The Hardest Thing Emigration Gave Me
And the one I’ll never regret
This is how well I had to get to know my own child.
When we first moved, my son was four, and the new language was incredibly hard for him.
I envied everyone whose children seemed to “pick up” the language naturally, while he only remembered the words we practiced together on the way to kindergarten. And there, without the words, he’d end up in fights.
Hiring a nanny, which would have meant a foreign-speaking one, was never an option. The language became a constant source of stress for him.
Back in our city, everything was different. Life was conveniently structured. My husband and I ran our own company and worked a lot, so after kindergarten, our son would often end up immediately in the safe hands of his grandparents.
It turned out I had underestimated how much emotional and practical energy it can take to truly “contain” a child. It’s one thing when the whole family shares that role, and another when all the child’s pain in the world stands right in front of you.
I can’t even count how many small and large crises we went through those years, from searching for new friends to solving health problems, from missing the past to falling behind at school. And the only people who were always there were his father and me.
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Well, about his father. Emigration became the place where we separated. And in that moment, the world of our little son began to look different, not only because of another country, but because of a different shape of family life. Instead of one home, two homes. Instead of one family, two people, each trying, in their own way, to live through their pain.
My son has a very good father, but from the outside, I watched him move beyond simply being “present” and, through his own frustration, build a truly close relationship with his son, exactly when we separated. Simply because when you are left alone together for thousands of hours, you have to do something with that.
And my life filled with confessions — our little boy began expressing feelings completely unknown to me before, which were flooding me with tenderness and breaking my heart at the same time.
One rainy day, he said (yes, in our new sunny city, he fell in love with rainy days):
“You know why I love when it’s raining? Because there were many rainy days in my life before we moved. For example, I remember almost having my umbrella blown away when you came to pick me up from kindergarten, or how we once hid from the rain in a toy store. Sometimes I so badly want to go back and watch the rain from our apartment — I feel, in that moment, my soul would be next to me.”
And one night before bed, my son told me:
“I still miss grandma and grandpa, but I’m more used to being with you and dad now. You’re my favorite people.”
I felt shame and joy at the same time.
Aren’t mom and dad supposed to be the closest people by default?
It turned out we only became the closest when we became each other’s main support.
And no matter how hard it was, this is the gift emigration gave me: to live through my child’s childhood not somewhere alongside my own life, but inside it.
