Third Culture Kid…you wouldn’t understand…the title of this Facebook group provoked open laughter between my children when they discovered this bunch of cyber-compadres. People really DON’T understand and most Bank/Fund/UN families can relate - kids, parents and grandparents alike. It’s hard not being able to answer that ubiquitous and most-dreaded question: “Where are you from?” My children have developed an answer. They usually say: “No particular country—I’m a global citizen.” Or when he’s feeling especially disobliging, my younger son will mutter: “Planet Earth…do I look like I come from Krypton?”

Like most TCK’s, mine have the requisite documents—three passports. Each passport represents access to a different continent so the problems of acquiring visa’s are rarely an issue—which is just as well because dad is presently based in Nairobi and mom is tackling a PhD in the UK while the kids are variously at school in South Africa and the US. Thus does TCK-style confusion often reign when the kids are about to travel:

“Give back my American sim!”

“How much money is still on my Oyster card?”

“Where’s my phone charger that works in Kenya?”

And inevitably an anguished wail: “I’ve forgotten my PIN! I can’t get any monneeyyy!” This one is a problem—the kids’ pocket money is paid to them in US dollars and they are more up to the moment with world currency exchange rates than any Wall Street analyst!

My TCK’s flew long before they could walk. This upbringing has given them numerous talents! They can estimate the weight of their carry-on luggage, by sight alone. A cerebral alarm rings whenever an online check-in opens and the child concerned will simply drop whatever he/she is doing, to rush off and grab the best available seats. They have internal calendars telling them when holidays and vacations happen in at least three countries and “summer vacation” is a flexible term that refers equally to July/August and December/January.

They become distinctly uncomfortable in any group that is too homogenous and their best friends live in at least five countries. Conversations happen at 6pm or 2am with equal aplomb. Yesterday evening, voluble Spanish was emanating from my older son’s bedroom—he was chatting with Gabi in Honduras. Thereafter, it being that son’s turn to cook dinner, his laptop was ensconced on the kitchen table, and he was showing off his mastery with a grilled steak to his American friend Martin, who is in Vienna, Austria on an exchange programme.

The earth belongs to TCK’s. They cope with concepts and problems that other kids never have to envisage. They often grow up early, possessing wisdom and self-knowledge beyond that of their somewhat more earth-bound peers. I have every confidence that my children will take up their global citizenship in an active manner and enrich this world. So until recently I thought that, albeit a somewhat hectic existence, living between countries isn’t a major problem.

However, until recently, retirement wasn’t even on the horizon for my husband. Now the end-of-career prospect is ever-so-subtly beginning to loom and friends are starting to ask questions that are equally as perplexing as the “Where are you from?” Now they are more along the lines of: “Where are you planning to retire to?” Questions that prove even more impossible to answer!

The retirement issue was raised at a recent luncheon we attended. A friend we hadn’t seen in a while started to probe, asking where we are headed for retirement. I guess I made a gaffe in my joking response, which was: “Well, I haven’t yet figured out where I’m from and where I am changes often - so where I might be going isn’t really a question I can answer!”

It’s not easy to put a Bank/Fund-family lifestyle into a nutshell for someone whose husband works from home in the same town in which they have lived for the past three decades, but I tried to explain. My friend listened, looking increasingly disapproving, as if my international life somehow threatened her different choices.

“Most of us KNOW where we come from” she said rather acidly. “And isn’t it just a teensy bit weird not to know where you are going? Or maybe normal issues only concern normal people.” Ouch!! Well, for me, it’s normal to have my husband on a conference call to Asia at 4 am local time—when he’s at home that is. It’s normal to have time-zones and flight schedules saved in my head. Keeping two or three wallets with enough cash in different currencies to hire a cab or pay for hotel room if I also forget a PIN, is only expedient. Single, married parent to three TCK’s is a state of being to which I’m accustomed. So I asked my friend, with some indignation: “Who is to say what is normal for whom?”

I’m happy to live in that question for now. I have no idea yet about my husband’s retirement. Like others who live in a developing country, we acknowledge that it’s unlikely that our Washington-raised children will be nearby when he gets to retire. But I don’t want to follow my children around – and even if I did, I have three children and I have no idea where each one will be. On the other hand, I also don’t want to end up living at the other end of the world from grandchildren. I grew up with all my grandparents overseas and I still feel that I lost out. I’m sure they felt similarly!

Working between systems is challenging. No doubt about it. But I intend to emulate the expanded life-skills I’ve observed in my TCK children. I can already see myself as a grandmother talking with my grandchildren over a computer. I imagine that their little faces will dissolve into cubist shapes every now and then, and they’ll smile when Grandma pushes a cookie or a toy against the fluorescent screen. I could be chatting with them in a language which is not my mother tongue. Likely I’ll have their school vacations listed somewhere so I’ll know when to visit. For them it’ll be normal. For me too, I guess.

Maybe the answer that I now need to deploy is: Where we retire is less material than how we retire. Maybe the smart someone who came up with “TCK”needs to invent a phrase that incorporates the other end of the spectrum - Global Grannies! Maybe I’ll start a Facebook group!

Corrie Bridgman

This discerning article was sent to us by a long-term WBFN member now based in Kenya. In her own words, “I arrived in Washington more than a decade ago with three young children. The children are all at university and my husband is heading into the final stages of his career with the Bank/Fund. With thoughts prompted by seeing a Facebook group entitled: “Third Culture Kid...you wouldn’t understand...,” my piece reflects briefly on the skills, defense strategies and difficulties of Third Culture Kids, and equally, how those same issues may also be relevant later in life, for a mother of adult children living elsewhere in the world”