My family just don’t get it!
I have moved about a fair bit (Scotland>Hong Kong>Scotland>Oman>Hong Kong>Boarding school in England) and my parents are a mix of Dutch, Canadian and English. My older sister also did a fair bit of moving about (Holland>Scotland>Nigeria>Sierra Leone>Scotland>boarding school> Hong Kong after school) but I guess was a bit more settled during her school years having spend most of the time at one boarding school.
About a year ago I read about TCK’s for the first time and, like a lot of people, was completely overwhelmed by how much I could relate to everything that was written. I joined the group on facebook and felt so happy to no longer feel quite so lost about my upbringing.
In my excitement about it all, I spoke to my sister and my parents about it. Their reaction was not quite what i expected. They looked at me like i had gone nuts and like i had joined some sort of cult or something. It was as though they felt i was completely overreacting about the effect leading a TCK’s life had had on me. They show concern sometimes that i cut myself off, don’t show emotion and at how dearly i cling onto memories of the places I have lived. But yet at the same time seemed to show no interest in the fact that i may have discovered why this was!
So i am putting a couple of things forward to discuss to see if others have had similar experiences…
1) why is it that my sister is so different and unaffected by her TCK-ness? She has happily settled down in one place, seemingly has no connection to the places she has lived and basically acts like she has been brought up just like anyone else.
2) has anyone else felt like i did - like even their own family thought they were insane for embracing their newly discovered TCK status? And did you, like me, find it really upsetting that the very people whp dragged me around the world with them, showed absolutely no interest in finding out more about it?! I felt so let down that my parents didn’t even want to read the book!! (But then maybe that’s just my parents!)
I would never take back my upbringing for anything, don’t get me wrong if this sounds negative.
Would love to hear people’s thoughts!
June 16th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I’ve actually found that besides my peers, the person whose been the least understanding is my own mom. After lving in Native American culture for years, I assimilated to it completely - followed the social customs; lived the way they did - fishing, chopping wood for fires, using the outhouse, coping without running water; spoke in broken english with the accent, all of it. I never completely readjusted to white urban culture when I came back. And my mom is constantly nagging me about it, about the fact that i still follow the native concept of time as well as other things. She always tells me I’m not on the reserve anymore, i’m in white culture in the city, and when in Rome do as the romans do. She tells me when I’m on the rez to live native and when i’m in the city to live white, as if it’s that easy. But i can’t switch completely back, and she seems to think i should and that native culture is somehow a little more backwards or something than white culture and that i can’t survive in the world if i don’t completely reassimilate to white culture. I’m sure she doesn’t mean it but she makes me feel as if i’m a bit backwards/uncivilized or something because i still have a lot of remnants of native/reservation culture in the in the way i live and think. It makes me feel hurt that she’s non-understanding when she took me there and lived there too.
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June 17th, 2008 at 4:42 am
I haven’t had problems with my family accepting it, since my mother herself was a TCK,
however my brother and I have travelled equally, and yet, he is not affected by the TCK bug, he never gets itchy feet, he has no yearning for a ‘home’, he never holds onto memories of places he had spent alot of time in, he is as unnaffected as a non-TCK.
I don’t know WHY it never affected him, I just know that though he has a TCK upbringing, he has never been affected by any of it. He’s got alot of the benefits of being a TCK, but none of the negative aspects.
I have always felt things alot more strongly than my brother has. I think he views the whole world as one place, it doesnt matter if its made of continents or countries, it is all one place, and you can get from a to b to c without a problem. as far as i can see, he see’s then entire world as his home, the name of a section of it means nothing to him.
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June 17th, 2008 at 5:05 am
Hi Nic. My parents also thought I had gone insane when I tried to tell them about the TCK thing. My father, even being TCK himself, was not really interested in reading the book. It’s Funny because I see so many TCK traits in him, almost more than I. And I know he has struggled with his identity and meaning in life for all of my life.
I was really hoping that my family would just accept that we are a TC family. My little brother was the most understanding but he is also the least like a TCK in my family.
It is weird because I think that most people, TCK and non TCKS, look at me weird when I bring up the ideas mentioned in the book. Most of my friends at the moment are not TCKs, which is great but I feel as if there is a whole side of me I cannot expose. This discovery for me has been bitter sweet, I am so happy to finally have words to express why I am who I am, but sadly I don’t know how to use this language without getting the “what the hack are you talking about” look. This discovery is a secret that I desperatly want to share with everyone, but some how I just cant.
Any one else feel that way?
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June 17th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
My parents had the opposite reaction when I told them about being a TCK and it’s effects. They found it really interesting and felt relieved that they did the best they could under the circumstances - they allowed us to assimilate while keeping close ties with our family back ‘home’ and now readily accept our referring to our host country as home as if it is very natural (I was fortunate in that we moved several times, but in the same country). My father realized that many of his personality traits are because he is was a TCK/CCK (he’s an American who went on his own at age 16 to live in Japan just after WWII)
Many of my siblings are single global wanderers well into their 40’s and 50’s, which concerned my parents and made them question whether they did the right thing by moving us abroad. Reading about the benefits of being a TCK and also seeing them in us, absolved them of some of their guilt.
Which brings me to my point - I think parents don’t want to listen because they are aware of a problem and feel guilty about it. To acknowledge TCKness and its resulting issues, makes them question their parenting. When ever discussing what I didn’t like about being a TCK (I didn’t have a name for it then), I also mentioned what I appreciated about being a TCK also - it limited the fights, but did not eliminate the inevitable cultural clashes I had with them.
To be honest, I have never met anyone - TCK or otherwise - that didn’t have problems with their parents at some point in their life, especially when in their teens and early twenties.
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