Summer Reading 4July 11, 2018
We are blessed to spend Sundays with Baba, at her house on the outskirts of the city. This year, as I’ve nurtured my love of reading I’ve taken to packing a tablet in the bag and this weekend as the electricity failed and the kids played I found myself swiftly ticking off another book for the summer reading challenge. In some ways this book was kind of a cheat addition to the challenge. I’d started the year delving into books about mission and motherhood, third culture kids and bilingual families. Amongst the books I’d read was “A-41: Essays on life and ministry abroad” by the Trotter duo. In there was the blog series that lead me to Timothy Sanford’s “I Have To Be Perfect”: (And Other Parsonage Heresies). I devoured them both and when this April I saw another book by Elizabeth trotter had been released I knew it must go into my reading list somehow.
(more…)
Summer Reading 2+3July 3, 2018
I was scrolling through the reading challenge list and it inspired me to look a bit wider and perhaps read things I’d not have looked at before. As my budget is only £10 I decided that this was a perfect time to go scrolling on the kindle unlimited list and hope something catches my eye. It also inspired me to go down my very long wish-list and see if there were books on it that I could bag. Category 6 is graphic novel and I’ll admit I’ve never read one, plus the challenge of finding something over 100 years old for Category 8 called me.
(more…)
Raising a ForeignerJune 30, 2018
I sat in the maternity ward watching the other mothers fuss over their new charges. Some were questioning everything, so unsure of themselves. They fretted, all of them. Fretted about feeding, burping, the rest of the family, the visits, the suddenly unfamiliar body shells, mostly the new life they had produced. I fretted too, I fretted about the delay this late delivery and yet another day in the hospital would cost, about losing a visa and having my beautiful boy being separated from one of his parents.
Every stage of parenthood has fears attached but there are some extra special ones for those of us who combine cultures. We fear that the language our child speaks will be a barrier to their relatives, that our parenting choices will be batted between conflicting medical experts and cultural expectation, that our child will not have a change to embrace our culture, that they will grow up feeling torn between worlds that could have been theirs.
(more…)