Maps and Birth - The Guilt of Not Belonging
A few years ago I wrote a post for a friend’s blog. I wrote about my experience as a TCK and my struggle with mental illness over the years. In my piece I included the phrase ‘I felt the general guilt of not belonging.’ The phrase was noticed by a doctor my friend and I both knew well, she wrote to us in tandem to inquire about the ‘guilt of not belonging’ and asked if it was a prevalent feeling amongst TCKs. My friend and I both agreed that it was, and we shared our understanding of the sentiment with her. She has her own blog where she writes about her ministry and her families cross cultural challenges, you can read her work here. I have always found her writing to be honest and encouraging.
I was humbled that she had read my piece so intently to pick out a particular phrase. I was also interested in the fact that what I said needed further explanation. So I am revisiting the phrase now, several years later, to try to expound on it for other readers - perhaps the ‘guilt of not belonging’ is something that TCKs feel inherently but don’t know how to express. Or perhaps it’s something we understand and we assume that others understand about us as well. Either way, it’s good practise to try and explain it further.
To do so, I have a story from my childhood.
Every April, our mission board used to have a meeting in South Africa. A team from America would volunteer to come and teach the children whatever programme had been used for their Vacation Bible Schools the previous year. (Holiday Bible Club here in the UK)
One year the theme was ‘Route 66 - A Road Trip Across the United States.’ It was a pretty glamorous theme. My friends and I were used to road trips across sub-saharan Africa. Some of them rode with their families for two or three days to attend these meetings. I was used to road trips in Angola being halted and rearranged due to de-mining fields or washed out log bridges or Marburg outbreaks. A road-trip across the US, even an imaginary one, must be just as exciting.
We wore t-shirts, gouged ourselves on American candy, and made key chains designed like little license plates. I loved the key chains. We listened to ‘Life is a Highway’ every day and watched Cars at the end of the week. We practiced a song called ‘Route 66’ with some vague message about finding God along the way. I had no idea what Route 66 was, most of us had no idea what it was. I didn’t know I was even singing about a real road - the roads in Angola did not have names. But it was fun to sing and it was fun to be a part of something - until I realised I wasn’t a part of it all.
One day the American volunteers brought in a massive map of the United States. Each State was outlined, pictures of the state flowers or landmarks stood out in bright colours. Route 66 (I guess it really does exist) was depicted by a solid orange line and a little van had been stuck on to represent our ‘journey along the highway.’
They handed out stickers to us all and said cheerily ‘Okay, put the sticker where you were born so we can see which States we all come from!’
I stared at them. I stared at my sticker. I stared at my friends.
Next to me, my close friend stared back - he was born in Botswana. He looked at his brother who had been born in South Africa. I shot a look at my best friend’s younger brother who was also born in South Africa. Then I looked around at my other friends - Zimbabwe, Western Europe, Mozambique. I couldn’t see where we were going to put our stickers.
I raised my hand - something had been overlooked and the adults needed to know.
‘I’’m sorry but I can’t put my sticker on the map.’
‘Oh, sweetie, you can!' One chirpy volunteer replied, 'Tell me where you think you were born and I’ll help you find it on the map!’
I stared some more. The incredulity was astounding. As a ten year old I didn’t know a lot about the world, I didn’t know where Route 66 went, I didn’t know the references made in Cars, I didn’t know what a zip code was, but I knew where I was born and I knew the Royal Infirmary of Perth, Scotland, UK was not going to be found on a map of the United States.
‘Where I was born is not on the map.’
‘Well… where do your grandparents live? Were you born near them? I can help you put the sticker there!’
‘No, I wasn’t born in the United States.’
The volunteer stared at me, eyes widening, ‘But you’re American, sweetie, so you just need to remember where you born - not where you live now but where you first started!’
‘I was born in Perth, Scotland.’
More stares. My friends added their voices.
‘I was born in Gaborone!’
‘I was born in Johannesburg!’
‘I was born in Mozambique!’
Eyes widened even more. In that moment, as a child, I think I felt sorry for this American volunteer. She had run this whole VBS programme in her home church where all the kids were probably born a few counties apart. She didn’t know that she was being sent to teach the same programme to a bunch of kids who would mess up all her activities on an international scale because of where their parents decided to give birth.
And there it was. The mis-belonging. The mis-placing of ourselves and the utter inconvenience we caused the volunteers. We didn’t mean to - we were children - but we could see it. We weren’t so much in the way as just extra afterthoughts, no one quite sure what to do with our answers.
No one quite sure what to do with us.
It is this same awkwardness and inconvenience I have encountered over my life as a TCK.
I could see and hear it when I was graduating from University and applying for the NCLEX. The staff at my nursing school told me directly my application was much more difficult than everyone else’s because I wasn’t born in the United States. This wasn’t my fault - I had no control of where my mother chose to give birth - but my existence as an international citizen was an inconvenience.
And it continues to be one.
It’s in the long pause when I’ve answered someone’s questions ‘where are you from?’ I can tell they are taken aback by my response, it’s not what they wanted. Most people want a one town answer, not a seven nation saga.
I can see it in the frustration of friends and family who are not TCKs and don’t know what it means for me to ‘not be American’ or not feel at home in one place or another.
There is hesitation at every introduction - do I bore or overwhelm this person with the truth, or do I minimise my life for their comfort? Often, TCKs minimise because we have to survive. We know that we require community, and to have community we need to be tolerated by other people, and in order to be tolerated we cannot keep overwhelming or correcting other people with out multi cultural identities. We simply have to assimilate and be who they expect us to be - American, British, Kenyan, etc.
And in this assimilation we lose a lot of ourselves, not always in a ‘woe is me I have forsaken myself’ kind of way, but more in a quiet ‘oh, this bit of me doesn’t quite fit here’ way. Sometimes that ‘bit’ is our second language, sometimes it’s our politics, sometimes it’s all of our childhood memories, sometimes it’s our high school experiences.
It’s difficult to feel like you belong when everyone is sharing their stories of driving to Sonic with their friends after high school and you mention that after school you and your friends ran alongside abandoned train tracks in the Rift Valley, watching out for gunmen. Or that your school trips were to climb Mt Kenya while your university peers went to SeaWorld. While others drove across counties to see their grandparents, you flew solo across continents and oceans.
It can come off a bit braggy, or at least it can come off as self estranging. So we, TCKs, minimise our stories. We preface our stories with the disclaimer ‘oh it wasn’t that different! Oh it was’t so unique’
I’ll confess, we’re lying through our teeth. But the guilt of lying is somehow more comfortable than the guilt of being an inconvenience, the guilt of not belonging.
We alter our stories to make our audience, our friends, our family, our peers, our dates more comfortable and more likely to stick around for the long haul.
We need community and often we’ll do anything to secure it.
And I don’t necessarily think this is all bad. Tapering our stories is a skill TCKs learn at a young age, adapting to our environment to maintain acceptance is natural. But what I don’t think is understood by those around us, and what is so keenly felt by the TCK, is the very guilt of simply having a TCK existence. An existence that wasn’t our choice, but one with consequences felt acutely by us. An existence that we will have to explain and compensate for over and over and over and over again (and again).
An existence that will not be understood, or accounted for, and we are required to give Grace for those misunderstandings, over and over and over again (and again).
Because if we don’t - we’ll be isolated.
I think we know this as TCKs, because we know we just don't belong, and we know that puts everyone around us in an awkward spot. We know, or at least we hope, that others want us to fit in. We just don't. And we know we don't. So, we desperately try to make it seem like we do, or at least to make it seem like we're not that different.
We try not to bore our friends with our un-relatable and irrelevant stories. We try not to overwhelm our spouses with the cumulative trauma of a TCK life. We try not to correct people when they forget where we have lived. We try not to ask too many questions, in case we ask something stupid and betray ourselves.
We want to be invited back, we want to be part of the group, we don't want to be penalised for having an international life. We don't want to be reminded we don't belong, and we don't want to carry the guilt of knowing we should.
And I wonder, because I don’t have a resolute answer, if this guilt is just another part of the TCK identity. If this is just another aspect of ourselves that we all need to come to terms with - we will carry the responsibility of calibrating our conversations for others. We will carry the weight of extending grace when we are misunderstood, misremembered, and misplaced. And other will carry the weight of extending patience and compassion as they get to know us.
If you are fortunate I do think there will be people, who are not TCKs, who will do everything they can to get to know you as one. I have found these people in my life and they are some of my dearest friends. One had never left her country until she came to visit me in England, but travel, change, and my life in general was never a barrier for her. Her unnatural understanding of who I am because of where I’ve been is a great, great gift and I am so grateful to God for her friendship.
I know not every TCK has that gift, but I hope, if you are struggling under this ‘guilt of not belonging’ that you are able to find someone - peer, friend, family, whoever - who really tries to understand.
And I hope that if you know a TCK, that their life stories and their experience won’t be a spectacle to you, and it won’t be an overwhelming topic. I hope that it won’t be an inconvenience just because you can’t place them and their sticker in a category that you understand. I hope, rather, that you just listen, are gracious and understanding, and let them know there is a place for them.
And now, because I don’t want to leave readers hanging, back to young Iona, sitting on the floor with her friends, staring at a disjointed map of the United States.
In the end, the volunteers put our stickers on a blank piece of paper. We wrote our names and our birthplace beside them and the paper was taped to the edge of the map. We were there, I guess, but we were distinctly separate from their world. We were outsiders, our existence denoted on a blank sheet of paper labeled ‘Other’ even though ‘Other’ included the entire world beyond the USA.
It didn’t feel good. We sat there and listened to someone talk about birthplaces and States and I’m sure they tried to tie it to Christ - or at least I hope they did. I sat and stared at my sticker, an afterthought barely attached to the giant map of the United States. Looking back, that sticker represents a lot of my relationship with the US - I should belong there, I really should, but I absolutely don’t. The best I can do is find a place on the peripheral edge and cling on for dear life, hoping no one asks too many questions or shakes the map too hard or else my fragile American-ness will fall clean off.
As I said, I did feel sorry for that one volunteer - I think, even at ten, I had a keen awareness that my friends and I were living a very different sort of life. I knew that we had to give grace to the volunteers, that we had to show an inordinate amount of understanding for our age because we had access to a concept they didn’t. You can be an American and not born in the USA.
But, because I was a child and because I have high expectations of other people, I also remember thinking adults must not be that smart and American volunteers don’t know very much about missionary kids except that we don’t have access to American candy.
And that is alright - we can’t expect people to know more than what they’re taught or exposed to - but I do think that sending churches and teams should be aware of this before they head out to mission meetings.
Just bring on the sour skittles and leave your single nation maps at home.