Raising Future Adults

My older sister went off to college when I was eleven. When I was fourteen, I was as tall as her. We're sisters and look like sisters. Her hair is straight. Mine is wavy. I'm slightly taller and there are some other differences, but we favor each other -- or did when we were younger -- enough that you could readily see a family resemblance. So for some number of years, anytime she came to town to visit and ran into friends of the family while out and about, they called her by my name. They assumed she was the sister who still lived in town. I got married and moved away and went to Germany for nearly four years. When I returned to the US from Germany and visited my hometown again, I ran into a friend of the family who promptly called me by my sister's name since she was the one they were used to seeing in town at that point. Although humans devote brain power to the ability to recognize faces, people rely much more on contextual cues than they realize. There is lots of...

I was a Third Culture Kid, which I didn't really know growing up. I just thought I was a White Middle Class American (TM). As a young adult, I kept running into other White Middle Class Americans who clearly thought I was one of them thanks to me being White and Middle Class and American and yet I tended to not click with these people. I found this frustrating and alienating and felt like there must be something wrong with me. I was in my thirties before I finally got the memo that, no, it doesn't really work to think of me as a White Middle Class American. It makes more sense to think of me as someone who grew up in some peculiar little cultural niche of German-American Military Families of the combined Ft. Benning and Columbus, Georgia and Phenix City, Alabama region. In my teens and twenties, one of my best friends -- nicknamed Freedom -- was, like me, someone whose father had been an American soldier and her mother was a German immigrant. However, I think her parents...