As a third culture kid, I wasn’t raised in the same country as the rest of my family. Even when I was growing up in America, our nearest family were a 3-hour plane ride away. My grandparents visited every summer, but everyone else was back in England, so I only had stories about them.
I grew up knowing I had a big family, with a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides; so many that as a kid I struggled just to remember their names, not knowing any faces, nevermind how we were related. I read books about growing up in a big family and thought, yeah, I can relate to this struggle. (Yeah, I was a dumb kid.)
Age 7, my parents and I moved onto a boat and began sailing around the Caribbean. Now there were no visits from my grandparents, but I had facebook, and mostly family members on it. They seemed pretty run-of-the-mill English; some public arguments in comments sections here and there, more minion memes than you could shake a franchise at, but they seemed decent.
There’s an assumption that you’re automatically close to your ‘family’. The word itself comes from the Latin word meaning “servant”. The original English meaning was close to our modern word “household” — a group of individuals living under one roof, including blood relations and servants. By that definition, I didn’t have much family.
But, I had at least three boat mothers. These were random women from the boating community without children of their own, who decided to treat me as family should treat you: they looked after me, played with me, fed me, and taught me everything and anything you’d need to know: how to haggle with the locals, how to make high-quality jewellery from nothing but a bag of beads and some fishing wire, and how to make your cat love you. (The key? I can’t tell you. Family secret.)
Some of these women have gone on to have kids since I’ve grown up, and I consider these children my nieces and nephews. I get more emails from them than I do my actual cousins.
Any other kids on boats we met became my siblings; there was no time to waste getting to know each other, because boat life is so impermanent. You don’t often spend more than two weeks in a place unless you need to renew your passport or make repairs, so there’s no time to waste being distant because you might not have anything in common with the other person.
On the same nights as I met my siblings, we’d have sleepovers, exchange Facebook and keep in touch as best we could with the crappy wifi boat life provides. Even now, my boat brothers and sisters know me better than the friends who live 5 minutes down the road. I can’t explain it; just the way it is.
Boat dads were few and far between- it seems most men choose the sailor life in order to avoid being a father and living that nuclear family life. Still, they’d tussle my hair or let me sip alcohol, just to watch me make a face and gag (‘how can adults drink that stuff? It’s so burny!’… If only I knew).
The boating community is something else, especially in the Caribbean. Most places have weekly potlucks where you all gather on the beach, bring your own big pot of food, and everybody would share with everybody else. In the morning there would be the ‘net’, where we’d all tune in our radios at the same time and listen to whatever news and gossip was floating around the community. On the radio you can even switch channels, to carry on conversations in implied privacy. If you were really nosy you could switch channels to whichever frequency the neighbours were talking on, and if you were extra cheeky you could join in with their conversation, uninvited. Nobody worth knowing minds nosiness on boats.
Fast forward to now: I’ve been living in my passport country (the UK) for almost a decade. My family is about an hour away in any direction. I know their faces now, and on a good day I can even remember how so-n-so is related to me. Usually when an unidentified number is calling me it turns out to be some aunt or another wanting to talk to my parents.
Family gatherings are nothing like a potluck- no sandy beaches in England, we congregate in pubs and chow down on greasy food someone’s pulled out of a freezer and stuck in some hot oil. Conversation is always good natured, tongue-in-cheek, and it’s a joy to listen to… until I chime in, and everything goes quiet.
I swear, I was never an awkward person on the boats. I could meet a person at noon and by dinnertime we’d be inseparable and know each other’s life stories. So how is it that my Passport Family is so perplexed by everything I say and do? Luckily they don’t linger on me long and switch back to their own banter after a minute or two of awkward chuckling where I have to try hard not to swallow my tongue in shame for ever having said anything.
As family, their knowledge about me is slender, boiling down to three things:
- I have a boyfriend.
- I go to university and study… a subject. Something artsy, probably.
- I’m tall.
Which really doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room when my parents nip out for milk or and leave me alone with these people. Their collective knowledge about me leaves room for just three questions:
- When’s the wedding?
- How’s university going?
- You stopped growing yet? You’re about to hit the ceiling.
Since I graduated university this month, I think questions 2 and 3 are obsolete at this point.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful for my passport, DNA-certified family. When I look back at them, we have the same eyes, same cheekbones, same sense of humour. They connect me to this passport country in a way I couldn’t be without them, that’s for sure. Still, there’s something off whenever I hear one of my friends say they can ‘just pop round’ or ‘drop in’ on an aunt or grandparent uninvited, even though I’m pretty sure my parents yeeted me through the window at some of my boat parents without much invitation on some occasions.
At family dinners, conversation revolves around my relatives and my parents, which makes sense because they’ve known each other for almost 40 years. They could probably walk the path to each other’s houses blindfolded, while I’d make a wrong turn and get run over by traffic. I’ve known these people technically my whole life, but met them a grand total of ten times, tops. We sometimes like each other’s facebook posts and indulge in family drama together, and maybe that’s the start.
As Third Culture Kids, we often talk about how out-of-place we feel within our passport country- the place we were born, but didn’t spend much developmental time. Maybe it’s time to talk about something new: the idea of the Passport Family that you are born into, which also might have you feeling out of place.
Can you relate to anything I’ve written about here? Please let me know in the comments below!
Culturally Confused 