the expat mum blues

Ever have a friend you like as a person but totally disagree with them as a parent? or the other way around? 

As an expat mum of young kids, a lot of the acquaintances I make are through the kids' kindergarten on the school playground. So it happens that I might quite like a person until -  Bam! I see her interact with her child and then realize that we have totally different values on quite important things. This becomes totally blatant if the said mother's child hits/snatches/kicks one of mine/somebody else's kid and the mother does not intervene at all or ineffectively. Believe it or not, it actually puts quite a strain on the (potential) relationship.

On the other hand, you can also spend time with mums who share similar values in terms of child rearing (and whose kids have a happy friendship with mine) but with whom you might not share a great deal with otherwise. 

I guess this goes with the play-date territory and it is certainly exacerbated by the fact that E & W attend an International School where all kinds of nationalities and cultures showcase many different values and ways.  In a non-expat situation I imagine this is balanced out by the fact that you still manage to see your school-day/work-day friends more.

Right now, my favorite people to talk to are my hairdresser, my pediatrician, (who are both Mums) my yoga teacher (a Mum and grandmum) and my pilates teacher (trying to have kids).... Perhaps because parental values are not tested through hard reality with these people and because we mostly talk about other things. I've also realized these are working people who are not spending their days just shopping, cooking, child minding, gossiping, making themselves beautiful etc.  Oh! how I sometimes wish I could have a another job than being a full time expat mum. 

Here is quite a good talk with my beloved child psychotherapist, Rachel Melville-Thomas,  on how to help children choose good friends.

Emma on her way to a birthday party

 William food shopping with Mum - he loves fruit!

I'm a third culture kid!

and it looks like my kids are also!!!

A definition I liked of a Third Culture Kid (TCK) is "a child who spends a significant time of his/her developmental years outside of the parents culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures while not having full ownership of any."

If you think you might be too or that your kids are, then please listen to this interview with Ruth Van Reken.

It's great actually to have a name to this "I come from nowhere and everywhere" identity of mine. I always felt that living all over the place made me feel kind of "rootless" because I was always different even if what I knew and what I had seen, learned and experienced was practically always presented in a positive light, for me there has always been a sense of not belonging and loss that I have found hard to manage. When I am here, I feel from there, and when I am there I also feel foreign.

It was kind of comforting for me to hear this person say that because everyone is always talking about the positives, you feel almost ungrateful when you express the losses or the fact that your identity is full of holes bigger than any cheese. She also talks about the unresolved grief which was a total slap in the face it felt so true to me.

When people ask me where I am from, to this day I try to explain in the truest possible manner the entirety of my origins because I cannot say that I am "only" Swiss/ Slave/ South African-English/ a world-citizen/ a little bit of all 9 countries I have liven in. When asked what my mother tongue is, I can only truthfully say my mother's language is English or that I spoke 3 languages at the age of 3; my mother's, my father's and Italian since at that moment, we were living in Italy. It's as if I need to explain my lack of belonging or my links to all the different places that are part of me. Maybe kind of crazy?

... to be continued

In the meantime, here are some related links:

tck world
tckid
International family transitions

N.B. I started writing this post three days ago then got interrupted by my  third culture kids and their international musical requests on youtube!