Manywheres

Monday morning, I took a quick scan of the sports section of the BBC on my phone while I made my coffee and fed the cat. After I woke up three sleepy girls, I gave them the highlights while they nursed their cereal bowls.

Eagles destroyed the Chiefs (yes, that’s the Taylor Swift one). Patrick Mahomes was sacked six times (yes, that’s the guy Babu likes). Someone named Jaylen Hurts won the MVP (it means “most valuable player”).

It’s not that I feel any particular need for my girls to be up on their Super Bowl stats, I assure you. But I looped them into the broad brushstrokes for the same reason that we loosely follow Taraji football here and sport the jerseys like diehard fans. It’s the same reason we watched every NBA playoff game while we were in Texas this summer and why we briefly got into women’s handball tournaments when we first moved here. It’s for the same reason that my dad and sister followed Champions League soccer growing up in East Africa and why I skipped class in high school to watch the national Bangladeshi cricket team play the Kenyan national team at a pitch not far from our school (well, I had other reasons that day too but that’s a story for another day.)

It’s because being able to follow along with the passions of the people and cultures around you, quite frankly, feels good. It feels like connection. And in general, sports is a stupid easy way to connect. Maybe it becomes your passion too (I mean, have you seen a handball match?). Or maybe you just move a smidge closer to seeing through someone else’s eyes. Either way, it’s a tried and true life hack for anyone navigating the world of cross-cultural living. And even though my girls go to a school in North Africa, there are enough Americans in their classes that the Super Bowl smack talking had been building for days.

They came home from school happy. Daughter Number 1: “By the way, thanks so much for giving a heads up about the how the Super Bowl went, Mama. It was so nice to be able to engage in the conversation today.”

Cue, the mom pride. That’s right, I’m a good mom for making sure my kids know stuff.

Daughter number 2 chimes in: “Yeah, it was so much fun to know what the Americans were talking about. Although, someone said something about kicking a field goal…I didn’t know you could kick the ball in baseball!”

Baseball.

You can’t win them all.

***

Honestly, the Super Bowl was a delightfully easy thing to loosely tie into their world this week. Most stuff is much harder. I often wrestle with how much to raise my daughters’ eyes to take in the heartbreak of the world as I flick through the news. Hostages, peace deals, refugees, migrants, elections, hate-speech, deportations, racism. These are not on the list of advisable things to chat with your kids about before breakfast.

But they have had classmates who have come to school weeping because of grandparents injured in missile strikes in nearby countries. They have had to miss school because of protests at embassies. They remember what it’s like to live in a warzone and love many people who live there still.  

I want them to know what is happening in their country too. I want them to feel connected enough to be troubled by what is worthy of shame and proud of what is worthy of recognition. I want them to have a firm grasp on their national heritage while also holding it with an open palm. I want them to always know where their true allegiance lies.

As if I could shield them from the world even if I wanted to. I check my 13-year old’s phone every once in a while, take a quick glance through her chat history and email. And buried between Taylor Swift lyrics and math homework is conversation about the world with her friends. It’s leaders. The multiple directions it’s struggling to lurch in. It turns out, along with sports, political dismay is a very bonding experience too. Everybody gets it. In fact, Americans are arguably just a bit late to the game. Much of the world is already very well acquainted with heads of state that create a vague sense of horror. We’ve just always assumed we were different. That we could do better.  

***

Last Friday was International Day at the girl’s school, one of the best days of the school year as far as they are concerned. Everyone’s is invited to come to school dressed up in the national dress of their passport country or a country that they have been deeply connected to. The kids move through various stations throughout the day, eating food, playing games, learning songs from all corners of the world. The Canadians usually have maple cookies and a competition to see who can hold their hands in a bucket of ice water the longest. The French station had crepes and Nutella. But the Korea station is always everyone’s favorite. Kimbap is like its own currency at this school. The number of times I open my kids’ lunchboxes to see the remnants of rice and seaweed and realize the cashed in their cookies or fruit or sandwich with willing classmates.   

Every year it gets a little harder for my girls to decide what to wear, though they have always landed on the same thing. Do they go with the East African countries they were born in? Or the one they spent most of their lives in? Or the one in which they spent a couple of golden years, post-evacuation? Or, the one they live in now? Or their passport country?

And every time they pull out my old tobes. We iron them, reminisce on where we bought them, where we remember wearing them. And they traipse to school in their flowing fabric from another life, wrestling to keep them put on their heads, tennis shoes peeking out from ankle length folds. At the end of the say, they always choose to carry the Sudanese flag in the parade of nations.

The beautiful thing is they are one of many kids that hold various parts of themselves and their family’s stories in tension on International day. The Peruvian kid worn an Algerian dress. An American came wearing her clothes from Morocco and carried its flag. Tanzania, France, Ethiopia and Jordan have all been represented by kids with deep connections to those places but whose grandparents may have never imagined they would step outside the boundaries of their home countries.

And every international day, I slip my sunglasses on when those kids come out in a riot of color and noise, proudly carrying a patchwork ribbon of flags across the schoolyard, hoping my ugly crying is just a little less obvious. Because, while it’s simplistic and sentimental, in a world that sometimes feels like it is burning to the ground even faster than normal, it’s so deeply refreshing. Sometimes you need to see a bunch of school kids screaming their heads off cheering for each other’s countries. Syria and Tunisia. The United States and Ukraine. You need to see them celebrating multiple pieces of their identity as they claim multiple stations as “theirs”, cultivating a generation who can see from manywheres.