sultry summer.

I made a new playlist the other week. It's called Sultry Summer. The title just kind of came to me. The mix has been playing on my iPod almost constantly. One of the songs on the playlist is "It's Time to Move On" by Tom Petty; track three from the album Wildflowers.

It's time to move on

It's time to get goin'

What lies ahead

I have no way of knowin'

but under my feet, babe

the grass is growin'

yeah it's time to move on...

Story of my life. I remember first listening to the song as I rode along I-26 on the bus ride home from our 8th grade school trip to Seabrook Island, SC. I was fourteen years old. It was the end of the school year, the end of my first year back in America, and I was about to switch schools again...I was about to start high school.

It's funny, the things we remember, isn't it? I've carried that moment on the bus with me me all these years. The song always triggers that memory. It signifies the sultry heat and salty tears associated with saying goodbye. The folky tune is what I imagine change sounds like.

***

Historically, summer has meant a lot change for me, and this summer is no different. It seemed that the big moves my family made often took place during the summertime. When we lived oversees in England, we'd come back to the States for the summer, and for those six weeks back in my passport country, I was struck each time with how much I was growing and changing apart from it. Each time I returned, the harder it was to identify with my native land. Going back to England at the summer's end felt more like home...and yet it wasn't quite home either.

The end of the school year in also England meant saying goodbye to friends forever--not just for the summer break. Friends who were from Sweden or Japan or South Africa were going back to their native countries, or perhaps onto another foreign land, and good-bye truly meant good-bye. "See you later" was not in our vocabulary.

When we finally moved back to the States, I transitioned into a tiny private school with a class size of about 32. Most of the kids had gone to that school since kindergarden and they all knew each other. At age 13, I was struggling to fit back into a country where I suddenly felt like an immigrant. I made some friends but I felt that there was this huge part of me that was hidden and isolated. I didn't know how to incorporate my overseas experiences into this new environment. I might as well have been from Mars.

I only stayed at that school for a year. Then I went to a different school for my freshman and sophomore years of high school. Then we moved again to a different city where I finished off junior and senior years. Then I was off to somewhere new for college and then I transferred to another school after freshman year. Then, eventually, I joined the military, go figure, and for the past decade, the cycle has repeated from one time zone to the next to the next.

***

The other night, Chris and I were driving home from Davis. We were talking about relationship stuff and Chris said to me:

"You really have some sort of outsider complex."

Gulp.

I just kind nodded my head and said, "Yeah, I know."

The outsider. That girl who is a part of things and yet still remains apart from things. I suppose I feel like her, standing alone, always with one foot in and one foot out. She sort of belongs...but not quite.

Change has been almost constant for me. Playing the role of "the new girl"and trying to break into pre-established circles of friends that are sometimes rooted deep in years of history is a pattern in my story. It leaves me feeling both motivated and isolated, both challenged and tired of trying. I learned this pattern during a crucial time in my development, and as an adult, I think I've learned to perpetuate it.

I think I'm coming to realize that it's okay to just be me though. Gosh, that sounds cliche, does it not? But in the flux of so much change and transition, I have not known who "me" is. I am slowly starting to figure it out though, and I'm learning that who I am at the core is not determined by which country I happen to live in, which circles of friends I currently run in, or whether or not people understand every aspect of me.

***

A few years ago the term "Third Culture Kid" (TCK) was introduced to me through an essay one of my classmates wrote. A TCK "is someone who has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture." These changes typically take place during the highly formative years of childhood/adolescence.

Anyhow, Chris's outsider comment got me thinking about the whole TCK thing again and I started reading a bit more about it. I've been astounded by how much it resonates with my experience. Something I recently read on the subject struck me:

"...one of the major areas in working with TCKs is that of dealing with the issue of unresolved grief. They are always leaving or being left. Relationships are short-lived. At the end of each school year, a certain number of the student body leaves, not just for the summer, but for good...Most TCKs go through more grief experiences by the time they are 20 than monocultural individuals do in a lifetime."

I also read that TCKs "cope" rather than "adjust." We adapt, find niches, take risks, fall and pick ourselves up again...we feel at home everywhere and nowhere...and most of us never truly adjust back to life in America. And then there's that part about how we don't learn problem-solving skills in relationships because we can always simply leave a problem without resolving it. We carry our baggage to the next location and watch it play out in new relationships...until we can leave again. (Ouch.)

The more I come to understand this part of my story, the more I am starting to understand where my identity struggle/outsider complex comes from. This doesn't explain everything, but it does explain some things. I can understand more of why making new friends can be easy and painful at the same time, and why I become detached when I have to say goodbye to people. So many meaningful relationships have been woven in and out of my life so many times...and most of them are only for a season. Sometimes it feels shamefully easy to let go of them...but only because it's so incredibly painful to let go, if that makes sense.

But, despite the growing pains, I am also seeing the beautiful things that God has written into my story as a result of these experiences. The book I was reading through states that "while TCKs are cultural outsiders in their own passport country, 88% can relate to anyone, regardless of differences in race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. They generally credit their third culture background with positively influencing their adult lives."

I know that my childhood and adolescent experiences burned a passion into my heart to reach beyond the limitations of my native country. There is this energy and drive inside of me that longs to identify with others who know what it means to leave people and places that feel like home and start over in a place that feels foreign. I tend to relate to those who feel like outsiders...who tend to lurk on the fringe. And while I realize that the scenarios of our stories are incredibly different, one name kept coming to mind as I've pondered all of this:

Ren.

When we receive him into our arms he will have to say goodbye to everything he has known. At such a young age he will know profound grief. This will be part of his story.

While I understand that in many ways I cannot possibly know what this is like for him, I can recognize a few ways that I can. I also know that on some deep, guttural level, loving him will perhaps soothe the sense longing and grief that I carry inside of me because of the story God has given me. The further I travel this journey to my son, the more I hear God whisper:


This is your son and I have equipped you to be his mother. I created you to do this.


If things continue to go as planned, we will be in China within two months, sweating in the sultry July humidity, our lives forever changed for the better. I can't wait to be overseas again, and far more, I can't wait to hold my son in my arms.

***

Quotes taken from "According To My Passport, I'm Coming Home" by Kay Branaman Eakin, online at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/2065.pdf

my map

Where you come from is gone, 

where you thought you were going to never was there,

and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

In yourself, right now is all the place you've got.

--Flannery O'Connor

I find myself again in that obscure place, approaching a major intersection of life, walking down one road that will soon diverge into another, preparing myself to part ways from those on this current path with me, reflective of past roads I've traveled before this one, all the while trying to make out the hazy horizon before me. It is familiar territory, a situation I sometimes wish I didn't know so intimately.

But I do. Hellos and goodbyes are deeply engrained in my story. Change is something that often feels more familiar to me than consistency and sameness, and I struggle between conflicting desires for both. I love a good adventure, newness, seeing new landscapes and meeting new people. And yet I hate this part of it...the gearing up to say goodbye, the wanting to detach from community as I watch people grow closer together while I prepare to part. For me, being "here and now" is difficult when so many preparations must be made for the future, when I feel like I have one foot in and one foot out.

As I drive around northern California, I look at the land, the hills that grow greener each day with the spring rain. I take note of my favorite stretches of I-80, my favorite bends of Hwy 29, and the daily drives that make me say I will miss this. As I drove to meet a dear friend for lunch in San Francisco several weeks ago, I took a photo of my favorite part of the drive, the hilly section of highway between Fairfield and Vallejo, right around American Canyon, where the pavement digs into the landscape and the view begins to open itself up to the bay.

And then there is that stretch between our home and Sacramento, where the hills subside into flat farmland. Vineyards become orchards and hills become plains, the cool marine air turns drier and warmer. I know this stretch of the road well, the part that's paved with memories of picking up and dropping off visitors at the Sacramento airport, especially during the long, hot summer of Chris's deployment. It is the route I drove to take our dossier to Sacramento, the day I put the final touches on the paperwork that would lead us to our son. It is also the stretch of road I drive to go to Dixon for therapy each week, a time when my thoughts and emotions are raw and accessible as I pass fields of sunflowers and corn, walnut orchards, and pegboards of trees meticulously planted and preened.

This is my map, the part of the earth where I have been planted, nourished, and pruned over the past three years. Parts of who I am reside in this land. Segments of my story will forever be tied to this place and the thought of leaving it feels as painful as losing an intimate part of myself. Fragments of my heart will be left here, just as they were in the many other places I have lived, and so I suppose it's no wonder that I can feel this way. Fractioned, pieced apart, a little less than whole.

My journey to this part of the country began nearly ten years ago. I have traveled and resided in all four time zones of the United States, one at a time, and this long and gradual trek of cross-country self-discovery will end here, the final destination, the opposite coast from where I came, which is ironically where I have felt most at home, most like myself. The West is full of open spaces and drier air, room to breathe and blossom into my own person. I have needed this space, and now, a decade later, I prepare myself to return, to venture back home, a far different woman than I was when I left.

So for now, I am soaking up the moments left with the people I love and the landscape I love. I want each day to celebrate with all of my senses the journey God has led me on over the past decade. This era is quickly coming to a close. Everything is about to change.

Here before me now...my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality...just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my own inventions.

Over the years I have taught myself, and have been taught, to be a stranger. A stranger usually has the normal five senses, perhaps especially so, ready to protect and nourish him.

--MFK Fisher, Map of Another Town

Becoming

It's Friday night and Bon Iver calls.  This music has been playing from my computer in the kitchen for the past hour as I've been washing up the remains of Tess's birthday celebration.  It's funny, what music does to a person.  This album reminds me of last summer when I purchased it.  I listened to it non stop, in my car, in the shower, in my bed, or at my desk while writing and critiquing poems for class.  It's strange how different life felt back then.  It seemed we had all the time in the world.

I recently read that Bon Iver was nominated for something like four Grammies this year.  I was annoyed when I read the news because I assumed this would eventually bring the band instant fame, thereby ushering them away from Indie rock and into main-stream-manufactured-trash.  I feel possessive of bands I love, especially during that phase when they are still unknown by the masses.

I felt this way about Coldplay in the early days, with their first big album, Parachutes.  It was the summer of 2001, and that album was my summer soundtrack during train rides through Italy. It played as I sat in our Florence apartment, sipping cheap wine and painting still lifes of fruit for a watercolor class.  That album is steeped in memories from my sophomore and junior years of college.  But look at Coldplay now. They became a big deal, and now they are doing duets with Rihanna.

In Bon Iver's favor, I will say that they refused to do a sell-out musical performance at the Grammies.  They said they thought the awards show was ridiculous, and that everyone should just go home.  They've got guts. They know who they are. It made me love them even more.

This is the sign of a true artist...someone who is all about their work, about being who they are and expressing that to the world. They are willing to uphold their integrity at all costs, even if it means losing popularity. They are not about the accolades or the praise of it. They do it because they have to--it is knit into every fiber of their being, and they do it whether they are publicly acknowledged for it or not.  It's just about being who they are.

I read a quote the other day that struck me.  It relates to all of this.

"Now, with God's help, I shall become myself."  --Soren Kierkegaard

It's funny how one little sentence--eight simple words--can sum up the arduous journey of a person's soul.  I've been journeying through the terrain of my own heart and mind over the past several months, searching for that answer.  Who am I?  Who is "myself?"  Parts of her have gotten lost in some places along the way.  I've started traveling back to find those fragments that I disposed of, some of them as a child, some during my teenage years, some during adulthood and motherhood.  I've held some of them up to the light and invited them back into the whole.  The strange thing about this journey, though, is that the basis of it has been surrender, a letting go of my life into God's hands.  I have had to ask Him to show me who I am, who He made me to be, and to give me the courage to be it. As my friend Heather eloquently wrote yesterday, "I love the thought of surrendering ourselves to find ourselves."

A couple of weeks ago at church they showed a video of a woman making a beautiful clay bowl on a potter's wheel.  The clip was creatively done, and its purpose was to illustrate the process of transformation--mainly, the process of God transforming and molding us into something beautiful.  As our pastor later stated, God is an artist.

God is an artist.

That sentence resonated with me.  It still resonates with me.  I've heard it before, but sitting in church that morning, it really hit me.  For a long time, I've recognized myself as an artist.  I've been painting, drawing, or sketching for as long as I can remember.  Now it manifests itself in writing.  What I'm coming to acknowledge, though, is that it's deeply ingrained in me.  I was born this way. It is not just what I do.  It's how I see the world, how I experience life, how I experience God, what I'm passionate about, and how I engage with people. Perhaps it's also the way God intended me to reflect Him.  In the past, I've thought that the "artsy" part of me was something to put in the background--it was always so impractical, so I couldn't justify spending a lot of time developing it.  Now I am understanding how backwards this approach is. After all, how practical is God?  In my mind, if He was practical, He wouldn't be so concerned with relationships, and He certainly wouldn't have bothered creating us.  Love is perhaps the most impractical thing of all.

Over time, and with God's help, I am starting to name and accept who I am.  It might take the rest of my life, but every day, I peel back more layers of myself and settle into that deeper, rawer skin. I feel okay saying that I am an artist, a writer, a poet, regardless of whether I gain acknowledgement for these things or not.  I have received one rejection letter so far, and I expect to receive many more.

I wonder why it feels so foolish to name who we really are.  I wonder why it feels so scary to let other people see it.  (Even this post feels really scary to write.)

What would happen if we stopped covering up the unique person God created us to be?