All throughout college, I was the sort of student laser-focused on where my training would take me in the future. I never changed majors. I never wavered in my determination. Ask me what I wanted to do after graduation and I would tell you without hesitation: "I want to teach overseas."
The elementary education degree program at my school was already a very full schedule, but where I could squeeze in electives from the intercultural communications department, I did. All four years of college I also worked at a school in the afterschool care program. When the time came to for student teaching I did everything I could to get international placements for both my shorter and longer internships (even though my school didn't usually allow students to go overseas for the short one). Spring of my senior year I wrapped up my student teaching at an international school in Bangladesh, came back to the United States for graduation, and then started packing almost immediately to move to Kenya and start my first teaching job.
I do not necessarily extol this sort of single-minded ambition. Certainly, I do not expect it of all young people. Some need time for exploration and experimentation. Some simply never feel such a strong pull in any particular direction (and yet these may well find more contentment and satisfaction on their meandering way). Mostly I chalk it up to personality.
However, for those who may relate to this aspect of my personality, I do have a warning. Don't expect this single-mindedness to last your whole lifetime.
Even if the passion that drives you never falters, life may present you with situations in which you must choose to pause or redirect. If all your purpose is tied up in a single ambition, what will you be left with when you find yourself unable to pursue that anymore?
I have found myself in this position twice now.
First, I nearly burned out in my second year of teaching. Then, I had a baby.
After my near burnout, I wondered whether I would return to teaching at all, but after some recuperation and a change of schools, I was right back in the classroom (with a little more humility and some new boundaries now that I had faced my limits).
The new position put me right where I wanted to be--it was a smaller school with administrators I got along with much better, I was teaching a different grade level I felt better suited to, and several years in the same place helped me find my stride--and then I found out I was pregnant.
I had always planned on leaving the classroom while my kids were small, so that's what I did without really giving the decision much thought. My mom had stayed home with us when my sisters and I were young (and she was an awesome mom), so I think I just assumed I would follow her example (spoiler: I don't think I can live up to her awesomeness).
My husband works remotely, so we were able to continue our global nomad lifestyle even if I wasn't teaching in international schools anymore, but since where we have ended up living for my daughter's early years doesn't offer many daycare or preschool options we feel comfortable with, so far there really hasn't even been the option of me returning to full-time work unless we move again.
I stand by my decision to stop working to spend these years with my kids. It was what I needed to do for my family during this season of our lives, but it has been harder than I expected to give up my classroom to focus on my home.
The struggle has only been exacerbated when I feel like I am on my own as an expat mom, because then I am reminded of why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place.
If you asked me during college or in my years as a teacher why I was so driven toward international schools, my answer was always the same: expat families need support and one good place where they can find that is in international schools. However, for all those years I was only seeing the need for support through the eyes of a TCK because that had been my experience growing up.
I loved the international schools I attended in Japan. Some of my best school memories come from those years and my favorite teacher of all time was my seventh and eighth grade teacher in Nagoya. More than anything else, it was how she supported me (simply by being a great teacher and a steady presence) when my family was really struggling, that made me want to be an international school teacher myself. If I could help kids navigating cross-cultural living and all the unique stresses inherent to the TCK experience the way she helped me, that would be something worth doing.
I was blind to the help that international schools provide parents, but now motherhood has opened my eyes.
Expat families need support, not just for the kids but also for the parents.
In the end, my family ended up leaving Japan because we couldn't find enough support to see us through our struggles as a family. We were already under stress and my parent's work was about to send them to yet another city in Japan where there wasn't an international school, so my mom would have needed to homeschool us or possibly send us to a boarding school. Instead, we went "home" to the US where there would be less stressful jobs for my parents and public schools for my sisters and me.
Now that we are parents, my husband and I face a very similar decision. When our kids are school age, what do we do? There are very few options for English-education in our city and we don't really want to homeschool. What about when our oldest is ready to go to school but the baby is still at home? Can we afford private international school if I am not able to go back to working yet? When there aren't support systems in place, parents have to decide what they can make work and for how long. If they burn out in the effort of trying to do it all on their own, they leave the place they have come to love sooner than intended.
It's the same story from all our fellow expat parent friends and it is the tragedy I set out to help families avoid when I became an international school teacher.
Would an international school fix it for every family struggling overseas? Of course not. Education is far from the only stressor for families living cross-culturally.
But do teachers in those schools make a difference to the families they serve? Absolutely.
When I find myself in conversations with other expat parents facing this particular question of whether their children's education is better served by continuing to live internationally or returning to their passport countries, the teacher in me wants so badly to be able to help, but right now...how can I? I am in the same situation as them - trying to figure out how to teach my toddler English when she won't be immersed in it anywhere but at home, feeling like it all depends on me, and wondering how long before I burn out again...
I can't go back to teaching yet, but taking a break from the classroom and learning to see the world through the lens of a parent has only reinforced my calling as an educator and a support to expat families. When the time is right, I want to work in international schools again. I want to offer whatever I can to families like mine, because now I see even more clearly the help teachers and schools can be to parents as well as their TCKs.
I still want to teach overseas.
God-willing, I haven't had to set aside this calling forever and I can come back around to pursuing it a better teacher for the time I spent wishing I had an international school with dedicated teachers supporting me and my kids.
