Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Becky Doughty. Hi Becky.

Becky: Hi Jo. How are you?

Jo: I’m good. It’s great to have you on the show. For a little introduction, Becky writes heartfelt and wholesome, contemporary commercial fiction and Christian fiction, including the Autumn Lake and the Tuscan Romance series. We have lots to talk about today, but as a starter —

How did travel play a part in your childhood?

Becky: Well, I always say I’m a missionary kid in recovery because travel made me fearless. Being a kid that traveled all around the world, I never really had a place that was home base. Even though we didn’t live in a lot of different countries, we did primarily live in Indonesia. My dad was an airplane mechanic and pilot, and he oversaw most of the hangar operations at our base camp in what is now West Papua.

For me, travel was just a way of life. We traveled back and forth to the States, which was home, and I traveled to school. I was a boarding student in high school and we traveled all on our own, with no parents. It was two days of travel, and we had to get to the right place during our stopover. Travel was just a part of life and it made me a fearless, “I’m just going to do whatever I want to do” kind of person. But the flip side is that it also leaves you feeling a little bit, not unrooted, but wondering where to put your roots down.

Especially since we were always told that America was home, in particular where our grandparents lived. But it never felt like home because we were always only visiting. That’s a big part of why I write stories about people finding their place. I’ve always written stories and escaped into other people’s lives for that reason.

Jo: It’s fascinating that you were told where home is whilst living elsewhere. Because you are living there, in West Papua or PNG as it was, with a very different culture, climate, and religions. I worked in mining for a while, so I know that sort of ‘Wild West’ idea of what was going on in PNG, and of course, there were wars and everything. So that’s very different.

To be told, “Your home is in America, you belong in America,” must have been very strange. What age were you? What were your formative years?

Becky: My parents went to the mission field with three kids under three. My older brother and I are adopted, not biologically related, and then the next two siblings came along naturally. My sister and I are only eight months apart. So when they went to the mission field, my brother was around three, I was one, and my sister was younger. I lived away until my senior year of high school.

We came back periodically. At the beginning, it was every four years. Then, as they realized how isolating that was for some people, it changed. I think now furloughs are closer to every two years.

Jo: And of course, no internet. International phoning was really hard. A very different world.

Becky: Completely different.

We had to travel to phone home to our grandparents. Once a year, we would travel into the capital, Jayapura, and make a very short call at the embassy. Our main mode of communication was cassette tapes. We would record and send them, and it could take four to six weeks, or even two months, to arrive. Our grandparents would record these long cassette tapes with Grandpa reading stories and singing songs, saying things like, “Here’s a song that reminds me of Becky.” We had these wonderful treasures because communication was so difficult.

Jo: Do you still have them?

Becky: I don’t have them anymore. My mom has a few things from back then, but those are some of the memories that we just lost. One of the issues we had was that we often had to pack up and leave everything behind. You get used to taking only what you can put in your suitcase, and with the idea that we were just going ‘home’ to see the grandparents, a lot of stuff that we should have kept wasn’t. My mom has kept all of her prayer letters and has compiled them in a book, so that’s cool because we get to see the journey through those letters.

When we came back to Indonesia, we would often pack a crate and have it shipped by sea. By the time it arrived, it would often have holes cut in the side and things taken from it. So even when we sent stuff ahead, things were often missing. We never knew quite what we would get at the other end. We started shipping things in 55-gallon drums that you could seal, which were harder to break into, but you can cut the lock on one of those. It was always a free-for-all; you never knew what was going to meet you.

Jo: A far cry from Amazon next-day delivery!

I want to come back to something you mentioned. You were adopted, and I was reading on your website that you say —

“I am adopted. It’s pretty cool. I come from nowhere, anywhere and everywhere.”

This fascinated me, because I don’t think I’ve ever read a description of being adopted in terms of sense of place before. That really caught my eye. Why did you choose those words to describe it that way?

Becky: That’s a really good question. I’ve had to really think about this and how to answer it succinctly.

One of the things I struggled with growing up was a sense of belonging. It’s not because my parents were problematic; they were wonderful parents. I am a success story as far as winning the lottery with parents through adoption. But I still always felt that there’s something of me out there somewhere. If I could find my people and my place, I would know where I came from, and that would give me a better sense of where I’m going.

Because I have such a deep connection to the people in my life—my adopted family, my husband of 37 years, our grown kids and five grandkids—I have a very stable life in terms of people. But because of the travel and never really having that sense of place, I always thought it would be cool to find out that I’m from some random place and get there and find a bunch of people who look and act just like me.

According to my birth records, I have both Japanese and Spanish in me, which you’d never know. But wouldn’t it be cool to go to Japan and find where I started from? So a sense of place is almost more important to me because I already have a sense of people.

Ironically, there’s a funny twist. We’ve been living in California for most of our marriage, but we moved to Indiana, which is in the middle of the Midwest. We ended up living on the exact same street, just four houses up from where my husband grew up. For my husband, Kevin, coming back to his street has been like coming home. There’s a little bit of me that gets to live vicariously through him regarding where home is. But I think I’ll always be searching for where home is.

I am a believer, and that is actually one of the few things that has kept me grounded.

The reason I came back for my senior year of high school was because I got kicked out of school. I really struggled with authority, especially not being able to question it. It was a very conservative boarding school for missionary kids. If you questioned anything, you were the troublemaker. That really played a lot into my feelings of “Why am I here? I don’t fit here.” I was told, “This is how Christians act and behave,” but that’s not the way I believe.

That set me as an adult in this direction of searching. I walked away from my faith for a long time in my thirties, and then at the end of that journey, I realized that’s the only thing I can really depend on because people are just people. This goes back to that idea of place. The older I get, the more I feel like maybe I’ll just keep traveling while I’m here and wait for that feeling of home for Heaven.

Jo: That’