One thing I’ve come to know about myself over the course is that I have a fairly significant sac of grief that lies mostly hidden within me, rather contained, much like a third lung, or a second stomach, or more accurately – my gall bladder’s twin pustule. Or wait – what if it’s more like a uterus?! Hmmmm… anyway, it’s there. And for the most part, like the majority of all other internal organs, it goes about its existence under-acknowledged until something comes along and upsets its delicate state of hard-earned equilibrium. That considered, it’s been of great interest to me to observe what kinds of things bring about such upset. And here, in what follows, is one such note…

It’s usually a story. Occasionally, I happen upon a particular brand that manages to tear into my visceral grief-sac, catching and ripping, spilling a lament of familiar heartache all throughout my bloodstream, not unlike adrenaline, or antibodies, or chronic leukemia.

Last week one day – it was raining – I was driving down James to get onto I-5 when a story came on NPR that left me sloppy and raw, teeming and alive. It was the story of an elderly African American woman who had dreamt for decades of serving in the Peace Corps but had stayed in the U.S. out of loyalty to her family. Finally, upon retirement from her job of 30-plus years, her children raised and grown, she in her late sixties up and moved in the name of world peace and friendship to the country of Namibia for some long awaited years of international living, service, and relief work. This woman talked about how initially the community there did not at all know what to make of her. She was an older black woman, when most every other Peace Corps volunteer the villagers had known were young and white. She was an anomaly, a foreigner of foreigners. But in not too long at all, the community came to enjoy her very much, affectionately referring to her as grandma, offering her their ongoing signs of deepening love and respect. The story culminated when the Namibian villagers, upon hearing that the United States had gone to war with Iraq, came together and after much discussion decided that they wanted to prepare a home for her in the village so she would be able to stay and live with them. Their reason – so she wouldn’t have to go back home to a nation that was at war, so she would be safe, because her country was in trouble and they wanted to help her as she had come to help them. [Ach!] It was at this point in the story that any internal tearing that had already begun in me just ripped loose entirely, and I was awash… capsized in the current.

[pause]

I’ve noticed a theme in the stories that take me so. Very many seem to have all so much to do with being an adult TCK. Having spent the majority of my younger years as an adopted foreigner of sorts, to feel acknowledged as alien yet loved and appreciated all the same is a theme that just hooks me every time. Entire crate-loads of internalized loss and difference are cracked open once again, and my internal grief-sac (or was it a uterus?) gives birth. A seemingly un-reattainable sense of normalcy drafts even further away, like smoke. I choke on tears. I ache for a kind of home that feels remote, slippery, and seldom understood. I ache for a kind of home. I ache.

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