MK & TCK Book Club discussion

FACILITATOR: KATARINA HOLM-DIDIO

Katarina, President of KHD Consulting International LLC has extensive experience in global HR, cross-cultural training, expatriate spouse support and career consulting and advising. Kat launched her career in the USA at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs before she joined the United Nations in NYC. She collaborates closely with the UN Local Expatriate Spouse Association and has lead repatriation training for the US Dept. of State / Tibet Fund Scholars Program. Kat regularly works with major relocation service providers. She currently serves as the Vice President of Families in Global Transition and is on the Board of the Finnish American Chamber of Commerce in NYC where she is the Chair of the Entrepreneurs Group. Kat grew up in Finland and is fluent in Swedish and Finnish in addition to English and some French & German. She enjoys travel, exploring the diversity of her adopted home country and is an avid reader and film enthusiast.

I am writing this post as I sit at the tiny kitchen table in our small summer cottage in Finland located on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia that separates Finland from Sweden.

For the past 10 days the children and I have been enjoying our annual visitation to my roots in northwestern Finland, five hours south of the Arctic Circle. A trip we have taken since they were infants. Each year they look forward to meeting family and friends and just enjoying the freedom of unstructured days and living by the sea. I enjoy reconnecting with my closest friends and family.

Each year we have to leave our loved ones behind as our 3 weeks are over to transition back to life in the US, until we meet again in 12 months.

There's a song I recall from my childhood summer camps in Finland. The lyrics went something like this:

"Meetings and separations are the rhythm of life, separations and reunions are the song of hope. Our paths are now separating, we are saying goodby, but we hope we will meet again".

This simple song manages to capture the "rhythm of life" of us living a global life. Those farewells and reunions. The sadness of separation and the hope of meeting again.

The topic of chapter 14 is Transitions.

An aspect of being in transition that I found fascinating is rites of passage. Those rituals we develop to help us move from one place to another, from one phase of life to another.

About a year ago, I wrote a blogpost about it here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/201410...

So my first two questions are:

1. What kind of rites and rituals have you used in the past or are you using currently to help yourself and your family process the transition a relocation (or other life change)entails?

2. In the book we read about how to build a RAFT (Reconciliation, Affirmation, Farewells and Think Destination) to help us move forward.

Q: What does your raft look like? What building materials have you used and how well does your raft stay afloat and move you forward?

So sorry I didn't comment earlier. I'm sad no one else has had a chance to either. :( Thank you for facilitating!

I moved way too many times, but I never had any rites or rituals. There was no structure to the move...not even a rhythm. It was usually when a church became toxic that we had to move. (Thankfully there were neutral reasons, but they were the minority.)

Again, we never really went through a RAFT-type process. I still remember my mother selling things I would have liked to have kept. (But don't tell her that. She'll take it pretty hard.) :) Sometimes I was able to say good-bye. I had an autograph book my friends signed. But after so many moves and no 'significant' friendships, I stopped asking people to sign it before we left. 2-3 years doesn't give much time to create things to miss. Years later, my family travelled across Canada and visited several of the places we used to stay. It was surreal and I got to see some of the people I knew. I found it more awkward than pleasant. Too much time had past and I was too insecure.

I think the sense of lack of control overall with these transitions led to my iron grip on my schedule. What I could control, I would. I could always take my schedule and personal routine with me wherever I went.

Brilliant Jared... I too did not have any rites or rituals moving around. We - as a family - had a "moving check off list" and this was probably the closest item to a ritual we had. As the RAFT item... that is completely surreal and poppycock. You controlled your life to some extent but if changes were to be made you sucked it up and moved on. That was the life of the expat. What is very interesting in all of these postings is the following fact --> my parents were both teachers and administrators in diplomatic [overseas] schools. Nearly 90% of the group of expats that they began with back in the early 50's... continued on to different overseas postings until they retired. They loved it - knowing that there would always be twists and turns - but the adventure drew them to the next assignment. When my parents finally retired [in the USA interestingly enough] that final group of new expats [that joined them in their last assignment] - 90% of them are still overseas in new assignments today... and that is an additional 20 years hence gone. So the TCK thingy is as much a mindset as an economic reality and social navigation issue. And all of the discussions here about "lost friends and reconciliation, etc." are really academic discussion points... and they really do not mean much of anything to TCKs. We have dealt with these items... and we take full ownership of these issues and situations. If I had to do it all over again... I would do it twice!

oh wow what a brilliant and painful chapter this one is for me. i have a few things to say. firstly ... i was five when we left malaysia and i recall that my parents did do some of these things, the telling us we were going bit, the sayting goodbyes etc. and actually i dont have too much of a memory of the bits before the last days which is when REALITY hit.

one thing that i would say was that as a small child with only that experience of living there i really had no concept (despite furloughs) of what moving to the uk meant. in fact one thing i do recall is the argument after as i argued i hadnt "known" what my parents meant, that i didnt "know" we would never go back. they argued i had known. we were both right. i was a child and i didnt know, not really know, any of it. and it was awful. the other realities and absesnces of RAFT were that my parents decided to have some last hurrahs. this meant our very last night in kl my sister and i were left alone in our hotel room whilst my parents went for a dinner and a last night. we were absolutely terrified. there were monkeys on the window sill and the call for prayer was feet from the hotel.

we went back by boat and this was supposed to be gradual but again the last hurrah was in force so we were in the nursery. again it was totally scary i can remember it all still vividly. including finally the arrival and dawning of reality that we were stuck there. i felt tricked and cheated, and devastated.

i love the bit in this book about mourning loss too. as this is something that got missed and is probably the cause of the fact that 47 years later im still dealing with this stuff.

suffice to say i think all the things in this chapter and in others blogs about managing transitions are all fantastic. recently in the uk i was talking to a friend who was moving from central london to hertfordshire (not far) with a small daughter with autism. the work she had put in was fantastic. trips back and forth, meet the school, the sacred objects and the clarity of the moving, designing her new bedroom etc etc .. all of it lovely.

my feeling is this .. the more imaginative the more creative the better, there can never be enough attention paid to the transition for both children and adults.

my challenge now in my 53rd year is going back and forth, mourning and trying to settle things. i love the suggestions in this chapter. and it isnt all abaout now i can use visualisation to create different endings, and to bring people from the past - my amah and the kids from kl school - into my now and say goodbye as i would like to. gill

This comes quite late, and for that I apologize. But I want to thank you, Katarina, for leading our discussion on dealing with transition. Thank you for making yourself available to us in the midst of your busy schedule to encourage us to think about this important topic.

A quick note to book club members: As always, please feel free to keep the conversation going in this thread. Please note that while the facilitators have committed to participate during the week of their chapter, they may not be able to continue in our discussions as we move on. Thanks for all your fantastic stories and insights so far, Everyone!

My transitions in the past 10 years have often been unplanned, so I have not been able to do the RAFT process or develop rituals.

The last move that I made was planned a few months out, and I definitely tried to prepare for it. I think that I went overboard, though, because several people said to me as I was setting up goodbye-lunches and get togethers, "You act like you're dying: you can always come back you know". I realized then that this was the first time for me, the first time to move that I could come back and visit, I could keep in touch with people in various ways. This wasn't an end to all of these relationships and people.