When I was growing up, my family was different. And as any kid knows, different is bad. We called my father "Papa" rather than "Dad." My mother cooked pungent ethnic dishes instead of tuna noodle casseroles. We spent our vacations traipsing around Europe and getting stranded in airports. My father's favorite picture of me is my first passport photo. We weren't "normal."

But it took me awhile to figure that out – and even longer to be OK with it.

When my brother and I were young, my family lived in a small town in Germany while my father was on sabbatical from his college teaching job. (Hence the moniker "Papa.") We lived in an old stone house ringed with grapevines. We slept under fluffy feather beds, and you had to pull a chain to flush the toilet. The local butcher and baker would sometimes slip me slices of bratwurst or tiny, exquisite animals made from marzipan.

I'm told I picked up the language quickly, as children do. My father likes to tell the story of the first time I taught him a German phrase. On the walk to kindergarten one day, I pointed at a splat on the sidewalk and said, "Look, Papa, Voge lah-ah!" Roughly translated, that means "bird doo-doo."

I don't remember that. However, I do recall an incident with a street vendor in our neighborhood. One afternoon, my mother handed me a few coins and told me to run outside and buy a loaf of bread. Together, we rehearsed my lines several times until I had them down pat. I approached the man alone, with hands that shook only slightly. "I would like to buy one loaf of pumpernickel bread, please," I said in my childish German.

His reply was along the lines of, "Kid, I don't have any bread. I sell fish!" Hot tears snaked from my eyes as I turned and fled home, furious with my mother for embarrassing me.

Maybe that's when I started to think my multicultural upbringing wasn't so great.

But when we returned home to the United States, my parents were determined to retain some vestiges of our life abroad. A new rule was implemented: On Saturdays, only German would be spoken at our house.

It didn't work. Now that we were back home, my brother and I were loath to do anything different from what our friends' families did.

So my father tricked us. He invited over a colleague who pretended that she spoke only German. I'm not sure how long my parents kept up this ruse before we figured it out.

Still, my father never gave up trying to impose a global perspective on his American offspring. When we were teenagers, he regularly invited foreign exchange students to dinner at our house.

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