Relocation Equation

This is it. The year of planning and applying and fretting and wondering about where we would go next has fully crystallized in today, my first working day at my new posting in Tanzania. I am oddly comfortable with this – with the country that I have never visited, and the colleagues I have never before met. With the language that is neither familiar nor strange, and the little roads flanked by tall, slender coconut trees in lieu of sidewalks. This is a good sign.

I am so happy to be here. It’s an emotion I can’t fully comprehend, so devoid of the trepidation that lingered on every other time I’ve moved countries. I wonder where this comes from – have I become an old hand at this relocation equation? Not sure, but it does bring back to mind a question I was asked a few weeks ago in the lead up to my final departure. A friend asked me how I was feeling about the move, about leaving Oman even if we had only been there for a short three years? If I was anxious about what was to come or just in general. This is the response that I never sent to her.

I would only be fooling myself if I didn’t admit that I was, of course, quite anxious about the move, for two specific reasons. The first was all about the logistics of moving and making sure that everything that needed to get done was getting done, properly, and on time. We had never shipped our home with us when we moved, so that part was wholly new to us, and I didn’t know what we would or wouldn’t find in Zanzibar, so I was trying to be smart about our additional purchases. That is a process that always makes me anxious because how can I actually be smart about something I don’t know – your odds of making a good decision are always fifty-fifty and that is so frustrating. The second was my anxiety about moving my sweet pre-schooler away from the first home she’d ever known, from a nursery that she liked so much, where she was popular, and from the first friends she’s made. The mix of emotions is so chaotic as I tried to balance between how special her childhood will be with all these travel experiences, and my sadness that she will be too young to remember this wonderful place that was the site of so many of our happy routines and moments with her. I would struggle with this every day before reminding myself how fabulous it will be for her to have seen so many countries and cultures before she has gone off to college.

As one can imagine, the anxiety is mostly in the waiting. The truth is, I just wanted the day to come, I wanted to move because I knew that it is in our nature to then make the most of the situation, find the solutions, find our bliss in the smallest familiar things and the glorious new finds. The “waiting place”* was making me anxious, not the rest of it.

As I pondered this I also realized that my concern about my daughter’s connection to Oman was quite exaggerated. My family left Kuwait when I was less than 2, I have no recollection of it whatsoever, but feel I have a connection to it because that’s where my journey started. I grew up in the UAE, and that marked me in many wonderful ways. We were the first generation of Third Culture Kids, and though the struggle of fitting in everywhere and nowhere is real, it is also slightly exaggerated. I say that now because I did eventually move to Lebanon and lived there longer than I had lived anywhere else, and as patriotic as I am, and as much as I lapped up every moment of being in my homeland, that was truly, grossly overrated. Before you judge me, let me explain myself. I found my voice in Lebanon in a way I could not have done if I were anywhere else in the world, and I would like to think that I was able to use it to contribute to my country as a good citizen. However, and without going into a socio-economic-political analysis that we all know, there is a point where our valuable country starts to feel like the heaviest anchor pulling you underwater. There is no virtue in drowning, so I cut the rope and swim for air. The irony of ironies is that every time I have done that, it leads me to my happy Lebanese identity again. Like I said, I come for the first generation of Third Culture Kids, but I have never not been Lebanese wherever I went. And though I am revived by moving around the globe with my Lebanese-ness, I also know that when the travels end, the only home I will want, the only place that is home to us, is Lebanon. And that sets my mind at ease when I think of the Third Culture Childhood I am inflicting on my daughter – I hope she enjoys and relishes every part of it, I hope she immerses herself in all the cultures and people we will meet, knowing full well that though we might be swapping houses every four years or so, and though she may want to continue to travel and move long after she’s left our nest, there is always a rooted home for her in Lebanon.

That thought banishes any lingering anxiety, and revives my excitement about moving. As an eloquent friend of few words once told me “if God had wanted me to stay in one place, he would have made me a tree”. I hope we learn to plant trees wherever we are, and move on to plant others.

*Homage to Dr. Seuss.