Ch…ch

What is missing?

UR

This was printed on a connection card ad we received in the mail a few years ago. Cheeky.

My daughters are for the most part living in a world that “does not look like them” as the refrain goes. These days it is said another way: representation matters.

So naturally I bring them to live in China. 😏

For two weeks my girls have patiently endured stares and giggles and pointing and gawking as we try to make it through our daily doings. Everything is hard when you can’t read or speak for yourself. Everything takes longer than it should. every.single.thing.

That is compounded when you are an adolescent, trying to not be seen in a world where you’ve not a chance of blending in. This, coupled with general (and expected) homesickness broke us all down. In two weeks time we were a mess: shouty pouty, irrationally angry, irritable, clingy, exhausted, grouchy or perpetually in tears.

Enter Sunday. We say words like Blessed and bless-ed for trifles but this experience remains beyond my ability to imagine. I try to do right by my kids and like any mother, I try to give them the best I can. Other challenges notwithstanding, it is evident that these next weeks in China will be formative for them. For better. For worse.

Sunday surprised them in the best way. I dropped them off to their respective age groups for class. And just like that they now have this new experience of fitting in in a most unlikely place. Of finding a tribe of children who introduce themselves as being  Brazilians, born in Australia but living in China. Or being from Ethiopia but mostly lived in Croatia now living in China. Or from Russia, but lived in America and now living in China. Or from East India, lived longest in France but now live in China. Children from everywhere and nowhere, third-cultured.

My kids didn’t know how to believe us when we told them there were other children like them in the world. The promise of meeting someone else with so fantastically bizarre a story as your own seemed unfathomable to them. To see another person reflected in your eyes–it was “like Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of footprints on the sand.”

I cannot remember the last time I saw such joy in them as what I did on Sunday. They were alive. The gift of friendship and human connection, of kinship–brotherhood and sisterhood is a far better gift than merely looking like each other. Not to look like; not to seem, but to be. That is a good and perfect gift.

Turns out we were missing. How good it is to be found.