As part of this series, I conduct interviews with fascinating people who have resided all over the country and the globe. These occasional interviews appear as podcast episodes (available through your browser or on various podcast apps) and while the starting place for these interviews are questions about physical “homes”, we get to talk about all sorts of other things that are (or are not) “home” in their lives.
Welcome to the last podcast episode of the year! I am thrilled to share with you a conversation with my friend Rebecca, who I’ve known for (gulp!) three decades. We graduated from high school together, but only after my move to Washington in 2020 did we more deeply reconnect. I’m so glad we did! Since rekindling our friendship, I’ve learned that there was a lot more going on underneath Rebecca’s quiet demeanor than I ever realized. It’s like making friends with a very cool person all over again!
Rebecca has had quite a journey across her life. She appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, a few weeks into our freshman year of high school in Columbia, South Carolina, and she didn’t even know if she would be staying for long. Her tight-knit family (two parents, four kids) moved around a lot due to her parents’ religious mission work, but she didn’t let on to the rest of us the unique upbringing she’d experienced. Her family may have fit the stereotypical mold we’ve come to understand as a “born-again Christian”, but for Rebecca and her siblings, it was just life.
Because of all her moves as a child, Rebecca constantly felt like a fish out of water, having to adapt over and over to new places and new people. Her schooling (as she says, “if you could even call it education”) was not nearly challenging enough for someone of her intellect, and she talks about how hard it is to “unlearn” deep-seated beliefs about the world (and those pesky dinosaurs)!
When you are just waiting for the other shoe to drop and your family to move across either state or international borders again and again, you form a distinct frame of mind that the world outside of your family will always be foreign, maybe even suspect. I am grateful that Rebecca was willing to be vulnerable and share what it really meant to have a “sheltered” upbringing, and how she’s still grappling with what it means to call herself a Christian as an adult.
Our conversation only scratched the surface, so look forward to Part Two in 2024, and if you’ve got any burning questions for Rebecca, please leave a comment or send me an email!
(This interview is shared with deep apologies to our former principal Dr. Scott, actor Macaulay Culkin, and, of course, the dinosaurs).
And I misspoke on my 8th grade Algebra teacher’s name; it was Mr. Rushman, not Mr. Rush. Oops!
Reflection Questions:
What are some of the foundational values you learned from your parents? How do you feel about them now?
If you could give any piece of advice to your teenage self, what would it be and why?
Image: taken at Versailles, by Rebecca’s daughter, Audrey.
Rebecca