9 minute read
Old Souls
Old Souls
By Rebecca Hopkins
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I had to use the GPS on my car to get me back to my friend’s house in a part of Colorado Springs that wasn’t familiar to me. Stay right, I reminded myself while I drove. I was just a few months into a US visit after twelve years living in Indonesia—where we drive on the left-hand side of the road. And I sometimes got confused about where I was supposed to be.
Rosalynn’s garden was gorgeous, surrounding me with its life and color and hope as I walked up to her front door. I reminded myself to notice, to take it in, to lay down some burdens and just breathe.
It had been a few years since I’d been there, and when Rosalynn welcomed me into her home, I wondered if this was a different house than when I’d last visited.
“We painted it, did some redecorating,” she explained when I asked her. “But same house.” Right. Of course. My friend is no longer living the highly mobile, Army-brat life we shared in our childhood. She hasn’t moved in years. I sat down and tried to remember what the color of the walls used to be. No idea. But I do remember eating her mom’s amazing Filipino egg rolls during the last visit. They were the same recipe her mom made for me in her Army- issued kitchen two decades ago. At that time, her kitchen looked almost identical to my own family’s Army-issued kitchen. We lived just a block away from each other during the couple of high school years my friend and I shared in the 1990s at Fort Drum, New York.
It had been too many years since I’d eaten her mom’s cooking.
I was the one who left that shared neighborhood first—moving from New York to Colorado as a junior in high school. A couple of years later, Rosalynn graduated from that first high school of ours, then followed her family to Colorado, too. It’s pretty amazing both our families ended up in the same town. Most of my past childhood friends now live all over the place. And while we may have shared one of our childhood homes, it’s rare to share more than one, especially at the same time.
But then I kept moving—from Colorado to Pennsylvania for college, then to Washington, D.C. for a newspaper internship, then to Texas to get married and work as a reporter, then to a tiny bush village in interior Alaska, and then to Indonesia, where I lived on three different islands. “I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve visited,” I said to her.
Rebecca and her friend, Rosalynn Ioapo.
I was sorry for other things, too—sorry for leaving her halfway through a high school that often bullied the diverse bunch of kids from all over. And I was sorry for very rarely living in Colorado at the same time she did. And I wished I’d done better at keeping in touch. Friends mean the world to me, but when the world separates us, I often lose touch and then carry shame that I’ve somehow failed them.
But I didn’t feel too sorry for moving to other special places. It’s what I tend to do. I keep going and enjoy where I am and try not to look back for long at the loss.
But I was glad, in this case, that I had looked back. Significantly, I felt safe with her in her home with the garden out front.
I’d spent the last few years living on the other side of the world from Rosalynn (and ironically eating similar-to-Filipino foods in my Indonesian home). They’ve been rich years filled with new friends and new languages and new nighttime equatorial skies. I love the journey—the discovery, the mystery, the growth, the people I’ve met along the way. Also, I’ve become a mom—three times over—which has shown me new sides of myself. It has shown me new limitations, but also new capacities for strength.
I loved the adventure, purpose, and challenges of our cross-cultural, overseas life.
But the past year or so in my Indonesian home, though, had really hurt. Life had become filled with trauma, loss and confusion. Though I’d tried again and again to muster more resilience, I was nearly out of courage to live the latest set of circumstances. And on that day during a visit to Colorado I was feeling lost. In many ways, life—the world, God, me—had stopped making sense to me. And that’s a scary place to be.
Most of the time when I visited the States on these breaks, I hoped for some good food, some family time, some rest, a change of seasons, reconnecting with people. And then I’d go back to my life, food, friends, house, and stuff in Indonesia.
This visit, though, I needed more.
Missing my “places,” finding my tribe
I wonder what your memory of time looks like. Do you remember your childhood in years? Or grades? Events maybe? I remember mine as places. The time I lived in Kentucky on a road called Mississippi Avenue across the street from my Singaporean friend named Jocelyn. The time I lived in Kansas when I had an imaginary friend who was a dinosaur (who ate clouds on gloomy days). The time I lived in Virginia with the woods behind my house, when my baby brother was born.
On that day in Colorado, Rosalynn and I caught up on our missing years. We chatted about our families—how our siblings and parents were doing, what jobs had come and gone, sicknesses, surgeries, marriages, kids. And then we asked each other questions about all the places from our lives.
Where were all the places we had both lived growing up? She was born in Germany. I was born in Hawaii. We figured out we had both lived in Georgia at the same time—but on two different Army posts. She’d been to the pink Army hospital where I was born and could describe it to me (because she lived in Hawaii many years after I’d moved from there). But I’ve never been back to see the hospital myself. We both lived in many other places that we didn’t exactly share, but certainly shared cultural elements that we understood—military ID cards given at age ten, national anthems played before the movie starts at the base theater, new next-door neighbors who have just arrived from Korea or Germany or Singapore. We both know what it’s like to never be “from” somewhere, to instead always have just “moved from” somewhere.
How we met? That one’s easy. We met at the bus stop on the Army post where we lived a block apart, both on streets named after generals. We were waiting to be carried off to the off-post, rural, mostly culturally and racially homogenous school. Many at that school didn’t seem to understand these Army kids who looked different, had different stories, had just moved from different places all over the world. My friend and I sat next to each other on that bus on the most frigid of northern New York mornings and in PE class when the girl bully taunted us both and in our Army chapel pew when we were trying to figure out God with our teenage-sized questions.
“Weird” anomalies in our lives? I learned that Rosalynn’s dad isn’t from a Filipino background like I’d always thought (her mom is Filipino, dad Samoan—both are US citizens). Rosalynn, though, is technically a German citizen, because that’s where her parents were stationed, representing the US Army, when she was born. She’s been trying to become a US citizen for years, but it’s not been easy.
We laughed together at that one like it was an inside joke—at her American-cultured, Filipino/ Samoan-parented, German-born (but not German-speaking) identity. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, of course. And yet, to me, it makes perfect sense. It was then that I remembered how very much my friend is “my people.”
Rosalynn’s diversity creates such a unique story. I’m only touching the surface of who she is, how much richness she adds to this world. And she lives it with courage and grace.
I, like many other third culture kids around the world, look like I fit into the majority-white culture here in the States. And yet, with my highly mobile, diverse childhood, and after spending most of my adult years in Indonesia, I feel less “American” than ever. Identity has become a bit complicated for me.
I was already struggling with feeling like the world didn’t make sense anymore due to the recent trauma we’d experienced. That was added on top of what felt like a life-long wondering if I made sense anywhere. Ruth van Reken and Paulette Bethel call this a hidden diversity, defining it as “a diversity of experience that shapes a person’s life and worldview but is not readily apparent on the outside, unlike the usual diversity markers such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth” (Bethel, 2003).
It can be isolating, creating what Janet Bennett called “terminal uniqueness,” which, in simple terms, means being too different from those around us (Bennett, 1993). We humans are, in fact, all unique, and yet we are meant to be connected to others in a meaningful way. Those meaningful, lasting connections can be difficult to grasp for someone who has moved constantly as a child.
But being able to have this conversation with my friend on that Colorado visit—about identity confusion and mobility in childhood and how we coped using kind, accepting friendship as one of our healthiest tools—gave me a haven that day. It reminded me of the pieces—and the people—that did make sense to me: the pursuit of friendship, the power of empathy, and the grace of God for the brokenness around us.
And that’s when I realized that one way I find “home” is to find an old soul—a friend who shares her unique story with me and lets me share mine with her, with acceptance, empathy, and openness. And my memories aren’t just marked by a diversity of places. They’re about people I love, and who have graciously kept loving me no matter where I live for the moment.
Researcher and writer Brené Brown interviewed eighth graders to discuss true belonging for her book Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. This is what they came up with:
Rebecca Hopkins spent the first half of her life moving around as an Army kid and the past fourteen years trying to grow roots on three different Indonesian islands while her husband took to the skies as a pilot. She now works in Colorado for Paraclete Mission Group and writes about issues related to non-profit and crosscultural work.
Website: www.rebeccahopkins.org
References:
Bennett, J. (1993). “Cultural Marginality: Identity Issues in Global Leadership Training.” In R. M. Paige, Education for the Intercultural Experience. Yarmouth, Maine: Intercultural Press.
Bethel, R. E. (2003). “Third Culture Kids and Curriculum Issues in the International School System: Recognizing (and Dealing Effectively with) the Hidden Diversity of Third Culture Kids (TCKs).” Comparative and International Education Society. New Orleans, Louisiana.
