children. With half her life spent navigating foreign soils and various cultures, Sarah is learning the language of living in her passport country. She explores identity and belonging at sarahhhwho.blogspot.com.

Bowie in Bangkok. Now Gone. And Still With Us. Like the Memory of My Shoe.

Bangkok 1983.

I was 13, and there were no seats. We stand in the vast oval of the Thai Army Stadium in Bangkok, crammed with Thais and me and my brother. Not sure who came on before Bowie but we waited and waited and waited for what seemed like hours after the taxi dropped us off.

He walks on stage finally. Platinum hair, Royal blue pantsuit. The arena comes alive. and the crowd presses forward in one solid piece. I am pulled downward then forward then my feet lift off the ground and I think, This is what it's like to die crushed in a crowd. 

I can see my brother trying to push space for me and for him but our small bodies have no power. We surge apart. One shoe comes off my foot. A fragile white mesh flat, ballerina slipper. Really impractical footwear when trying to survive a stampede. I feel frantic, undone, one bare foot feeling the packed dirt of the stadium floor. But I am upright and I know this is good. The pushing stops, it might only have been a moment stretched out by adrenaline, and I feel relieved to be standing, relieved that the undertow of the crowd was gone as fast as it came. The music starts. No, maybe I just can hear it now. My heartbeat slows. And I watch as a fragile white mesh slipper passes hand over hand above the crowd, seemingly straight towards me. I don't remember signaling or waving, "Hey that's my shoe." Kind of like the magic of a 3D movie, when it comes straight to you and you don't even ask. I slip my white mesh shoe back on. I am breathing and taking in the world-sized beat of Bowie.

My brother and I decide that Bowie was late because he was dying his hair hours before the show. It shines white in the spotlight and he sings Oh Baby Just You shut Your Mouth.... Shhhh...... Hands rest on my shoulders throughout the show, Thai-style, where bodies aren't separated by personal space bubbles and we are all connected and very much alive, thrumming to the energy of one Mr David Bowie in Bangkok 1983.

As a Teen TCK, What Are Your Memories of Music?

Bootleg tapes on the street corner.

Pop songs when all I wanted to hear was alternative New Age.

"I Just Called To Say I Love You"????? AGAIN!?!?!??!

My favorite typo entered into my TCK Lexicon: "Comfortably Nump" on my Pink Floyd The Wall tape. Like most TCK jokes, you had to be there. I mean that literally. You had to be there, in that country, at that time.

Rick Springfield. David Bowie. The limited rock concert choices of an American teenager growing up in Bangkok, Thailand.

What I would have given - to see The Clash, Violent Femmes, Yazoo -

As a teen TCK, what are your memories of music?

Our access to music played an influential role in our experience of TCK teenagerdom. I was in Bangkok for my late teens, my US summers spent recording tape-to-tape from my cousins' music collection, the likes never found among the stacks of bootleg tapes on street tables in Thailand. Oingo Boingo. Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Cure. Belgium for my early teens, leaving me imprinted with a European version of fantastic 80s music. Pass the Dutchie. And I called them Yazoo. Not Yaz, which I still can't get used to.

And I did get to see David Bowie. With the news of his January 10 death came the memory of his concert. Bangkok 1983. I always thought of it as Bowie's "Let's Dance" concert, but it was actually his Serious Moonlight tour. I know this now because I just looked it up. At 13, I went to the show in Bangkok on December 5, 1983. I loved it. I was there. That's all I knew.

In this "information age" I can access from the bird's eye view: from May to December, 15 countries and 95 performances. How many TCKs saw this tour? Standing in our own mini-worlds, in our own mini-moments? Were you there? Maybe you saw him in Auckland, New Zealand - the show he played before Bangkok.

"The David Bowie Serious Moonlight Tour was thus far Bowie's longest, largest and most successful concert tour. The tour opened at the Vorst Forest Nationaal, Brussels, on 18 May 1983 and ended in the Hong Kong Coliseum on 8 December 1983; 15 countries visited, 96 performances, and over 2.6M tickets sold. The tour garnered mostly favorable reviews from the press.

"The tour, designed to support Bowie's latest album Let's Dance, was initially designed to be a smaller tour, playing to the likes of sub-10,000-seat indoor venues around the world, similar to previous Bowie tours. However, the success of Let's Dance caused unexpectedly high demand for tickets: there were 250,000 requests for 44,000 tickets at one show, for example, and as a result the tour was changed to instead play in a variety of larger outdoor and festival-style venues. The tour sold out at every venue it played.

"The tour was a high point of commercial success for Bowie, who found his new popularity perplexing. Bowie would later remark that with the success of Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight Tour, he had lost track of who his fans were or what they wanted. One critic would later call this tour his "most accessible" because "it had few props and one costume change, from peach suit to blue."

Thanks, Wiki. It is what I remember he looked like. White hair. Peachy white suit.

News Flash: Jimi H is Black

I never knew that Jimi Hendrix was black.

I moved to the U.S. in 1988. When I saw a poster of him on a college dorm wall, I was stunned. I read the puffy yellow letters under the image of a wild-haired man holding a guitar that told me who he was.

“Jimi Hendrix is black?!” It was a rhetorical question I supppose.

It wasn’t so much that he was black or blue or purple. It was that I had never thought about him one way or the other. He existed in my mind as his music. He existed as sound, not skin. “Of course Jimi Hendrix is black,” I was told. “How could you not know that? Listen to his voice. He has a black voice.”

He does?

I listen closely sometimes. Even now in my 40s, I listen to him on NPR during today's feature segment. I strain my ears, listening for signs of black-ness. I hear his jamming wild guitar sound, his raging power in the form of uncontained beat. After two and a half decades in the U.S. I now know more of his story, not simply his music.

And as I listen today, as I drive along the Seattle streets of his hometown, I laugh, and remember, “Hey! Jimi Hendrix is black! Who knew!”

Because most of all I like to remember the 18 year old girl who didn’t know he was any color at all but purple haze.

Memories of Air

This is one of my favorite childhood photos.

My grandmother Margaret is in the foreground. I'm flying a kite on the beaches of Calpe, Spain, near Alicante. We spent summers and a few Easter breaks in the warm Spanish sunshine when we lived in Belgium (which is filled with as much rain and as many rhododendrons as Washington). Wow, sounds like the life, eh. When I tell my traveling stories, I become envious. Wait, it was my life and I'm envious?

But remembering "some other grand time" is not why I like the photo. I like this photo because when I came across it in my grandmother’s album I had never seen it and -- it surprised me. I look so comfortable flying a kite. As if standing on the earth with my head tilted into the wide open air is the most comfortable thing in the world. I look at ease on terra firma, like I belong to the space around me - water, air, wind. That's what I love about it. I look so darn grounded – and I don't remember carrying that feeling with me.

The photo makes me remember that what I remember can be different then what also was….

Haunting the Customs Line

"Ow, Mom, that hurts!" Noah says to me, after his first swipe with third-world toilet paper.

We're on our first international family vacation. Isla Mujeres, Mexico. He's five years old. Okay, we'd all been out of the country before that but sorry, Canada, you don't count.

My first steps off the airplane, into the tube walkway, and then Wham! It smells of my childhood. It smells like home. That wet musty air hiding underneath the scent of machine-cooled air. An overworked A/C system. Leaky windows. Who knows what it is. I had to spend a minute sniffing it to figure it out. The smell of humidity. The smell of imperfection. The smell of a third-world HVAC system.

American air conditioning smells, well, perfect seems like an odd way to describe it. Clinically clean is more like it. You can't smell wetness, age, and a certain thickness. American HVAC air has no personality, no oomph. Here I was, sniffing stinky canned air and feeling quite happy about it. It meant I was overseas again.

The last time I was overseas in 2005 -- five months in India with my husband -- feels like -- decades ago, xx,xxx leagues under the sea away from who I am now. I am a mama. I now exist in an entirely new dimension, one that I never even knew existed. And I am now traveling overseas for the first time as a mother. Two kids in tow.

I stand in line, holding four dark blue passports now. Not my usual, solitary, One. The customs line winds around the poles. Katherine thrashes at my feet and makes a break into the crowd, too many hours on a plane for a one year old. Noah wants to be held, tired, heavy for a five year old. The whining, begging, chasing, thrashing sets in.

I am desperate for calm. To be left alone, really. I dig out the kingsize Blow Pop from my purse, it's been in emergency stash for a few months now. Sticky pink saliva immediately stains the front of Katherine's shirt. And she refuses to remove the sugarbomb from her mouth now that she's had a taste. She shrieks when I try to pull it away. Okay, I'm only slightly mortified. Because it works.

The sticky Blow Pop affords a few minutes of calm in the line (once I stop trying to rip it from Sticky      Paws' hands). I look around. I find myself looking into faces, wondering. I am looking for myself. that girl I knew. The one who stood in customs lines at the foot of her mommy and daddy, two, three, four times a year. That girl who never thought twice about standing in customs lines. It's just the way it was -- to get home, to leave home, to go most anywhere.

I want to find her in someone else's face. I want to recognize myself. Remember myself. This girl feels far far away from me. I want to find her, so that I can be sure she actually was a part of me. Is a part of me. More and more, I hardly believe I was her.

We're next. Hand over the four passports. It's my name on the customs form as Head of Family now. Hola. Small smile, make eye contact. Small nod. These are the people giving me passage to another country. They are the final gateway and I always take this moment seriously, and with a slight smile.

Passports flip open to the picture. A glance up from photo to actual face. Check. Boom! Stamp, stamp. The mechanical bang of stamps echoes down the line of customs desks, those square hard boxes each with filled with boxed unsmiling men. Travellers flow in one by one. Leaving home. Coming home.

I look at my Mexico entrance stamp, first one in my new passport. I've had a passport since I was six days old. And I wonder -- when will I come home? After forty years, here I am, still looking for myself in a customs line.

Diversity Under Cover

Rural Skagit Valley seems very white. It is very white.

And like yesterday, I'm often pleasantly surprised to uncover, by happenstance and casual conversation, the deep connections to the larger wider, less white, world.

I'm a prime example, walking around here looking like I fit in, me and my pale skin and my complex colored background (checkered past?) spending my formative years in countries much less white than this.

Yesterday, in a room filled with pale skinned people again, I uncover the hidden diversity. All seats taken, just a few on the squeezed against of the walls of the room are open. Skagit Valley Writer's League meeting. A woman squeezes in next to me. She is smiley and turns out as we chat to be Anne, gives me her card. I glance down at it quickly during the meeting. "Horticultural Professional & Therapeutic Gardener. Alizetti Gardens." I smile inwardly, that she likes plants, that I like her title, the possibilities it contains. I muse on the possibile actualities of "Therapeutic Gardening"  -- what she means by it versus all the things that could mean.

A lull in the meeting and I glance down again. In teeny less-than-6-point type at the very bottom of the card, I squint to read,"Alizetti: Swahilli for Sunflower from Kenya, East Africa - where our family took root..."

Initially I miss the comma after East Africa. It's the size of a dirt speck. Swahilli... hmmm. Not a common reference, really. During the meeting break that includes chocolate cake with plastic-y frosting that I do not eat, I ask, Why the Swahilli? A stint in Peace Corps in Kenya, and then she meets her husband so they stay a few more years after that totalling seven. Again, I smile and get excited. Kenyan husband, I wonder? Awesome. She explains, second generation white Kenyan. She describes his heritage as "colonial." I call him TCK.

We connect more. I mention, likely in a low mumble she doesn't catch, that I'd love to meet him, that I'm a TCK too. I don't think she heard me. As usual these days, I downplay this part of me. Though it always lives, in shimmering excitment at the news of someone else maybe a bit like me, in this part of the world.

[photo credit: Alizeti's flickr photostream]

Questions Big and Small, Mostly for the Sake of Asking

On seeing the movie The King's Speech: Is writer's block an unspoken stutter? The pressure of the blank page, pressure of facing "the audience." The drive for perfection -- and under it all, the fear of underperfoming -- that can lead to spoken or written hesitation. Vocal or paginated blanks.

Family, From Afar

How is it that my family looks morebeautiful from afar?

I am running the lake, feet pounding the gravel, breath pounding from lungs with each thud, and I see them -- standing on the concrete dock, like an island, a pedastal, holding them like art, no sound of them. Ken. Noah. Katherine's canary yellow stroller. Bright against the green trees, the gray sky, the smooth silver water. Framed. Still life. I slow down, hear only my breath. I want to stop running, to grin, satisfied, to linger, to take them in, like a painting I want to stop and gaze at for a long time, no sound of them, just my eyes soaking them in as art, no words, my heart gasping now, how beautiful they look from this distance, three beings somehow one solid sculpture of family, my family. Oh, my heart.

I didn't want to admit this - how much more I can see the beauty now, then up close, when I am mostly myopic and feeding and wiping and bossing.

And today I come across a quote I saved a few long months ago from the back of The Sun - and I feel better to know - why - they looked so beautiful in that moment on the dock, far away, no sound.

"If you see the whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern." ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Thank goodness for moments from afar; those tiny glimpses of the whole.

No Longer Spineless

Following a decade of publication in magazine journals and newsprint-style formats, behold: The Spine.

If you're interested in cross-cultural conversations, you can find The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays in all the usual places books are sold: the big A, B&N or your friendly local bookstore, as well as in downloadable formats for Kindle and Nook. Or put in a request at your local libary to purchase a copy for loan. And let me know if they do as I'd be honored. Our libraries are amazing.

Among the 20 diverse essays on sociocultural topics, you will find my essay on the experience of growing up overseas from zero to 18 years old, and then "coming home" to the U.S.: "Fragments--Finding Center".

Strange how different a book feels, being published in one. I tend towards essay writing, and love all good writing regardless of book or magazine. So I'm suprised at the difference suddenly how much more permanent a spine feels.

It means I can be in libraries. It means I can take a place among people's bookshelves at home. It's a sweet spot.

My Old Friend, U.S. Highway 2

You know those rare moments when you realize what a good friend you've had standing quietly beside you through the years? Today, I drove a two-lane highway for the umpth time -- through the corridor of trees, alongside the emerald Skykomish River, next to metal train cars chugging alongside, up up up to Stevens Pass. And I realized: Highway 2 and I have a long sweet history.

Today, a clear winter road took us up to Stevens Pass for Noah's Sunday ski lesson. A rare treat to spend two hours in the car, just my little buddy and me. Sure, he was tired. Sure, I was tired. 6:30 am, an early morning up and out of the house. A long drive ahead. I ignore an impulse to offer him an iPhone or Leapster game. I drive in the quiet and occasionally adjust my rear view mirror to study his face. Much of the ride, his eyes are relaxed -- lids heavy but open, his relaxed face turned to the window.

How many times have I whizzed along this road, watched the same scenery he was taking in? Today, we pass by gray-brown trees, haloed by the gray-white light of midwinter, covered in a thick moss like fur. Limbs stretch across the road like arms in slow motion. Together, my son and I fly through this tunnel of time.

Highway 2 was a frequent road to adventures in my early twenties. My then-boyfriend Brad and I would pack up for the day, sometimes without a plan, for a hike or to explore a town or to picnic or all the above. Sultan. Startup. Skykomish. Goldbar. I loved the sounds of these towns, the way you could still feel their roots out of nothingness, settlements borne out of some bold people making their way through these mountains as miners or loggers or prospectors.

The great Northwest lay at my feet, too. Both Brad and I were new to the area and hungry for its thick trees, its rivers, its mountains. That we could pass a car loaded with skis, then a car strapped down with a kayak, and another topped by a mountain bike, and us with our leather hiking boots itching for a trail... it felt exhilarating as hell to live here. It felt new and limitless.

It wasn't just a new city for me, or a new state. Living in this corner of the U.S. - it was an entirely new country for me. And man alive was it amazing. To be on my own, at the start of my adult life, discovering the beauty of great outdoors. Discovering who I was, in the context of America. Sure, I'd visited the Northwest - but under the wings of my parents, always as a child. Now I was in charge of the discoveries, and it was exhilarating. Highway 2. Curves of road lined with soft bristle of evergreen tree - and then around one corner, POW! A fist of snow-covered granite, Mount Index, hits you in the face.

Twenty years later, Highway 2 is an old friend, one that I'm still hanging out with, still new having adventures. Today, I'm with my six-year-old son. And every time I round that curve, the one that flings your car by that stretch of river that sits still and deep turquoise, your car so close you can almost imagine you are a bird swooping over the smooth boulders holding the pool wide, so close you have to inhale sharply every time, smile softly as you turn your head out the window to take in as much of the turquoise as you can, and you have to say to whoever is in the car with you this time, "Look at that! Oh man, is that beautiful. Look at that color." Every time. To my then-boyfriend or my husband or my good friend or my son or my mother -- whoever is on the adventure today. And if I'm by myself, just me and the road, you can bet I think the exact same thought.

Here's to old friends, you and me, Highway 2.

God Speaks in Compound Sentences

It's been more than one month since we've moved and we're still alive. The lights in our house run only on solar and summer's over--we've lost the sun.

I wake up and my eyes squint through the gray like a vole, like I live under the earth rather than on top of it. I want to write and I do not. It's as if I cannot see, and it's as if I can only feel my way through the day, through the dripping gray sky, through the dishes and the tugging of my children at my leg. I want to write about what this all feels like, but I do not.

This is the unedited product of a writing exercise from Priscilla Long's workshop "The Virtuoso Sentence" at the Skagit Valley Writer's League Conference last Saturday. Instructions: Take a subject you're working on and write about it using only compound sentences. That's two independent sentences joined by and, or, but. Three minutes. Go.

I found it quite difficult to flow within those constraints and felt quite pleased with myself. Until it was my turn to read it aloud and I got six words into my reading when she interrupted me. "That's a dependent clause," says Priscilla. Yes, "since we moved" is a dependent clause. (whaaaaa!?) Okay. Keep reading. Third sentence. Interrupted by, "That's a dependent clause." ("like"... "as if"). Okay, so, by definition, compound sentences can't have dependent clauses? Okay, so, apparently I use a lot of dependent clauses. Is that bad? Is it like having food hanging from your chin, like an extra appendage? Time to study craft - time to study sentence structures of the masters. Ach! I loved this 90 minute class of hers. I want more.

Here's a really cool fact: across all religions, god, in whatever form he/she/it/them manifests, speaks quite often in compound sentences. According to Priscilla this is because compound sentences carry a lot of authority. Who knew.

Goodbye, Bright City, Goodbye

I keep thinking of everything I will miss.

As I wish the city goodnight, as I draw the curtains, I think: How I will miss the city lights reflected in the rain on my window.

I pause, look out our bedroom window with Katherine against my hip. We peer down onto the street, the same visual fragment of street I've seen from that window for six years. The slick pavement, all the lives moving below. How I will miss the hubbub. Long clear beads of rain smashed against the glass - refract the red green orange gold lights of the city into a shiny melted crystal crayon mess all over the window.

Time to go draw a new picture in the woods. Bring lots of black crayon. It's dark in them there trees. But the stars are bright, almost as bright as the shiny clean air in my lungs.

--

In the woods, night presses thick as fur against our house. Night feels liquid as the cat that curls its body around your bones. Darkness becomes a Thing that pushes against you,a Thing that you push against, like a gale force wind - a Thing that you close doors and windows to in case it leaks through, in case it seeps out your candlelight - yes, it presses its liquid breath against the glass until, maybe one time, you throw your front door open to it. Break the seal. Relief. Pause, breathe. Now night is a cool hand on your cheek, a lover you can't see only feel, a friend you forgot about until now.

Dive out your door, look up through the trees holding the sky in place. Swim through the cool black, maybe through the quiet, over the bridge, maybe to the neighbors for a visit. The embryonic darkness, you don't realize it overtook you until you tumble into their house, into chatter, golden light, the living. It does feel good to break through the black, to lose yourself in it. Night is such a different story in the forest.

I feel like Mary Poppins - walking in to a painting, but I will stay for a while and it will become real.

Lionhead: Water Earth Fire

"I just love how I can hear Lionhead at night," my cousin Laura says to my mother.

"I know," she replies, "isn't it nice? I can hear the creek too."

I butt in. "What? What do you mean, 'You can hear Lionhead.'?"

Laura turns her head to me from her chair on th sandy white beach. My toes dig in to the cool sand of the evening. "I can hear Lionhead Creek rushing at night. When it's all quiet and everyone's gone to sleep."

Laura's head turns to look up the lake and farther, up to the distant mountain that peeks between the purple hills above the shore. Lionhead. The "Mountain" part goes unsaid. Its shaggy rock-striped face goes without saying. It needs no introduction as a mountain.

Funny thing is, I wake up tonight at 3:39 am, have to pee, leave both kids in the camper a bit unsurely - I keep looking back at Katherine as I stand at the door of the camper, my hand on the knob, turning slowly, that screen door that no matter how slowly you open it releases with a loud Clack.

Turn, turn, slowly, looking back. She often wakes up within a minute or two of my body absent from her side - and now she's in the upper bunk alone -- Clack -- She scootches like an earthworm, wriggling, face scrunching. Her body releases and she lets out a wheeze like a sigh. I slide out the camper door.

And there it is. In the quiet, now that everyone's asleep, I hear it. Unmistakable. A roar like the black whooshing of the universe, sliding down that mountain, rushing past the pelt of trees, skimming the air above the water to fill my ears like a shell with the volume turned up to 10.

How could I never have heard this sound before? Lionhead Creek in the darkness. Whooshing down Lionhead Mountain. The head waters that carried the ashes of my ancestors. Grandma Bessie and Grandpa John.

Half-started vs. Whole-Hearted: A Blog Theme Emerges, and I Fight It, Still

I don't want this blog to be a mommy blog. Really, I don't.

Half-started posts linger on my Drafts page. Blogg-ish thoughts lurk, un-inked, in my mind. Thoughts on yoga. On our transition to rural life in the Skagit Valley. On living with my feet in two worlds, urban Capitol Hill and rural Skagit. On excercise. On the TV show Hoarders. Yes, I said it -- lately I'm inspired to write about Hoarders. Ties into my fascination with thrifting and how our culture manages their "stuff." I have many thoughts On Writing. On Not writing. On ego. On clinging -- to a strong body, to a non-wrinkled skin surface, on clinging to ideas about what is and is not okay to write about on a blog.

And yet. Somehow. The blog posts I end up whipping out and clicking "Publish Post" -- end up being musings on my children, on motherhood, on moments in time as a mom.

And dang it, I end up sounding like someone who thinks parenting blogs are less-than. It's not that. It's that I think I'm less than, if I am presenting myself to the world and all I have to talk about is my kids. It's just so dang cliche.

And if you know me in the slightest, you'll know that I hate to be put in a box.

Box or no box, the fact remains -- my heart explodes for my children, my head aches with the growth that's in it for me. Year by year, I know -- the complexities will only magnify. So I'll probably keep writing about what it's like... And so, I just have to go with it.

I like to write about the sweetness of life. I like to write from my insides, the blood-thumping red rimmed pulsing insides of our selves. I can blather on about brilliant thoughts of mine. Insights. Theories. Observations. But little of it feels connected to my heart. So I let those thoughts linger on my Drafts dashboard. Try as I may to impress, to impose a representation of my different selves into this new-fangled way of showing my self to the world, the fact remains. I write from my core and my core right now revolves around tasting life as a mother.

Toot, Toot! (sound of my horn)

Hamma Lamma Ding Dong Triathalon finisher! And... #1 woman out of the water on the swim leg. Toot toot!

P.S. Rainiest tri ever???

Thanks to Becky & John Hamilton and all of us crew who pulled off the 2nd annual home-spun swim-bike-run from Seward Park this September. You guys rock. See you next year!

Book Review on the Brain

I'm polishing my final draft of a book review on Third Culture Kids--The Children of International Educators by Dr. Ettie Zilber (2009, ___ Press), for publication in The Journal for the Advancement of International Education.

I think I just put myself to sleep, listing all those long titles - and I also have double reason: that 10 month old who only fell asleep at 4:30 am, after screaming and wriggling for hours last night. Here I am, sitting upright, with her strapped to my back in the Ergo, sleeping against me, since I refuse to deal with another night like that -- and it was looking that way after her brother accidentally woke her up around 9 pm.

Wow. I must be tired. Because that's a really long winded way of saying -- I'm slightly incoherent, but I've got "TCK" on the brain.

You know -- Third Culture Kids. Well, maybe you don't know. People like me, who grew up outside of their home culture. In another culture. That essentially creates a the experience of a third unique culture inside one small soul. Such as myself.

Reading the TCK book for review brought up all kinds of memories, insights, and "family of origin" aha! moments. You'd think this would all be old hat, how growing up in five different countries from 0 to 18 years old impacted me. But since moving to the U.S. for college at 18, it's an identity I've gone under cover about. After all, I look-sound-smell... American. I've got nuthin' to show for my TCK-ness. Just lots of passports stamps and an inability to join in conversations about favorite childhood TV shows.

So, while coming across hard and fast evidence of "TCK-ness" may seem momentarily interesting to you -- it means the world to me. Like the news that not since John Quincy Adams lived in France for a stint have we had a TCK in office - until good ole Barrack. Turns out Obama appointed a slew of TCKs for office, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Heck, Geithner even attended the same high school I graduated from in Bangkok. And it's not that small of a world.

I haven't gotten the "aloof" accusation in a while, but I used to -- and it's a relief to read a quote about Obama like, "That cool manner of seeming 'above it all' is... a classic feature of the Third Culture Kid."

Or, "'I laughed when I heard a commentator call Barack exotic and elitist,' says Lois Bushong, an American who grew up in Costa Rica and now works a therapist for internationally mobile families. 'How exotic or elitist can it be to go home to visit your grandmother, even if she lives in Hawaii? She’s still your grandma. This TV guy seemed to forget that the world many see ‘exotic’ is simply home for TCKs.'"

I want to get back to web surfing and quit my exhausted blathering. One day I will put together a fabulous anthology of stories from us TCK folks--about growing up, about the dilemas we face raising our own families now (where? give our child a place to call home? or ramble, as we are used to?), about the every-day-ness of living our lives the only way we knew how--no "exotic" rose-colored-glasses crap.

For now, I just need one good night's sleep.

Between the various princesses, he chooses...

At what point is my son going to stop thinking of me, adoringly, as an angel? Perusing a catalogue of kids' Halloween costumes tonight, he pointed to the costume he picked out for me: "Beautiful Angel." Well, it was between "Beautiful Angel" and "Bride to Be" on the same page -- both decked out in angelic frilly white, looking lovely, peaceful, and perfect. Yes, ahem, that's me...

And it's damn sweet of him. Between the 24 pages of costume choices, between the various fairytale princesses and Queen Nefertitis and young vixen-y pirates--he chooses the virtuous for me. Gotta love him.

So. I'll take the compliment and fold it into my heart. At the same time as wondering, bemusedly of course, at what point along the parenting path will Noah's brain & being no longer adore me unfailingly.

By the way, he chose the 'baby pirate' for Katie (super cute choice); the football player or man-eating-shark for his papa (odd and fitting, in that order); and some Clone Wars/Star Wars-looking outfit for himself. In his mythical dream vision of family. Or, just want he thinks everyone should be for Halloween this year.

A (Good) Day in the Life of...

We are eating breakfast in the sun room, Ken and I, when we hear the front door slam. Question mark. Did someone just leave? Or come in? No sound after that. I sit and listen for clues. Hannon appears in the door frame. No hello. He simply announces in his 5-year-old voice, "I-want-to-play-with-No-ah." Stacato emphasis on each syllable. Legs planted wide, mismatched socks.

It's cuter than heck, his no-knock entrance into our house, his one blue sock, one white sock, and his no-hesitation proclamation. It makes me laugh, and my heart feels light at the sight.

"Well, I'd like you to play with Noah, Hannon, but unfortunately we have a rule about not letting him play with boys whose socks don't match."

Hannon's brown eyes give me a steady gaze, waiting to see if I'm bluffing. I give him an eye twinkle and he knows I'm kidding. He smiles, walks into the sun room, snuggles up next to Ken on the brown leather couch.

Saturday at Walker Creek Community. Noah, still sleeping at 10:30am, praise the lord. Hannon leads the way up the stairs to wake him. Ten minutes later, another front door open and slam. Joe, Hannon's dad. Needs to help build sets for the play down at Big Lake Elementary. Can Hannon stay here, or does he want to come with Joe? Hannon says he'd like to go, but wants Noah to come with. Joe,that okay with you, I ask? Yup. Alrightie then, quick dress & shove a buttered cinamon raison english muffin in Noah's hand, watch him clamber into the back of Joe's giant red truck.

Baby Katherine nurses and falls asleep in my arms. The next few hours, Ken and I lounge in the sun room and listen to This American Life. Wow it's nice (and entirely rare) to be uninterrupted. I listen with my eyes closed. I hold my sleeping baby who just yesterday Noah sniffed and announced, "She smells like blueberry pie!" She does. This is bliss. I sink deeper into the couch.

The red truck roars back around 3 pm. Someone showed up with cheese pizza at the school, Joe says. They each had a slice. Can you take them for a while now? Yup. No sweat. Noah's already flung his boots off, barefoot stomping and giggling in the garden dirt. "Hey! Not in the garden!" I point them to their Dirt Fort, roll up Noah's pants legs, and off they go. Darn, they are playing with the hose water again, I can hear it spraying full force. "Hey! Turn off that hose, guys." Katie on my hip in the sling, I hump a wheelbarrow over to them and fill it with water. "Have at it, this is your water quota for the day okay." Immediatley they chatter plans for how they will make their mud city.

Teresa wanders over to get the community mower. It's in our front yard from mowing yesterday. "Have you seen one of these before?" she asks, waving her new weeding hoe like a proud flag. We talk weeds, county issues, and walk the community raspberries recently mulched with sawdust. She rides off on the mower full-speed down the driveway, white hair flying, waving her long hoe in the air hooting like a wild rodeo mow-girl.

I catch up with her later in the meadow. Shovel plowing up deep weeds from the edge of her garden in big dirt-sodden clumps. Katherine's getting heavy in the sling. I sit down on a nearby bale of hay, solid and only slightly damp. Baby K sits on the dry cardboard below me, pulling at the grass in front of her. Fist + blade of grass pushes into her mouth. I alternate between monitoring the grass intake and the clumps of grass Teresa's tossing into the wheelbarrow. V wanders up, kisses for T. Wanders off. More fistfulls of grass pulled up by baby K. More clods of earth dug up by Teresa. Joe wanders up. Kid logistics. Sure, we can take Hannon for the night. What's the school thinking to schedule a play showcase at 9:15pm? Sheesh.

Kid report from Joe, too. Hannon and Noah are playing down at the creek. Ken's with them, he's just cracked a beer. Hannon and Noah are splitting a beer, har har.

The college kids from Sherwood are circled in the meadow, bundled in cold sunshine. Their second annual retreat here at Walker Creek, free and sister community, why not. I don't know a single one of them. I do remember being them. Young and just me.

My black boots kick through the wet grass, I walk by them, smiling, baby K leaning towards them from my left hip. Her eyes bright, watching them. The basket of dinner greens I just harvested from the greenhouse bounces against my right hip. Two things I've grown, both held in the crook of my arms. Baby Katherine on one side. Greens on the other. My jean hems soak up the moisture from the grass. Another good day at Walker Creek.

Feeling Forty: On Fashion

Enter, 40. Enter, The New Fashion Demographic. Or shall I say: the Old Fashion Demographic.

I look around at the new fashions parading Broadway Avenue in Seattle. I was never eternally hip, but I do recall noticing new fashions and choosing whether I wanted to partake of them or not. I look at the puffy elastic waisted minis now and realize - even I wanted to wear that, I should not.

Young fashion, at forty, suddenly no longer feels like a choice. Why? Because I would now not look fashionable. I would look like an aging woman, clinging to youth. Ouch.

Jeggings? Joke. Robin Hood boots + cuffed shorts? Uh, not for me thanks, pass. Now to stay younger-looking, I have to stick to flattering classics. And worse - clothes that are hip and appealing to my demographic. The Born in the 70s and Now Forty Demographic, say Helllllllllo! "Comfort over style, baby, Comfort over style."