July 2014 - Gina Brenna Butz

Parenting Is Worth It

Post author:Gina B
Post published:July 9, 2014
Post category:parenting

It’s all worth it.

That’s the feeling I have while closing down this day. I spent the evening with a group of wives and moms who are about to go overseas to work. We talked about what it’s like to be moms in another culture, the ups and downs, the challenges, the joys.

I walked in the house after the kids should have been asleep (no fault of my husband’s – they’re getting older and summer hours are different). I found one waiting just to lay some of his emotions at my feet, needing to hear a good word to calm his anxious heart. I found the other so excited I thought something spectacular must have happened in my absence. Turns out she just thinks my return is worth that kind of reaction.

What a gift.

Those are the kind of moments that make it all worth it, no matter where you raise your kids. We talked a lot tonight about how hard being a mom can be, and that is so true. But to get to be that person for your kids – the one who calms fears and brings joy and makes the world right enough to sleep . . .

It’s all worth it.

Back to Normal, for Now

Post author:Gina B
Post published:July 7, 2014
Post category:third culture kids transition

The other day, our daughter said, “If we could bring Scout out here, I would want to stay here forever.”

So it seems she is enjoying the summer. And why wouldn’t she be? Two of her oldest and dearest friends are here with her, along with a couple dozen other TCKs (Third Culture Kids), for six weeks. Weekday mornings we have meetings, during which the kids are together doing fun activities. The rest of the time we all live together in college student housing all centered around a common courtyard. We’re back to the days of, “I don’t know where the kids are, but I know they’re having fun. They’ll probably come home when they’re hungry.” In other words, it’s their paradise.

It’s also their normal. Our kids came into the world when we lived in a building with 29 other people we worked with, as well as nine kids under the age of 5, most of us within 5 stories of one another. We bought a security door with our American neighbors and placed it 10 feet down the hallway (instead of each of us having our own outside our doors) so that we could leave our own doors open for the families to go back and forth at any time.

When we moved to Singapore, we again had numerous families we knew all centered around a common courtyard, this time with a pool. Every day at 2 pm, that’s where we were. Our last two years in Asia, most of the people from our office lived within a 2 mile radius of one another. Between us there were 60 school age kids, and most of them were homeschooled. There wasn’t a day that went by without friends.

Then we came to the States, and our kids didn’t know what to make of it. Ethan’s managed to find some friends a couple blocks away, and they are over as much as possible, but we’re still praying for Megan to have at least one good friend in the neighborhood. They are realizing that what they grew up with just wasn’t the norm.

Throughout our transition, this has been one of the places of deepest grief for our kids. As much as they want life to be the way they knew growing up, they simply cannot make it that way. They are still trying to figure out how to do without.

And then we come here, and life IS that way, and we’re all kinds of happy and thankful and relieved (it’s hard to think of things to do without friends!).

So what is my conclusion? I confess I’m tempted to look ahead and gather my emotional energy for the fallout of losing this environment once again. I’m trying instead to simply be grateful for the gift of having this amazing community.

After the Storm of Transition

Post author:Gina B
Post published:July 2, 2014
Post category:transition

Have you ever walked through the woods after a big storm? You can hear the water still dripping from the trees, the animals venturing out again. The ground is soft, you find new puddles, maybe some downed branches. There’s a quietness in comparison to the fury of the storm. It’s back to normal, it seems, but great storms rarely leave things unchanged.

My last post was over a month ago. I could blame the end of the school year, or travel (we’ve been up to Minnesota and are currently in Colorado helping with a training). I’ll admit that the frequency of my posting is often directly proportional to the amount of time I spend with God. That might be part of it.

But mostly, I don’t have much to say. I feel like I am wandering through the woods of our lives after a great storm, surveying the land, wondering, “What next?” I am so accustomed to life being turbulent, I don’t quite know what to make of the relative calm.

That’s not to say we’re done transitioning back to the U.S. A friend out here said the other day that she’d heard it takes one year for every four overseas. That leaves us with about 2-2 1/2 more years to go. That’s both overwhelming and comforting, strangely.

Our time out here involves training people who are about to move overseas and go through their own storms of transition, so I just might have more to say about it. At the least, I think it will help me make some sense of this new view after the worst of the storm.