Soon after moving to Caracas, I learned about Third Culture Kids. I was excited to see that there was such an organized group dedicated to bi-cultural kids and it was also refreshing to learn that most of the issues my children would be confronting were already familiar to me. Even though there’s a plethora of information out there for them, there are a few points that I feel are crucial to them becoming happy people.

1) There is no right, wrong or best place to live. Live wherever you want. Wherever gives you warm and fuzzy feelings. Places that terrify you. Or those that make you feel protected.

2) You can have more than one home. While most people think of one place as home, it’s not a rule. It’s perfectly normal to feel attached to several places – even places that you’re visiting for the first time.

3) The quality of your life is strongly linked to your relationships. Living anywhere you want and/or having several homes will most likely mean that you’ll always be living far away from someone about whom you care. That means you’ll have to make an extra effort to maintain those relationships because otherwise you run the risk of turning the road less traveled into a lonely one. So, like plants, water them on a regular basis.

4) Your cultural identity is like your fingerprints. It’s unique to you. Although third-culture kids tend to have a lot in common, how you end up coalescing all the cultures you’ve been exposed to will be like no other. View this difference as you do your fingerprints, it just is. No need to measure it, qualify it or label it.

These four points are pretty broad-based, but I think they offer a good starting point to prevent common frustrations of bi-cultural kids. Can you think of any other advice?

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.  ~John Archibald Wheeler

You know we expats are always talking about how different our lives are from friends and family back home. We describe how our schedules have changed, how we manage our homes differently and of course how we eat differently. With the start of school (yippee!) and hearing about everyone else’s changes and transitions, I noticed that our lives are so much more alike than I had previously realized. It’s fragile. We have happy times, sad times and bored times. Also, everything can change in 24 hours.

From hearing about a Facebook friend who realized how much her life had changed since her last status update 18 hours before, to reading about people who are affected by another sudden tragedy; people’s lives are in constant flux. This is true whether you’re rich, poor, living abroad or living in the same place you grew up. Someone once made the analogy to me that life is like when you’re in the bathtub with a bunch of floating balls and you’re trying to keep all of them underwater. Right when you’ve got all of them under control, one pops up. Sometimes the ball that pops up can easily be handled with a slight maneuver. However, sometimes getting a handle of it means letting go of all the others. Regardless of a person’s exterior circumstances, which is basically what living abroad is, dealing with sudden changes can be very difficult. Traumatic even.

So, I’ve decided that next time someone is asking me about how different my life must be living abroad, I’m going to remind them that we go through the same emotions as everyone else. I’m living a life very similar to theirs; I’m simply doing it at a different geographic coordinate.