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You know those questions you get when you visit your home country … that are really hard to answer? Almost impossible to answer. Like, you’re in the grocery store and bump into someone you know, and they’re so excited to see you, and also look at you like an exotic animal they can’t believe they’ve encountered outside of the zoo.

“What’s it like living over there?”

And you try to pack a whole year’s worth of culture shock and falling in love with a new place, and strain, and confusion, highs and lows, and everyday life, because somehow it’s just life in another package – into a few sentences. 

And you’re also trying to be an ambassador, to an extent. You don’t want to give people the wrong impression of an entire nation or continent or people group based on a couple of the difficulties you’ve experienced, and you don’t want to glamorize the life because while you’re living it, it’s not glamorous, it’s life, and so many people already have an overly-glamorized perception.

It doesn’t work. It’s hard to come up with a satisfying answer.

Part of the problem is we haven’t spent much time crafting our story, and practicing telling our story.

Tip for visiting “home”

One thing my husband and I have done before each trip back to the US is come up with a handful of stories we want to share from the past year. There will be 1 or 2 that serve the purpose for most encounters, and a couple more for when there’s time to go deeper with people we’re spending more time with.

This has really helped us manage the awkwardness of meeting with people who can’t relate at all and want more than a soundbite but not a lot more.

And by the way, I don’t blame people at all for asking bad questions. They don’t have much practice with it! And I’m just as bad about trying to find a point of connection with a bad opener.

To get at some of those stories, we ask ourselves things like:

• What have we learned?
• How have we changed this year? 
• What’s been challenging that will challenge people at home in a way that encourages them to grow or expand or shift along with us?
• What can we share that will help build connection or understanding or goodwill between people at home and our host country?

Then we make a list of stories and talking points, and narrow it down to a few.

We enjoy this opportunity to review our lives and solidify some of the meaning. 

However, that’s just a tiny sliver of our life.

There’s so much more to our life story.

We rarely go much deeper, or try to look at ALL of life in one package. Or try to make some kind of sense out of all the smaller less significant pieces, or the deeply personal and private pieces.

How can we do that?

This is especially important for kids growing up across cultures, who don’t fully identify with their parents’ cultures and find themselves in-between, which makes it hard to put themselves into familiar categories. Their lives don’t follow the standard arc of life experiences and sequences, so their storyline – – it can take some extra attention to find and define their storyline in a way that makes sense to others and to themselves.

So how do we help our kids see and understand and tell their own stories?

Aha.

This episode is the first of a series on storytelling. We’ll look at it from a few different perspectives. 

• Today I’ll tell you about an art processing activity I put together that’s available to you now – see the link in the shownotes.
• The next two episodes I have coming up are with two ladies who work with verbal storytelling, and we’ll get some fresh insights and tips from them. 
• One is a podcaster, Kate Jetmore, who has a podcast called The Listen podcast, which is stories from Americans abroad. 
• The other is Christine Taylor, whose business is called StoryCraft, and she teaches people how to find and craft their story for the purpose at hand.
• I’ll also be interviewing a lady who does drama with kids. She teaches drama, online now, and she’ll share some tips parents can use that help in parenting, in doing online school at home, even if you don’t feel you have any drama skills yourself.

So stay tuned for some great interviews coming up.

Art processing

I’m a big fan of art processing to get below the surface. My first two interviews in this podcast were with artists who talked about the importance of using art to explore and express and process, and to develop skills we need to navigate the rest of life. So have a listen to episodes 2 and 3 with Kit Ripley and Fiona Valentine – those episodes don’t have any introduction or wrap up from me explaining why I brought in those guests and why it’s important for families abroad, but this is why. 

Our people back home don’t understand this life. 

It’s hard to explain the hard parts because all they see is glamour.

Often we  don’t have anyone to tell our whole story to.

And thinking about all the messy bits isn’t anyone’s favorite thing to do. It’s not really encouraged in society, there aren’t many spaces in everyday life where we have time and opportunity and safety to go excavating to uncover the difficult bits and try to make sense out of the parts of life that don’t make sense.

That’s one of the ways the TCK life is unique… the bits of life that don’t go together but get mashed up into one life, this doesn’t make sense to anyone else but other TCKs. Even then, most of us don’t have practice at telling our stories.

I’m a big fan of using the arts for this kind of processing.

And don’t worry – you don’t have to have any artistic ability / consider yourself an artist. This can be a tool that helps unlock stuff below the surface, and gives you a way to work with those thoughts and emotions, to put them into order, to make meaning out of them. 

Mosaics activity

I’ve developed an activity for you to do together as a family that’s all about looking at all those mis-matched bits of life and then you match them together in a way you choose.

It’s inspired by the artform of mosaics, where you take a bunch of broken pieces of ceramic or glass and fit them together in a new way to create a new effect.

So it’s this idea of recognizing that you may have a bunch of broken pieces in your life – and even if you don’t think of them as broken, they may feel mis-matched – and we’re going to create space to look at that, and use that in a meaningful design that includes all your parts – the good and bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

We’re working with paper and a gluestick, so it’s accessible to all ages and you don’t need any special supplies.

Because we’re doing this for the benefit of the processing that happens during the creating.

I help you with how to guide the conversation too. 

Because stuff might come up that feels uncomfortable to us as parents, it may make us want to swoop in to “fix” things. It’s a natural part of parenting that we want to save our children from pain, but that inclination can sometimes get in the way of healing the pain. So I help you with how to create that safe space and not sabotage the process without even realizing it.

This Mosaics activity is ready now, so check out the link in the shownotes.

This is something that can be used in a variety of ways. One person can do it. Although I do highly recommend that parents engage with it at the same time as your children, because it’s a very different dynamic if you give your child this task to do while you watch or that you’ll inspect when they’re finished, than if you sit at the same table making your own mosaic at the same time.

But it can be done individually, meaning each person makes their own, or you can make a collaborative piece where you all contribute and work together on the same piece. It could also be used in the classroom or school setting to help a larger group. You can look at a whole lifetime, Or It can be a reflective tool for just a specific event or timeframe – for example, I did it with my kids just looking at the pandemic – which is something we needed to do. 

The months had blended together into one big blur, without the usual events to mark time or break up the seasons. When I asked my kids about their memories, what’s happened over the last year and a half, what have been the highs and lows, the only thing they had was: coronavirus was bad and in-person learning was good. 

I said come on, a lot more has happened than that! So we started filling in our list month by month – the birthdays, the camping trips, the cat who adopted us, … and when we couldn’t remember any more we flipped through photos and said, “Oh yeah!!” and filled in a lot more. A lot more texture than just coronavirus was bad and in-person learning was good.

And then we made a collaborative mosaic. Ours was abstract (and I realized halfway through that I really wanted to make my own piece because I had strong ideas of how I wanted to express certain ideas that were quite different from how other family members wanted to do it). 

But we had fun together, and we remembered a lot from the past year and a half, reminisced, and created a piece of art that reminds us of this time we spent together reminiscing and talking about how we felt. And at the end we had a visual representation of the good bits and the not good bits co-existing in a way that made some sense.

Because ultimately, we get to tell our own stories. We get to decide how to order the pieces and what significance to give them.

We’ll be talking more about that in the upcoming episodes, so listen in.

expats.together.

Before you go, let me tell you about a new thing that’s happening. In the course of launching the group program adapt.succeed.together., we noticed that a lot of people were looking for more connection and social support. So we responded by creating a weekly live chat on zoom – called expats.together. – where you can drop in when you’re available and talk about whatever’s going on … whether that’s “big” stuff like a move or kids going off to university, or “little” stuff like looking for a new book to read. 

It’s a little different every time, and … it’s always a highlight of my week and no matter how heavy the topics are I leave feeling lighter for having connected with people who “get” me and I come away with a new idea or perspective that helps.

I’ll put a link in the shownotes to the events on Facebook – you can choose from 2 different times – and even better would be to get an email reminder – that’s the feedback we’ve had, so I’ll have a link where you can sign up for email reminders.

Stay up to date

Thank you so much for listening to Expat Family Connection. I hope this episode has given you a fresh perspective on your family’s international life and how to shape the best possible experience, or just a reminder of what you already know but hadn’t thought about recently. To stay up to date on the latest developments here at Resilient Expats, be sure to follow the link below to be one of my VIPs. See you again soon!