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.

The little guy doesn’t realize it, but…

I used to sit by this very window with him when he was only a few weeks old because he was jaundiced and it was the best window in the house to get direct sunlight…

He could care less about that – especially with the evil pink machine in hand, but we made memories in that house. Maybe that’s why this place feels like home.

After living in Caracas for a year and a half, I guess there are things that I’ve become so accustomed to that I no longer take notice. As I’m sure as every expat experiences, there were things about the US – or South Florida, that I did notice during this short trip that I probably would’ve seemed the norm once upon a time.

Where are the lines: I’ve told you how Venezuelans have turned standing in line into an art. The first time I took notice was while at Super Target (my other home) and every line, including the one I was in had 4 to 5 people. All of a sudden, a manager looking guy comes to the front and starts calling for back up cashiers. What?! You mean I don’t have to spend more time in line than I did shopping? Awesome!

Which brings me to my next observation…

Quick errands: In Caracas I always expect errands to take long (I spent four hours in line registering the kids for school last month). So, when I managed to go to pick up groceries at Publix, buy lotions at Bath & Body Works and make a quick run through Marshalls in 1 hour and a half, I was convinced that I forgot to do something. Now, one of the reasons that this is so much quicker is because they were all located in the same strip mall – an architecture that I have yet to see here in Venezuela.

Google is useful: One day for lunch we felt like having Chinese. I’m not very particular about where I get my low mein and fried wontons and I wanted to place my order so it would be ready when I got there to pick it up. What do I do? I Google Chinese food and my zip code. And guess what? 18 places came up. I chose one that was pretty close and had a website where I could review the menu. I placed my order – which they said would be ready in 15 minutes and when I arrived 25 minutes later, it was waiting for me on the counter. By this time, my head was about to explode with the excitement of convenience.

We live in the car: Now, this one was not a happy change. Everything, and I mean everything we did required the car. I know this may not be the case for all expats living in Caracas, but we live in an area that’s central to all the basics. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have lasted a year and a half without a car (felt so weird saying that to Floridians). In any case, I put on a few pounds in two weeks due to this inconvenience and I literally felt myself getting lazier.

After all these observations, I don’t know whether I’m now more of Caraqueña or still a South Floridian at heart

So, as we were making our final descent in Miami, I started to get as excited as my little guy who spent the entire 2.5 hours saying “Mommy, we’re flying!” What I initially thought was a feeling of new adventure, was really a comfort in going back to the familiar. Anyone who’s been to Miami International Airport knows that it’s in perpetual construction and there’s always something new – even that felt familiar.

When we were driving on I-95 to go home, which has also had some work done to it in the past 18 months, it all felt the same. I knew the exit signs, I knew how much farther we had to go, I knew the crazy drivers who were going to speed past to get in front of you only to slam on their brakes. Before we even made it home, I finally accepted that the word I’d been avoiding is that this felt like home.

I used to think of myself as a nomad. I had no trouble packing up and moving to a new place when I felt the time was right. I never really felt like I was leaving a home behind, I was simply going to create a new one wherever I went. Well, I don’t know if it’s age or the fact that Venezuelan society is a bit more difficult to infiltrate , but I now know that for the time being, South Florida is where I consider to be my home.

My first few days there were blissful. The humidity was at about 70% and the temperature was over 100F. It was normal…expected. I didn’t want to anything and I wanted to do everything. The latter is what got me into trouble the remainder of my trip. This picture is the view from my bedroom window. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s home (wow, that’s 4 times in one post ).