Tag: expat mom

How to Help Mom Take a Sabbatical (even with kids at home)

I recently had a conversation with Global Trellis Podcast to answer a listener’s question about moms needing sabbaticals on the field or during home assignments, and she wondered how to make that happen in the busy of life with kids.

The question reminded me of my days with three little girls at home. I was often running on empty, homeschooling, working, taking ministry classes, dealing with health issues, and just doing too much.

I remember asking another older and wiser homeschool mom how she fit in quiet time or rest time during her days while also being a mom, teacher, nurse, cook, and playmate. She answered, “You take the time right there in the busy moments of the day. Sit on the floor with the kids, read your Bible, journal, write, pray, study . . . let your girls see you taking that time for yourself and for Jesus.”

Her advice stuck with me, and I obviously still think about it today. Implementation of the advice took a little trial and error as I worked out how to make it all work while focusing, praying, or learning. I had to adjust my expectations, reframe what I thought quiet time or rest time could be, and really allow Jesus to walk with me in the moment.

As I continued thinking about the answer to this listener’s question, I thought about this advice and how it could also apply to a sabbatical. Yet I also recognized that the simple advice I’d followed as a young mom needed more depth to fully apply to global worker families in need of true sabbatical time.

Is it even possible for missionary parents, moms especially, to take a sabbatical? Is it possible for couples with littles to have sabbatical time together, or should they plan separate times?

In the podcast, I offered some tips, ideas, and layered ways to make sure young families or busy moms can also take sabbatical time. There’s a lot to consider, but here are the top seven things you can do to take a sabbatical as a parent.

  1. Redefine what sabbatical means for your season.

You don’t have to leave your home, your country, or your kids to rest. A sabbatical can simply be a slower pace, gentler expectations, and a little more breathing room. Think of it as a pause or a slowdown that shifts how you move through your days rather than trying to plan a dramatic break from your life.

  1. Set a few intentions, goals, or expectations before you begin.

Ask yourself what you want to feel at the end of this sabbatical. What do you want to accomplish, learn, pray through, or focus on during your sabbatical? What you need to release, what needs to be restored, and what you want to hear from God? 

These quiet questions can help you pay attention to what your sabbatical time is actually for, instead of arriving at the end of your sabbatical and wishing you’d been more intentional.

  1. Make small, practical changes at home.

A home‑based sabbatical is built on small changes from normal. This could look like simpler meals, lighter homeschooling, fewer ministry tasks, a daily anchor like a quiet hour or a walk, and/or one day each week where you don’t host, meet, or do any outside work. Even small pauses like tea outside, a slow walk, a quiet hour, or a creative moment will begin to add up.

  1. Choose what you’re pausing and what you’re keeping.

You can be strategic. Hospitality, team responsibilities, ministry output, language learning, extra personal goals, and discipleship of others can all be set down for a season. Basic parenting, simple family rhythms, and connection with God can become more normal during sabbatical. This isn’t quitting ministry or failing at global work. It’s choosing a time of sabbatical that fits what you’d like to have for a sabbatical.

  1. Bring your family into the process.

Let your kids know you’re slowing down for a little while. Let them see you develop a sabbatical that includes them in the intentional plans. Create a family “slow list” of restful activities the kids can do while you read or study or exercise. Build small rituals like quiet mornings or simple meals. Kids learn rest by watching you rest, and a sabbatical can become a gentle reset for everyone.

  1. Communicate clearly with your team or organization.

A few simple sentences of preparational communication can protect both your health and your ministry. You can say things like, “This is a temporary rest season,” or “This helps me stay healthy long‑term.” Most teams respond well when they understand the purpose behind your pause.

*I’ll add a caveat to all of this planning to mention that your organization might require special permission or approval for taking sabbatical time. Be sure to check in with them early in your process!

  1. Set aside dedicated time, if needed.

For some, having a very free-flowing, easy, laid-back sabbatical time is the perfect fit for you. If it were structured, it wouldn’t feel restful. Plan that way.

For others, having a structured, planned, and fully orchestrated routine is going to keep you on track and help you stay motivated to accomplish what you’d intended for sabbatical time. Of course, there’s a group in the middle that needs to plan for some of both options!

It’s important to understand yourself and be self-aware enough to know what will be best for your rest, renewal, and refreshing while also helping you grow and learn.

Additional Resources for Planning and Taking a Sabbatical

Velvet Ashes has many specific posts and resources about taking a sabbatical.

Right here at A Life Overseas, you can find more information about taking a missionary or ministry sabbatical.

Over at Global Trellis, there is a full Sabbatical Journey Course with downloads, videos, and guided discussions that can be used in personal journaling, with your spouse, or in a group. Global Trellis runs small groups through zoom calls with other workers who are going through the course. These are offered when there is a need for community. If that’s you, please contact Global Trellis about groups or other ways to find community.

As you research, plan, pray, and start to build your sabbatical, coaching or spiritual direction can be very beneficial in giving you dedicated time to focus on your own journey through a sabbatical. If it is scheduled and on your calendar, it’s more likely to happen.

If you’d be interested in one-on-one coaching, I know there are people who’d love to help. There’s something special about having someone walk with you in this. All of the websites above have more resources for coaches, counselors, and spiritual directors. 

If you’d like to talk with me specifically, please reach out!

Co-Grieving Loss with Your Repatriated TCK

We didn’t have words for TCK loss back then. Not when I left Cameroon at nineteen and stepped onto U.S. soil as a stranger to my own country. But just because there weren’t words doesn’t mean the ache of loss didn’t burrow deep. Nineteen and newly repatriated felt like drowning in a sea of people who looked like me and talked like me but didn’t know the red-earth-Africa that shaped me. 

I hardly recognized the girl I became in the wake of losing Cameroon, my best friends, and everything that felt familiar. That season was one of the hardest – and one of the unhealthiest – of my life.

Now, after the years have fast forwarded to an empty nest, I find myself looking back, not just at my own story but at theirs. I think of my children, my third culture kids, who built rich and beautiful lives on South African soil, their home. How will they handle letting go? How will they carry the weight of leaving behind the people and places that shaped them?

When I saw Megan Norton’s invitation to write a letter to my recently repatriated TCKs for her upcoming book, Letters Now Sent, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I know the grief of leaving a place that tattoos an indelible mark on your soul. As their mother and as a TCK myself, I want to co-grieve their losses of saying goodbye to a life they loved in South Africa. And I know where I want them to root themselves now, as they step into adulthood in the U.S.

This letter is a new beginning with new language for parents of TCKs. It is my way of opening the door to a safe and sacred conversation with my young adult children—one established in love, shared understanding, and the kind of hope that reroots through the cracks of even the hardest losses. While their reactions to my letter are deeply personal and honey to my heart, I can tell you that this budding conversation was met with warm reciprocity and open arms. 

A letter to Elaina and Sawyer Danforth, 2025 (republished at A Life Overseas with permission) 

My two dearest toasted marshmallows,

You are eighteen and nineteen now. University carries a steep learning curve for everyone, but especially for the ones like you who left home, country, and friends to be grafted back to the place of your heritage. 

As second-generation TCKs, you belong to a tribe that your father and I know well. Your childhood was formed in the womb of the cradle of humankind, in KwaZulu-Natal, and it ended abruptly on the other side of a plane ride to the United States. But the things that formed you there still sing in every crevice of your mind and shape the way you see the world. 

Repatriation is a season when the losses of the familiar sink in hard for TCKs. And these are the years when you become aware of your roots, the ones that have been transplanted to new soils and now feel wildly distinct and out of place. The places of your childhood are the places where your formative and deepest roots grow. And the soil of South Africa no longer surrounds or supports you. 

You’ll remember from working on our farm that a transplanted plant often wilts for a while. It is learning to survive in a new and unfamiliar environment. Its roots aren’t sure what to make of its new home. They don’t know whether they can unfurl and take new life or whether the newness will be hostile to growth. Repatriating TCKs are the same. 

While my roots in South Africa will never be as deeply formative as yours, I am here to co-grieve your losses with you. I did the same as a nineteen-year-old with my Cameroonian roots. And your father did too, at eighteen with his Congolese and Central African roots. 

Some losses are obvious. Our imperfectly perfect little farmhouse and the stability of its cracked walls. The foamy blueness of whales flirting between the horizon and the Indian Ocean. The oneness of our multicultural, multi-lingual farm family. The wind-whipped cheeks from four-wheeling wild past giraffes. The saggy eyes after Minecraft all-nighters with friends. The laughter with your non-blood sisters farmsteading in the mountains. The crispy-edged pancakes hot off the griddle every Saturday morning. The seasonal ebb and flow of subtropical downpours and droughts. 

But some losses are hidden. Some, you won’t even know you miss until you come across them years later. And you’ll be caught off guard by a sudden feeling of home. Hidden losses are the sounds, smells, and invisible things that God sprinkled into the backdrop of your childhood. They are the things that you didn’t even know weren’t everywhere on planet earth. Until they weren’t. 

Your hidden losses don’t have to make sense to anyone else. They don’t even have to be pleasant. But something about these background sounds and smells had a profound impact on developing the unseen part of who you are today. And we honor those gifts by naming them. 

The background sound of your childhood is the cry of hadedas filling pink southern skies and beckoning your sleepy eyes open. You didn’t even know the sound was missing until that first morning in a Midwest dormroom when the synthetic shock of an alarm clock demanded your attention. 

It is the faithful singsong Xhosa greeting “Molweni” on your proud farm stoep. It is the mourning doves telling each other off gently and sternly. It is the inexplicable peace of violent rains threatening to crash right through tôle roofs. It is the baying of hounds, whether to threaten skelems or to give chase to dassies, outside your burglar-barred window. 

It is the South African flavor in which people have always said your name. It is the twisted, segregated history healing in real time through the harmony of church songs in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu. It is the comfort of our family’s age-old call to meals that reaches back to the recesses of your first independently held spoon, “On va prier.”

The background smell embedded in the roots of your childhood is a eucalyptus flame licking Karoo lamb ribs on the braai. It is soft buttermilk vanilla steam from an Ouma rusk dunked in Five Roses tea. How can something be so moorishly crunchy and goopy at the same time? It is the barely-there salt in the air where the Indian Ocean laps at the sky. And yes, it is even the familiar sewage plant every time we try to hold our breath at that bend in the highway by Uvongo.

Your roots will fumble around in this new place of red, white, and blue for a while, figuring out what is friendly soil and what isn’t. And this is the time. Dit is tyd to close your eyes, take a breath, and rediscover the power of your one unshakable tap root. It is your deepest root. The most formative one. The most familiar one. The most stabilizing one. It is your one root that pushes far past all the others, past every good and rocky soil, reaching like life depends on it, to the source of life. Water. Living Water. 

It is in Living Water that you’ve always found life and truth and all that is good. When everything around is unfamiliar, this source is the familiar. 

You’ll find community in the taproots of familiar people planted there too. And you’ll come to know new people who are automatically family because their taproot seeks life in the same place where yours does. This is the good stuff, my toasted marshmallows. 

While your secondary roots stumble around and try to make sense of star-spangled life, sink all your energy, all your questions, all your everything into your taproot’s source of life. It is the one and only thing that will never change no matter where you go, how far you fall, or how unfamiliar everything else seems. 

Taprooted to the Source with you,

Mom (Anna Danforth)

~~~~~~~

Inspired by Ruth Van Reken‘s book Letters Never Sent, Letters Now Sent will be a collection of letters from TCKs, parents of TCKs, and system leaders to share personal stories about their experiences with TCKs, being a TCK themself, and/or raising TCKs. This book is a fusion of both memoir and anthology written in a specific “Dear [name]” format. 

Here is the Google Form link to submit a letter with additional details about length and content prompts: https://forms.gle/jQyzq3TtFqfyznvCA. The deadline to submit a letter is March 31, 2025, and the book will be launched in July 2025 at Ruth’s 80th birthday celebration. Families in Global Transition is hosting the 80th Birthday party in Chicago on July 26, 2027, and registration will be live on their website soon. You do not have to be a member of FIGT to register for this event.