MK forum

What was life like for after high school?

On another thread it was suggested that parents move back to the US with their children when they send the students to the US for college. What was your post-high school experience? What would you change if you had the power to have things different?

My parents were scheduled for a furlough directly following my graduation. I lived at home and commuted to a community college, got a drivers license, got my first car and my first real job. It was beneficial to have my parents help me with those things. It took the pressure off of having to do all that in just a month or two (which many of my friends did). I felt like I eased into independence that way. Then, I lived with my grandparents, whom I barely knew, and that was a major adjustment for me. Thankfully, I made some really great Christian friends right off the bat through a club at the school, and they were very helpful as well.

However, saying goodbye to my parents after a year of having them all to myself was hard. My faith was tested many times in the next two years...and I struggled big time with abandonment issues. It took about 5 years for the U.S. to begin feeling like "home."

Since no one has posted, does this mean that Allbetter is the only MK who still posts on this site?

I am a spouse of an MK. I know there are several parents on here. I know there are some currently serving missionaries on this forum. I know there is at least one boyfriend of an MK on here.

But are the vast majority of posters not truly MKs?

Shadowspring, I am an MK who had a very positive experience, being homeschooled in a remote location with no occurrences of abuse in my childhood.

I became a parent of MKs, two of whom we abused by a missionary co-worker/trusted friend.

It is heartbreaking for me that my own children had such a different MK experience than I myself did.

So I post here with a double identity: third-culture MK and penitent parent.

I was sent to the dorm at age ten. Back to America to finish high school with the family, but had no relationship with any of them by then. So in essence, the emptiness of abandonment continued well past what people would assume. Like many MKs, I ran to NTM Bible school to reconnect, having just turned 17. Didn't cut it there though, and dropped out. Marrried young. Still have trouble relating to my mom.

I married young too, age 20. Crazy, that!

So, highlander, as best as I can tell, you are the only MK still posting here.

Everyone else who has contacted me as an MK is a second-generation missionary, MKs who are also parents of MKs.

In other words, the only people still posting here are supporters of the missionary lifestyle. They may think it needs tweaked a bit here or there, but overall they are supporters of the doctrines that created the lifestyle and think it is a great way to live and serve Jesus.

So people who were crushed, rejected, destroyed by the doctrine of eternal damnation and all the guilt that loaded upon their young heads, won't find healing here. MKs who grew up hearing the call to moral perfection over and over, forcing them to hide their anger and pain from others, inwardly conscious that they never measured up to the standard of perfection won't find healing here. People who post here more or less like the system, but would change a bit of how it is administered.

It makes sense now, why ornerythorney and sherpadude are gone; why posts are few and far between and always sound so supportive of the missionary lifestyle.

I can't learn anything useful here. Parents ran off the kids again!

If anyone wants to keep up with our experience trying to heal as a family from fundamentalism/the curse of the MK:

http://shadowspring-lovelearningliberty.blogspot.com/