What does home mean when you have lived under many skies?

In this episode of the House of Peregrine podcast, Mickelle welcomes back Sam Frearson Tubito—third-generation global nomad, writer, speaker, and author of Beneath a Borrowed Sky: A Woman’s Search for the True Meaning of Home.

Sam first joined us in Episode 52 for a beautiful conversation about home, identity, and raising children across cultures. This time, she returns with her memoir in hand—a deeply personal reflection on what it means to belong when your life has been shaped by movement, reinvention, and the quiet ache of leaving.

Sam has lived in fifteen countries and raised four fourth-generation global nomads, now scattered across Portland, San Francisco, Sydney, and Barcelona. In this conversation, she and Mickelle explore the emotional architecture of a globally mobile life: the choices we make for our children, the identities we rebuild in every new place, and the truth that home may not be a destination at all—but something we learn to carry within us.

In this episode

Why “home” can be something we carry, not somewhere we arrive

Sam shares the central idea behind her memoir: that true home is not always tied to a single place. For those who live between cultures, home can become an amalgamation of people, memories, languages, rituals, and love.

She describes each country she has lived in as a kind of “borrowed sky”—a place that was hers for a time, even if it was never meant to be permanent. This reframing is both tender and powerful: the places we pass through are not less meaningful because we leave them. They were home while we were there.

The meaning behind Beneath a Borrowed Sky

The title of Sam’s memoir becomes a doorway into one of the episode’s most resonant themes: how to fully inhabit a place while knowing it may only be temporary.

Mickelle names it beautifully in the conversation: invest like it is permanent, while remaining aware of the impermanence. For many Peregrines, this is the tension at the heart of international life. We root and uproot. We build community and say goodbye. We learn to belong without certainty.

Sam’s book sits inside that tension with honesty, grace, and hard-won wisdom.

Raising third-culture kids—and watching them build lives globally

Sam reflects on raising four fourth-generation global nomads and the decision she made early in motherhood: no matter where life took them, her children would come with her.

Having been sent to boarding school as a child while her parents continued their international life, Sam wanted a different kind of family story. She and her husband chose to create stability inside the family unit, even as the external landscape kept changing.

Now that her children are adults living around the world, Sam speaks candidly about the pride and the grief that can coexist. Giving your children the world means they may actually take it. They may build lives far from you. They may become deeply capable at starting again, making new homes, and finding their people—but that does not mean the distance is easy.

The unseen work of the supporting spouse abroad

Mickelle and Sam also explore the often invisible role of the supporting spouse in international life.

Sam speaks honestly about the pact she and her husband made when their children were young: he would hold the financial fort, and she would hold the fort of everything else. That “everything else” included raising children, managing moves, creating belonging from scratch, reinventing herself professionally, and helping the family land in each new place.

The conversation does not flatten this into sacrifice or privilege. Instead, it gives the role the nuance it deserves. There can be beauty in it. There can be agency in it. There can also be loss, identity shifts, and moments when the agreement needs to be revisited.

As Sam shares, the key is honest conversation. What works in one season may need to change in another.

Why doing your homework matters before any major life transition

One of Sam’s most practical pieces of advice is deceptively simple: do your homework.

Before entering a new country, a new culture, a new language, or even a new life stage, prepare yourself. Learn the basic phrases. Understand the context. Respect the transition enough not to assume you already know it.

Sam shares that one of her hardest moves was to the United States—not because the language was unfamiliar, but because she assumed familiarity would be enough. It was a reminder that every place, no matter how visible it may feel through films, media, or reputation, deserves to be approached with humility.

Mickelle expands this beautifully beyond relocation: parenthood, marriage, divorce, reinvention, and empty nesting all have their own languages. Learn the language of the chapter you are entering.

Belonging, people-pleasing, identity, and learning to be yourself in the in-between

For third-culture kids and global nomads, adaptability is often praised as a strength. And it is. But Sam and Mickelle also explore the more complicated edge of that gift.

When you are skilled at reading the room, mirroring the culture, and adjusting yourself to belong, it can become easy to lose track of where adaptation ends and self-abandonment begins.

Sam speaks honestly about midlife, people-pleasing, and the realization that even the most capable global nomad can lose parts of herself along the way. Her memoir does not offer a neat, polished ending. Instead, it offers something more human: a woman in the process of seeing herself clearly, asking better questions, and learning to be at home within herself—even when life is still unfinished.

About the guest

Sam Frearson Tubito is a third-generation global nomad who has raised four fourth-generation global nomads. Her children now live across the world—in Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; Sydney; and Barcelona—while Sam and her husband live in Italy, the fifteenth country she has called home.

A lifelong animal lover, Sam shares her life with her golden retriever, Khaya, whose name means “home” in Swahili—a quiet tribute to her years growing up in Africa.

Sam believes identity is shaped less by where we are from and more by who we are. She is more likely to ask someone what their story is than where they come from. For her, home is an amalgamation of places, people, languages, memories, and love—something carried rather than fixed.

Through her writing and talks, she supports globally mobile individuals and families navigating questions of identity and belonging. She writes about life across cultures, home, and third-culture identity through Wandering Identity and on Substack.

Her memoir, Beneath a Borrowed Sky: A Woman’s Search for the True Meaning of Home, explores motherhood, marriage, movement, and belonging through the lens of a woman who has spent her life between cultures.

Resources to add:

• Sam’s website: https://www.wanderingidentity.com
• Sam’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_wanderingidentity_/
• Sam’s Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/samfrearsontubito
• Beneath a Borrowed Sky purchase link: https://us.amazon.com/Beneath-Borrowed-Sky-Womans-Meaning-ebook/dp/B0GX5FQ3LB
• Episode 52: “Home is Not a Place, It’s a Feeling”

Listen to the episode

This conversation is for anyone who has ever struggled to answer the question, “Where are you from?” It is for the parents raising children between cultures, the partners rebuilding identity abroad, the empty nesters learning a new version of home, and the Peregrines who know that belonging is rarely simple—but always worth exploring.