One Home or Many?

The word “home” word evokes feelings of comfort, familiarity, safety, connections and belonging. For TCKs who have lived in several countries, choosing just one place to call “home” can seem impossible. When every place you have lived feels like home for that season, do you really need to choose just one place to call “home”? 

I lived in overseas for just 2 years from the age of 5 to 7 years old, then spent the rest of my growing up years in Singapore, my passport country. Even that short period overseas at a young age left me with a sense of belonging to that distant place, even while I was growing much deeper roots in Singapore. After living in other cities in young adulthood and growing roots to a greater or lesser extent in each one, I finally realised that it wasn’t necessary to choose just one place to call “home” – my life was a unique patchwork of multiple homes.

Of course, the degree of belonging is not equal across all these places – at any point in time, the depth of feeling varies depending on how long I had lived there, how long since I left, my age at the time, my involvement in the local community, how frequently (or not) I had revisited the place, and whether I still had friends there.

When TCKs move, it is important to help them understand that they are not abandoning or rejecting a much-loved home for a new one; they can always carry that connectedness with them, even as they settle into a new “home” somewhere else. They need to be helped to feel settled in that new place, and learn to appreciate how all these “homes” contribute to their unique identity. At the same time, one of these homes should be their passport country – where else can they retreat to if other countries decide to close their doors to foreigners?

* A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is someone who has spent a significant part of their childhood living outside their passport country.