Last week, my parents moved out of their house and to a village 300 miles away. And I spent a couple of days feeling a little bit sad about it. I've known the move was happening for a while - when we left England, I knew we wouldn't be coming back to that house. So this took me a little by surprise. It took me a day or two to put my finger on why exactly.
Then I figured it out. I'd put down roots in that house. When I came home at the end of university, I came back to that house. I invested a considerable amount of time painting three walls of my bedroom with a paintbrush, because my dad didn't trust me with a roller. In amongst the change of navigating the university to work transition, my first adult job and moving to Manchester, I kept coming back to that house. Even once I'd moved out, I lived close enough to pop back for a night, or a Saturday, or when my car needed to go to the garage. When L and I got engaged, we told my parents by turning up unannounced and unexpected at the front door of that house one evening. I got ready for my wedding in that house, and my sister's wedding too. I sat around the kitchen table drinking cup after cup of tea more times than I can remember. When L and I sold our house ready for the move out here, we moved into my parents' house, spending weekdays there and weekends back in Bradford. Of course I put down roots there.
And now, those roots have been all up-ended. Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited about visiting my parents' new house when we are next back in England (and when they have a new house). I'm very fortunate that they have moved to a place where I already feel like I have a few little root tendrils, thanks to many holidays there over the years. And experiencing grief at change is a perfectly normal and emotionally healthy thing. If you've ever seen the Pixar film 'Inside Out', you'll understand what I'm talking about as it captures this concept pretty much perfectly.
But I'm also conscious that we've been here in Turkey pretty much 5 months now. Our plan has always been to spend 2 years in this city, then move to another city. And 5 months isn't far off 6 months, which is a quarter of our time. A quarter sounds like a proper chunk of time. And so I continue to try and plant myself deeply in this city, knowing that in a year and a half, we plan to be uprooting again. And that we will continue putting down roots in this country, where our ability to remain here rests on being able to acquire a residence permit each year or two and feels so fragile.
There's another thought lodged in my mind as well. L and I chose this path, where uprooting ourselves is part of the job description. But we are also making J into a 'Third Culture Kid' (TCK for short). This term refers to children who spend some years when they are growing up in a different culture from their passport country. The idea of the 'third culture' is that it is the amalgamation of the two cultures because a TCK never feels like they completely belong to either culture. If J spends a large amount of his childhood here, then he will probably never feel entirely British, and he'll never feel entirely Turkish. There's been a growing amount of research into TCKs in recent years, but one of the key characteristics is rootlessness that results from much change and not feeling that they truly belong anywhere. One researcher summarised the effects of rootlessness when he said that "most TCKs go through more grief experiences by the time they are twenty than monocultural individuals do in a lifetime." (Though it does also need to be said that there are many benefits as well to being a TCK as well.)
I don't have any easy answers about J being a TCK, any more than I have easy answers about the roots I've put down in different places. (In fact, even less, as I haven't been a TCK).
A couple of days ago we were thinking about a passage that talks about One who is like a shepherd, carrying his sheep close to his heart, and yet who is incomparably mighty. It reminded me that I don't need to be looking down at my feet to carefully nurture the roots I'm putting down, but should be lifting my eyes up to to the heavens, where my help comes from and where I can see the stars that are known each by name (although not literally, because unlike a couple of months back, we have power and so I can't see the stars through the light pollution).
Holding onto this truth and the hope we have will anchor us, but it won't negate the sadness and that's okay. There is no neat ending to this story. I'm already over being sad about my parents move, but there will be other uprootings in the future that I will be sad about. J will experience lots of changes that he'll be sad about, which will make us sad too. There are, and will be, lots of great things about living here, but there will also be sadness and we don't have to pretend it doesn't exist or be ashamed of that.
