The decision to raise children overseas was tethered with worry and rewards. When I spend time with our daughter and son, I can see how much they benefited from growing up abroad. They are kind and curious, at ease in any situation, and make the world a better place through their actions and interactions. But in the early years, when we packed up the house to move from one country to the next, they stood before me in raging tears for taking them from what and who they had come to love.
In one of those moments, I wrote a piece called "Moving Transcendence," which was published in the American Foreign Service Journal (August 2001), in a section called "Postcard from Abroad," where expatriates could weigh in on their experiences.
I am sharing it in this post as a forward for next month's Traveler's Tales blog, Raising Global Nomads, where I will write about the ups and downs of raising children overseas, as well as applicable tips for parents who want to raise children with a more global perspective.
Moving Transcendence
I once heard of a woman whose sleeping baby was packed by the moving company. It's true the basket holding the baby was small, and perhaps the drape of the yellow flannel blanket concealed the baby's fuzzy head. To the eyes of the men wearing grey World Wide Packers jumpsuits. It is likely that the floppy, stuffed animals that filled the basket, one of which was brown like his hair, camouflaged the baby. To their relief the awkward bundle easily slid into a cardboard crate designated for bed coverlets.
When the mother started screaming, the packers quickly found the box and slit open the webbed tape with exacta blades. That is, they did so once the mother located the English-speaking foreman sitting out back with a Coca-Cola and hysterically described the situation, while wringing her hands.
The foreman leapt to attention, toppling his coke bottle, and demanded that the baffled workers find a large, egg shaped basket. Fortunately, the baby lived and grew up retelling the story.
The potential for loss confronted us the first time we packed our things to move overseas.
"Where are you going?" the young packer asked.
"We're moving to Peru."
"Well good luck to you," he said in a sympathetic drawl. "We just had a client coming home to retire after living in those foreign countries."
He scratched his head trying to remember the story as he had heard it, and then continued: "Her stuff made it all the way back to the Port of Wilmington, North Carolina, when a crane picked up the shipping container and dropped it into the sea, right beside the dock."
I can't do much about my shipment once it leaves me but like most of us in the foreign service, I have fine-tuned the mechanics of packing. It's the emotional part of packing that's a little harder to harness. How do I label, categorize and move the pieces of my life? It's a daunting task.
Every time I move I get to review my life. Moments of deep contemplation are thrust on me when I touch useless but precious objects that have silently gathered dust in a drawer – a feather from a hike, a sequin from my daughter's bird costume that her father made, a tooth removed from under a down pillow. They are everywhere, and I do not know what to do with them.
When I go into the homes of very old people who have lived their adult lives in the same place, I see similar precious things. Eventually an heir will pack up these vestiges of their lives and put them into a Goodwill truck. Unlike them, I am not allowed the comfort of passing blindly through my life, willing its remnants to disposal by the next generation. Every few years I have to repackage all those memories.
The real issue, in the long run, is not how to pack it but how to look at it. In some ways moving is like breaking a good porcelain plate. You can pick up the pieces and glue them back together but the pieces are still there.
That's not what I tell my children, however. Although their life is broken, it is also continuously renewed. They have always found new best friends, incomparable adventures, and new talents nurtured by caring mentors in our adopted communities.
I could have given them a single heart on a gold chain, but what they got in life was a charm bracelet kind of life, not one heart pendant, but a cache of tiny hearts circling their wrist.
The broken, then mended, plate is a symbol for a life well lived.
Credits:
Photos are stock photos from Pinterest.
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