I grew up in a neither/nor world that cannot be stereotyped as a typically “white American childhood.” I was born in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and when I turned three, we moved back to Mahomet, Illinois in the American Midwest. After three years, we moved to Santiago, the capital city of Chile. Then, when I was eight, we moved to Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates. When I was nine, my parents decided that they would homeschool my sister and me for a year while our family backpacked around Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. During that year, my parents learned that they both had gotten jobs in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where we spent the next six years. Then, when I turned seventeen, during my last two years of high school, we relocated to Amman, Jordan.
So, when I share this long answer to “where are you from?” I always feel like I disrupt other people’s ‘norm’ of what they expect me to be because it no longer fits within the usual frame of the American kid who looks like me. Some have tried to describe those of us who spent our childhoods everywhere with “Cross-Cultural Kid” or “Third Culture Kid”, but these phrases never seem to fully describe who I am or the experiences that I have had.
For five years I lived Boston, Massachusetts. For a year now I have lived in Boulder,Colorado