surprisedbyjoy -- your post was well thought out and honest. We are who we are today because of the adversity we faced. A father who stood behind me and taught me to stand up for what is right is one of the blessings of my life. He also encouraged me to believe I could be anything I chose and succeed in life. There was no pressure to be the perfect NTM child and follow the New Tribes path of Bible Institute and back to the field as a missionary clone. It is strange, my dad was a man in every sense of the word, yet he was the sensitive nurturing one of my parents. My mom came from a dysfunctional family, the only believer in her family, and she never seemed to connect emotionally with us kids. Her work was always more important. I don't remember ever sitting in her lap or reading a book when I was little or doing the special things that mothers do with children. In my all my years at Tambo and into my adult life until my parents retired, I never received a letter from my mother yet I received regular letters from my dad while I was at Tambo, in college, and married. I struggle to this day with my relationship with my mother, it seems so disconnected, and yet she is my mother, and now we are moving into a stage where I will have to at some point look out for her and take care of her. It feels awkward and strange. My father passed away many years ago.
But to change the subject -- MK's have a wonderful connection no matter where in the world they grew up. When I went to college all the MK's at the Christian liberal arts college I went to found each other and were friends before the first week was finished. We had a common heritage and so many similarities in the way we looked at things and interpretted them. I walked in not knowing a soul there, and immediately had friends who understood and were doing the same thing, all of us far from "home" without the normal support structure that the other kids had, but we all did well.
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