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I used to watch the Matrix films a fair bit and I’m going to borrow one of their concepts for this post. The films follow a hero through a dystopian reality check, where, among other things, he learns to pay attention to the moments of déjà vu, the ‘glitches’ in the world around him. In the film, these glitches might be seeing something subtly not quite right within its own frame of reference, such as seeing the same person cross the same road twice within a few moments. These glitches are clues to a world behind the facade, a world he must learn to navigate (and conquer and triumph over, etc… ) 

I see glitches too. My moments of déjà vu find me looking at a scene, or participating in an event, and being suddenly thrown beyond it. My gaze can soften and pass through time and space to my other life, where something like this – and at the same time, very unlike this – has happened before. 

There is nothing like becoming a parent to make us realise that we really are making this up as we go along. Sure, there are books and courses and theories and approaches – and they all help construct a kind of framework to which we cling. But when our children are struggling in friendships, or we are struggling with their routine hysteria to do with flies and bees, we realise the books haven’t met our child. 

What’s more, we Third Culture Kids have not lived the lives of our children. Now, this is the case for any parent, right? The world is always a different place for our children than it was for us. As my own child informs me when I suggest she find something to do without a screen, “It was okay for you, Mummy – you were USED to being bored. You didn’t have screens like I do”. 

Yet the general trajectory for parenting throughout the ages is that we learn from the model of our own experiences of being parented. We keep elements of that experience we appreciated (even if only with hindsight!) and we discard or replace those elements that we consciously didn’t enjoy. And many of us (dare I say most?) nevertheless find ourselves perpetuating these models we experienced, despite conscious attempts to deviate. The brain has learnt how parenting ‘should’ look and we often easily replicate it. 

How do you know you ‘count’ as a Third Culture Kid? You know, a REAL one? This was raised as an issue for my doctoral research on TCKs – how would I define them? There are the classical definitions of course – children of parents working for international organisations, such as missions, military or in diplomacy. But what about those with parents who worked as independent missionaries, journalists, international entrepreneurs?

How do you feel about the idea that we ‘perform’ our identities? For many people, performance is associated with ‘faking it’, ‘inauthenticity’ or even, ‘drama’. It can feel jarring to consider identity as performance. And yet how many of us have a distinct feeling of ‘masking’ when with other people, especially people we feel won’t understand or accept the less predictable elements of us? My hand is up.