It has become clear to me over the last few years that being
an expat means having your heart in two different (at least) places. For me, I have my family, including my oldest
son, and parents and sisters, in the States and my spouse and newer friends
here. Skype works relatively well, but
I always feel I am dividing myself between two different continents in the
connections I am trying to form and maintain.
To add complication to this, my parents are aging. They are both in good health, but they are
becoming less mobile. I have, in the
back of my head, the magic number of ‘at least once per year’ as the number of
times that I will see my U.S. family. That
feels woefully little, when one considers that this is a lifetime decision, not
just a temporary one. When one makes the
decision of how often they will see their family, then one must save up the
funds and vacation time to make that happen. Originally, I thought that I would
fly my family here since that was cheaper than all of us travelling to the U.S.,
but it became clear that that wasn’t entirely feasible for various
reasons. Also, my father has announced
that he does not think he will be making any more trips to Europe in his
lifetime. He has the money to do so, but
travel seems physically harder and harder on him and his wife. This pull to be on two continents at once
creates a kind of a conflict inside.
Complicating this is the fact that my family in Denmark does not really
want to spend all of our vacations in the U.S. (and particularly not in Texas!). This is understandable but it only adds to
the conflict we feel. I am grateful that
I have ample vacation time in Denmark, but it still never is enough to maintain
loving relationships on both sides of the pond.
Many of my clients seem to have similar conflict. Some of them have parents who are not well and
cannot travel at all. Sadly, a colleague
of mine just had her mother die of cancer, in New Zealand. She was not there to wish her mother goodbye. Complicating everything was the fact that
flights to New Zealand are expensive and exceedingly time-consuming. It’s not humanly possible to make a quick
trip to New Zealand on the spur-of-the-moment, when a medical crisis has
afflicted a loved one.
For my more mobile family members, one solution has become
to rent a summerhouse somewhere in Europe, in the summer, and invite them to
come, with no charge for boarding. This
makes a yearly European vacation nearly doable, and has us assume part of the
burden of cost for the rest of my family.
It’s fun, and it’s a ‘win-win’, in many ways. Two summers ago, we rented a lovely place on
Tinos, Greece, and paid to have it for three weeks. Many members of my family came to visit and we made some exquisite memories.
It dawned on me that this is an important issue and I
endeavored to find some information about long distance relating, in particular
with aging parents. There is almost
nothing academic, though there are a few essays that I found. One I will share with you here. It strikes me that this issue is going to
become more relevant, in our increasingly globalized world, and that we should
share with each other strategies we learn to increase our sense of closeness to
our birth families. Feel free to write
me or to comment here with your thoughts and ideas about this topic.
