by Shannon Brink I wrote the following letter to my son about the grief that he is feeling right now. Our family had to come back suddenly to Canada and it’s not the Canada we looked forward to, nor the one we left. I hope it resonates and encourages other TCK parents out there who […]
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by EC Nance April and May are usually a grieving season for mission communities. This year it has been particularly rough. Schools closed without warning. People evacuated with a day’s notice. Graduation ceremonies moved online. Children face the prospect of never seeing friends again, without having done the leave-taking. I wrote the following poem as […]
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Elizabeth and I recently carved out some time to go sit in a van in a park and talk about marriage. As a result, we’d like to share with you three new episodes of our Trotters41 Podcast! This series on marriage is not specific to cross-cultural folks, although some of it is. It’s also not […]
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It was in the fall that I first saw the announcement from Lauren Wells that she would be writing a book about raising third culture kids. Like many TCKs, I get skeptical any time I hear that someone is writing a book about us. But Lauren’s approach and the fact that she herself is a […]
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My daughter, a freshman in high school, said to me this week, “I don’t feel like I’m being productive right now.” We were on a long walk with our dog because we miss being able to go to the beach during this pandemic and we both wanted to see the water. We walked and talked […]
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Last weekend, my wife and I used Facebook to video chat with two of our sons, their wives, and our four little grandkids. That’s what you do when your children are serving in a faraway land. That’s what you do, too, when your children, like ours, are close by but COVID-19 protocols tell you to […]
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‘Twas the day before furlough and all through the house, Everybody was crazy, even the mouse. With kilograms counted and carry-ons packed, The dad will get asked, “Can I fit this last sack?” With Ma on her IG and Pa on his Twitter, They’ll update their close friends through one last newsletter. Frazzled and […]
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*a version of this was first published at Babble, in 2014. When you are the international traveler in the domestic terminal, you look and smell really bad. Everyone else has just come from home or one other connection. You left home twenty-five hours ago and have already endured three or four airports. Your kids are […]
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We don’t talk about sex very much. Sure, we might joke about it (the first working title for this article was The Missionary Position), but we don’t actually talk about it very much. Truth is, most folks are scared to death to have an honest, non-joking, realistic talk about sex. Maybe with a good friend, […]
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“A Syrian painter recently told me that we all have a map in our bodies, composed of the places we have lived, that we are constantly in the process of redrawing. A street from our childhood might be traversed by a train car in which we once fell in love. A garden from a year […]
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by Sean I was 42 years old and had been serving internationally for nearly 20 years before I took a break. I don’t know how I made it that long. But I know that I just barely did. I don’t mean I didn’t take a vacation or time off work during a holiday–those breaks came […]
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My kids have to say a lot of goodbyes. We live in Djibouti but my husband and I are both from Minnesota. Our family spends some summers in Minnesota and when we leave Africa, we have to say goodbye to friends and coaches and teachers. Then, come August, when we return to Africa, we have […]
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