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 were divorced and I never met her father.
She lived in a three bedroom house not hugely different from mine in the same neighborhood. As the crow flies, she was basically down the hill and across the creek, but you couldn't go straight there thanks to fenced yards and what not.
Instead, you had to turn right at the bottom of the hill, go to the end of THAT street, turn left and cross the bridge over the creek, turn left again and double back down her street to arrive at roughly the same place you would have arrived at had you just gone straight at the bottom of the hill.
Like my family, her family "never had much money." They had a vegetable garden out back and they were always looking to economize and save up because every year or two her and her mom went and spent a month or six weeks visiting relatives in Germany.
Freedom would then come back home with hand-me-down clothes from an aunt the same size as her, so she didn't dress like anyone else at our high school and really stood out in a big way because of it. She dressed in a very stylish and European fashion for next to nothing, coming back with hand-me-down clothes being one of the ways they justified the cost of plane tickets.
When I was a young mom stationed in Manhattan, Kansas, I lived sort of the same without thinking about it. All the military wives stationed there found that there was a dearth of shops that catered to their fashion needs. They would see me and get all excited and asked where I bought whatever I was wearing, thinking I had tripped across some super secret local boutique aimed at military wives.
They were inevitably crestfallen when my reply was "Georgia." Like my friend Freedom had done before me, I was getting most of my clothes when visiting family in two larger and more cosmopolitan cities elsewhere and thought nothing of it.
When my oldest son was asked at school where his extremely cute clothes came from, his answer was "a box." My mother sews beautifully and I routinely took measurements from my kids to keep my mom up to date and she sewed a lot of their clothes and mailed it to us. I mostly bought socks, underpants and shoes.
I hadn't yet had the epiphany that I came from a Third Culture family and so did my sons. I was, as yet, failing to talk to them about how "Well, we don't quite live like other people." I tried to get better about that as my understanding of the issue grew.
Freedom's mother sponsored foreign officers at The School of the Americas, so their house looked a lot more stylish than most homes I spent time in. It was arranged for hosting parties and I happened to be there once when they had a couple of officers over for dinner who barely spoke English. I think they were Asian and I was trying to meet them halfway muddling through on my limited French as the language we most had in common.
When I was stationed in Germany, I took my infant son with me to go visit Freedom overnight on one of her routine trips to visit family. She and I stayed up much of the night talking, like twenty-something kids tend to do.
Sometime after that, I kind of lost track of her as our lives diverged. Her childhood habit of owning dogs and adopting injured squirrels and nursing them back to health and such led her to pursue a career as a veterinarian and my life was as a military wife, increasingly stationed too far away to regularly visit home.
Given my dog phobia and such, we were sort of an odd couple. But she always made sure I was comfortable at her house, a place a mutual friend nicknamed The Zoo (the same friend nicknamed my bedroom La Bibliotheque because of my excess of books).
It was only much later that I realized the way folks around me lived wasn't necessarily "normal." As far as I knew, it was normal because it was normal for my life.
A lot of people with ordinary jobs and not much money around me traveled to visit family in distant places, so clothes, cuisine and an assortment of other things from elsewhere were a normal part of the mixed culture of the people around me.
I didn't have a lot of money. I certainly wasn't part of The Jet Set. In fact, my family traveled a lot less than a lot of the families around me.
When my youngest son was in kindergarten, the three of us had a good opportunity to all talk about how our family was different because the class did a project that put some of the biographical info up on a wall for each kid. It was sort of a means to do an icebreaker for the class, I guess.
Most of the kids were local and they answered the question of "Where were you born?" by naming which local hospital they had been born in. A few kids listed the US state where they were born. My son was the only one who listed another country in reply to that question.
Third Culture kids don't quite fit into any of the cultures that influence their lives but they often think they are really part of one of them when they aren't. I thought I was culturally American because I grew up here instead of in Germany, but that was not really an accurate assessment of who I was.
The military has its own culture and many of the families that were a big part of my childhood had some degree of German influence. It's easy to see that I'm not really German. It was harder to see that I'm not really (culturally) White Middle Class American even though I am clearly a White American and spent most of my life Middle Class.
Third Culture kids need some support for sorting out their identities. When they don't get it, they end up like me in my twenties, thinking they are something they are not and befuddled and unable to figure out what they are "doing wrong" that they can't seem to make friends with people they imagine are like them and failing to see how untrue that is.
My kids seem to have avoided that particular identity crisis, so I seem to have managed to get them the memo somewhere along the way.
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 were divorced and I never met her father.
She lived in a three bedroom house not hugely different from mine in the same neighborhood. As the crow flies, she was basically down the hill and across the creek, but you couldn't go straight there thanks to fenced yards and what not.
Instead, you had to turn right at the bottom of the hill, go to the end of THAT street, turn left and cross the bridge over the creek, turn left again and double back down her street to arrive at roughly the same place you would have arrived at had you just gone straight at the bottom of the hill.
Like my family, her family "never had much money." They had a vegetable garden out back and they were always looking to economize and save up because every year or two her and her mom went and spent a month or six weeks visiting relatives in Germany.
Freedom would then come back home with hand-me-down clothes from an aunt the same size as her, so she didn't dress like anyone else at our high school and really stood out in a big way because of it. She dressed in a very stylish and European fashion for next to nothing, coming back with hand-me-down clothes being one of the ways they justified the cost of plane tickets.
When I was a young mom stationed in Manhattan, Kansas, I lived sort of the same without thinking about it. All the military wives stationed there found that there was a dearth of shops that catered to their fashion needs. They would see me and get all excited and asked where I bought whatever I was wearing, thinking I had tripped across some super secret local boutique aimed at military wives.
They were inevitably crestfallen when my reply was "Georgia." Like my friend Freedom had done before me, I was getting most of my clothes when visiting family in two larger and more cosmopolitan cities elsewhere and thought nothing of it.
When my oldest son was asked at school where his extremely cute clothes came from, his answer was "a box." My mother sews beautifully and I routinely took measurements from my kids to keep my mom up to date and she sewed a lot of their clothes and mailed it to us. I mostly bought socks, underpants and shoes.
I hadn't yet had the epiphany that I came from a Third Culture family and so did my sons. I was, as yet, failing to talk to them about how "Well, we don't quite live like other people." I tried to get better about that as my understanding of the issue grew.
Freedom's mother sponsored foreign officers at The School of the Americas, so their house looked a lot more stylish than most homes I spent time in. It was arranged for hosting parties and I happened to be there once when they had a couple of officers over for dinner who barely spoke English. I think they were Asian and I was trying to meet them halfway muddling through on my limited French as the language we most had in common.
When I was stationed in Germany, I took my infant son with me to go visit Freedom overnight on one of her routine trips to visit family. She and I stayed up much of the night talking, like twenty-something kids tend to do.
Sometime after that, I kind of lost track of her as our lives diverged. Her childhood habit of owning dogs and adopting injured squirrels and nursing them back to health and such led her to pursue a career as a veterinarian and my life was as a military wife, increasingly stationed too far away to regularly visit home.
Given my dog phobia and such, we were sort of an odd couple. But she always made sure I was comfortable at her house, a place a mutual friend nicknamed The Zoo (the same friend nicknamed my bedroom La Bibliotheque because of my excess of books).
It was only much later that I realized the way folks around me lived wasn't necessarily "normal." As far as I knew, it was normal because it was normal for my life.
A lot of people with ordinary jobs and not much money around me traveled to visit family in distant places, so clothes, cuisine and an assortment of other things from elsewhere were a normal part of the mixed culture of the people around me.
I didn't have a lot of money. I certainly wasn't part of The Jet Set. In fact, my family traveled a lot less than a lot of the families around me.
When my youngest son was in kindergarten, the three of us had a good opportunity to all talk about how our family was different because the class did a project that put some of the biographical info up on a wall for each kid. It was sort of a means to do an icebreaker for the class, I guess.
Most of the kids were local and they answered the question of "Where were you born?" by naming which local hospital they had been born in. A few kids listed the US state where they were born. My son was the only one who listed another country in reply to that question.
Third Culture kids don't quite fit into any of the cultures that influence their lives but they often think they are really part of one of them when they aren't. I thought I was culturally American because I grew up here instead of in Germany, but that was not really an accurate assessment of who I was.
The military has its own culture and many of the families that were a big part of my childhood had some degree of German influence. It's easy to see that I'm not really German. It was harder to see that I'm not really (culturally) White Middle Class American even though I am clearly a White American and spent most of my life Middle Class.
Third Culture kids need some support for sorting out their identities. When they don't get it, they end up like me in my twenties, thinking they are something they are not and befuddled and unable to figure out what they are "doing wrong" that they can't seem to make friends with people they imagine are like them and failing to see how untrue that is.
My kids seem to have avoided that particular identity crisis, so I seem to have managed to get them the memo somewhere along the way.