What it feels like to be a TCK

This poem was written by an American girl in India. She describes how we all feel so well. So if you are a TCK, enjoy the recognition. If you are not, please treasure the glimpse you are given of what life is like as a TCK.

America; Foreign Home
How could I tell them?
They would never understand...
That my heart and life are split in half,
Yet each bleeds into the other side, undefined.

They know not the side of me
that belongs across the sea.
They only know what the eye can see;
the American inside of me.

And yet this American is tainted,
stained, infused
With the chaos, the wonders,
the essence of her other home.

My people have not known
what it is like to save a child from the streets.
My people have not known the abject poverty,
the smell of disease.
They have not heard nor seen the vain,
desperate cries to empty, ugly gods.

It is not enough to show them our pictures or see a video.
It is not enough.
They simply don't get it...
Until that same voice pricks their hearts.

All the dinners, all the fellowships, all the talks
With all the average people in all the average churches
It wears one down to explain over and again that
America has now become the foreign land.

The awkward silence ensues, and they serve more food.
Because they don't understand this foreign land,
they don't understand the foreign me.
I'm too foreign to be American,
too American to be foreign.

I have become a puzzle-piece,
with ever-changing, ever-morphing sides.
With some I do not fit;
the kids in the States would never match my sides.
That is sometimes unbearable; sometimes freeing.
Sometimes both at once.

Maybe I have the worst and best of both worlds.
I will keep searching for my niche;
for I know that my misshapen heart
Will always have a home no matter where I go...
Home is in following Him.

AlexandraBangalore,
India Sept. 2008