Something I've Been Thinking About

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about this strange lifestyle that we live and how it will affect our kids. Living overseas, especially being in ministry is just a strange lifestyle. There is little consistency and routine in our lives and we’re beginning to feel how much people come and go.

Recently we’ve begun to see how all of the comings and goings on so many people in our lives may affect the girls. Since mid March we’ve had our supervisors from Rome, my younger sister and her husband, Jonathan’s parents, old family friends of my family, and my dear friend and her new husband all visit us. All but one set of these stayed with us at our house. Add to that the short trip I took with the girls to see my sister and her family in April. Now Jonathan’s mom is here as well as a team from Trinity church (the team is not staying with us) and Jonathan’s dad will come next week for a few days. Right after that another dear friend of mine will come to visit and another team from DB will come. That is a lot of contact with a lot of different people in a short amount of time! They were honestly all GREAT visits too.

What we’ve been noticing though is how Katie enjoyed each visitor and got attached to them and then had to see them leave. She’s still so young that she doesn’t really understand the distance or the connections we have with all of these people. We had 3 of these sets pretty much back to back to back and by the end we could tell that she was pretty checked out and very clingy to Mommy and Daddy. She’s getting the names of people confused and even called Grandma, Sarah because Sarah was one of our last visitors. After the first several visitors she’d ask, “where’s ____ and ____ ? “ “They had to go bye-bye on the airplane,” we’d try to explain. And then the next would arrive. She’d get their names all mixed up and generally call the new couple by the previous visitor’s names. So confusing for a 2 year-old!

When S and D were here last week S kindly asked, “Can I be your friend now?” or something like that. Katie’s response was, “No.” “Oh. Why not?” “Because you’re going up in the sky.” We figured out that she meant going on an airplane, leaving, basically. Who knows exactly what she meant, she’s two, but we were all struck by her comment.

My heart especially hurts for her right now because we just found out last night that our wonderful neighbors who have become dear friends are moving - today. They have lived in the apartment directly beneath us since before Katie was born. They have a little girl the same age as Katie and she LOVES to play with her. It has been so wonderful having friends and a playmate for Katie so close. Even though this isn’t a result of us living overseas, it’s still another change for Katie that I don’t think she’ll understand.

On top of that, Katie doesn’t know that her best buds A and J will be returning to the US for good at the beginning of August. She just loves those guys and even though we don’t see them every week she talks about them all the time.

So, put all of these things together and it’s hard to know how to help her understand that people love her and care for her but then have to leave and how to help her have stability in the midst of it all. I know she isn’t the first kid to live this way but she’s my first kid to live this way so my heart hurts for her. It has reminded me to pray a lot more for our girls as they live this cross-cultural, international, life.