Flags, lawn chairs, and people lined the streets. We heard the drums in the distance, signaling the start of the parade.

"Is the king about to come?" my 8-year-old son asked.

I giggled inwardly, but looked at him with adoring eyes.

"In Morocco, yes. But this is different. We're in America getting ready to celebrate their Independence Day. America has a president, and he won't come to this parade."

Ah, the life of a child growing up in more than one culture!

It’s like a switch deep inside me. I can turn it on, but it’s more common for me to turn it off.  

Two whole years had passed by since we had last seen my dad. I had just arrived in Florida, along with my two young children, when my dad called to say that he was driving through the area. I was thrilled. He then went on to mention that he could only stop by long enough to have lunch. Only lunch? Only an hour or two of the day? I felt the loss and sadness begin to well up, so I threw my switch to the “off” position.

A new family invited us to have dinner at their home recently. Because we didn’t know each other well, they asked us questions about our life in North Africa.

Their genuine questions invited us to share our story.

Afterwards, we mentioned to them that it had been a long time since we had told our story to someone. It felt good!

We all have stories to tell—fun and not-so-fun stories from our daily lives, encouraging testimonies of changed lives, tough stories of loss and grief that have built up over the course of years, and sometimes, traumatic stories and crisis experiences that we have been forced to walk through.

Whatever story we carry, there are multiple benefits of telling it to others.

Making a mountain out of a mole hill!  

This is an English idiom used when someone appears to be exaggerating a situation.  It can happen externally where others see it, or it can happen internally where only I notice the mountain growing inside of me. 

I stepped off a plane into the summer heat of Casablanca, Morocco with my two boys (3 and 5 years old). It was August of 1997. My boss and his welcome committee all ended up on vacation the week we arrived. 

“That’s ok, we can do this!”

We were excited for the adventure before us and easily sloughed off getting lost in a taxi with no cell phone. We didn’t get outwardly frustrated trying to find food in a store where we couldn’t read the labels. Even trying to find our own housing with no native English speaker to help was ok . . . for about a month. 

We started off with the honeymoon (link to culture shock graphic) excitement and joy that you may remember. But over time, the stress of cross-cultural living settled in, and we began to carry around the weight of it. Now, after all these years, we not only can look back and identify the stress we faced, but we can more easily see it in the new people that arrive each year. 

So what are the common stressors we see?