on Cultural Stress...

I have all these great ideas about blog posts. I really do. You wouldn’t believe me since I have become terrible at blogging, but in reality there is a lot of ideas mulling around up there about what I COULD write about. The problem is time, and space. Not physical space (although that is often an issue too) but mental space. Space to breathe, exhale, collect all those wandering thoughts and put them down in a cohesive format. This probably is a poor analogy, but  

sometimes I feel like I’m in a room where two competingTV’s are stationed.  

I want to be watching and paying attention to the one, which let’s say it is a soap opera or something (not because I like soap operas, but because sometimes my life really is as dramatic as one, just of a different type). But on the other television is MTV heavy metal blaring at twice the volume of the one I should be paying attention to. I have to strain in order to hear, pay attention, follow the plot, etc of the one I am trying to watch. So, I guess the point I am trying to make is that

it takes a lot of mental stamina to parent in another culture.

As a mom of littles (anywhere), life often is a soap opera. The drama shifts every 3-5 minutes and is never-ending from start to finish. When they are this little (3 and under), you can’t divert your eyes for even a minute or you have toothpaste on the toilet seat or someone is eating a bug. However, at least when I was in a familiar culture, I had a few options. There were weekly play dates or a park nearby to get exercise. There was always the museum or the zoo, or library story time. Yes, I dreaded going to the grocery store with my kids because there would be inevitable meltdowns and tantrums, but at least there were people there who spoke my language, and someone (...someone!) guaranteed to give me a sympathetic look and a “Bless your heart…” in passing. Parenting in a culture outside of your own, though, is like having that other TV blaring in your face…and it's because of this thing called cultural stress. It's like really loud background noise…that causes me to strain really hard to concentrate on what I need to be doing to get through the day. Blogging...shoot. That's a luxury this mama doesn't have on a regular basis.

Examples of cultural stress: 

1. It’s having to drive on the opposite side of the road, with a different set of rules, and signals, and not knowing (but hoping) that the person who is heading toward you at a fast speed will get around the person they are trying to pass before you have to run off the road and hopefully not hit any stray kids in the process.

2. It’s having to listen REALLY hard when someone is talking to you (even in English!) in order to decipher what they are saying, which 90% of the time doesn’t register until the conversation is over and you are back home again.

3. It’s having no clue what you are going to make for dinner or how you are going to acquire the food for said venture.

4. It’s making a good dinner, and hoping that you washed the vegetables well enough because you just can’t handle one more GI bug in this family.

5. It's not knowing how you are going to respond to the next person who asks you whether your children (donning pigtails and pink polka-dots) are boys or girls.

It’s aromas and body language, intonations and cues, a lack of noise ordinances, or personal space boundaries, different sets of social norms and a different understanding of how to appropriately relate to children (like making scary monster faces or weird noises at my children when they are in the middle of their meltdowns).

It's not just Ugandan culture 
(which I've grown to love by the way...)
It's any culture outside of your own. 
...It's cultural stress...

...and it’s a beast.

But, all that’s water under the bridge, right? Because I DID say in a recent newsletter that I would be very soon blogging about how we are seeing God in the midst of our life here. And we are- EVERY DAY! So, enough about the MTV heavy metal blaring in the background of my head. On to the soap opera, and God’s redemption in the midst of it...