Distance Families – How does it feel to be geographically separated from your family?

What is it truly like being a son or daughter who leaves home to live in an expat/migrant setting? How does it feel to be geographically separated from your parents, grandparents and other family members?

UNPACKING EMOTIONS

After researching transnational families (Distance Families), Australian-based sociologist Zlatko Skrbiš concluded that emotions aren’t a resource to explain Distance Family life, they are the experience in themselves. In other words, to ‘do’ Distance Families is to live in and be surrounded by emotion. 

This chapter acknowledges the key emotions connected to the Distance Family role that expats and migrants quietly cope with, often in an alone space. They aren’t discussed a lot with the folks back home but are centre stage for Distance Sons and Daughters. As author and researcher Rhoda Bangerter put it so well, these emotions are “something we rarely get to hear over the kitchen table when we visit [home], but we experience them first-hand, every day, as distance adult children”.

Ambivalence and Ambiguity

“[Expats and migrants] experience millions of deaths of selves attached to places, friendships fallen by the wayside, missed opportunities and alternate realities.”

Leigh Matthews, psychologist

Ambivalence and ambiguity are easily confused. Family therapist Pauline Boss from the Department of Social Science at the University of Minnesota offers a great explanation: “In the theory of ambiguous loss, ambivalence means conflicted emotions such as love and hate, whereas ambiguity means a lack of clarity… Ambiguous loss (in the relational sense) leads to ambivalence (in the social sense).” 

Ambivalence is everywhere

Relationship ambivalence is experiencing both positive and negative feelings, or understandings of a situation, at the same time. Traditions, social expectations and social norms fuel it. Geographically close in-country family members experience ambivalence, so it is understandable that the Distance Family will also. Even the most dedicated, family-orientated Distance Son or Daughter experiences ambivalence within their Distance Family relationships – and that’s okay. 

Sociologist Dr Ingrid Arnet Connidis is a professor emerita at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on family ties and relationships. She stresses that the analysis of ambivalence within families should be done on multiple levels. There are good days and bad days, good situations and bad situations, good years and bad years, good seasons and bad seasons. This applies to Distance Sons and Daughters navigating Distance Family relationships. It is an ever-changing kaleidoscope of contradictory, mixed-up, disrupted feelings and settled and unsettled situations. These all need to be considered. 

Distance Sons and Daughters experience relief if they reach a plateau of ‘business as normal’ where ambivalence settles into a comfy, familiar groove. It is an excellent result.

What does all this mean? It is okay for Distance Sons and Daughters to experience ambivalence about their Distance Family. It is normal and understandable. 

Ambiguous Loss

“The features of [ambiguous] loss in voluntary transnational families are different from families separated involuntarily.”

Catherine Solheim and Jaime Ballard, mobility scholars

Pauline Boss coined the term ‘ambiguous loss’ in the 1970s. It’s a loss that is unclear. 

The separation loss for distance parents and grandparents is an involuntary loss. They didn’t choose for their family to move away. Their loss is unclear because they haven’t lost their children but those children are no longer around. The children are with them psychologically, but not physically. 

There is an argument that says Distance Sons and Daughters do not ‘qualify’ as valid sufferers of ambiguous loss because, in most cases, the choice to leave was theirs. I argue that they do qualify.

Boss relayed the scenario of a young man who felt that losing his mobile phone was an ambiguous loss. When this story sits alongside those who Boss worked with, people who lost family members in catastrophic events such as 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami, the phone loss seems inconsequential. However, to this man, his phone was his ‘life’ and its loss was overwhelming and full of uncertainty. If he sees it as ambiguous, then it is, even if others don’t see it that way. 

If a Distance Son or Daughter experiences an unresolved loss, day in and day out, then for them that is an ambiguous loss, even if they have chosen to live where they live. Despite the purposeful circumstances, a loss is ever-present. 

Ambiguous loss can be experienced by Distance Sons and Daughters because of:

• Uncertainty surrounding the length of an assignment
• One half of a couple deciding, or being forced, to opt out of traditional employment for all manner of reasons 
• Concern over what could have been. What might the family have missed out on by opting for the life they have chosen?
• The ‘loss’ of a parent or grandparent affected by dementia
• More recently, COVID-19 generating ambiguous loss around the missed opportunities to travel, visit family and keep up connections 

Distance parents and distance grandparents have automatic entry into the Ambiguous Loss Club. Distance Sons and Daughters, more often than not, end up as members because of circumstances that are beyond their control. It is important to realise that the folks back home probably don’t think of it this way. They might say “but you chose to leave”. But through understanding and empathy, they may come to appreciate that all generations can experience ambiguous loss.

Guilt Is a Constant Companion

“Guilt, guilt, guilt is what all migrants face.”

Professor Loretta Baldassar

Psychotherapist and author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Lori Gottlieb says the following about guilt: “Guilt is useful if it tells us that we’ve gone against our own internal moral code and helps us make better choices next time. Guilt is crippling if it comes from the ‘the outside’ and tells us that somebody else’s ideas about how we should live are more important than our own… The minute you started to experience joy, you also experienced guilt. And the guilt won every single time.”

When guilt is discussed in the context of Distance Familying, there are two types:

1. Guilt generated by you (Gottlieb’s internal moral code). As clinical and health psychologist Melissa Parks admitted, she often asks herself, “Am I being the daughter I want to be?” This comes from a place of love, caring, empathy and knowing that you decided to live abroad.
2. Guilt imposed upon you (Gottlieb’s ‘the outside’).This guilt is from others and comes from their place of grief, disappointment and heartache. I would also add it can come from ignorance and, to some degree, selfishness on the part of your family back home.

Guilt generated by you

The bad news is it comes with the territory. I’m not going to list all the reasons why you experience guilt. You already know them, and you don’t need to be reminded. I suggest you see guilt as an emotion you own – because you care. This is an admirable quality. The world would be an amazing place if it was full of caring people like you. If you didn’t give a **** about your family, then that wouldn’t be ideal. 

It is also healthy to know that even in families where Distance Family members are accepting of your move, guilt still finds a home. Australian Distance Daughter Tanya Crossman has lived most of her adult life abroad and enjoys this luxury, but she still admits to experiencing guilt.

“Knowing that I can only blame myself. That I’m the one who decided to go. That I could be closer but chose not to be. Knowing I valued something more highly than being near the family members I love so dearly. That’s a hard truth to face – and yet also a hard one to escape!… I think the guilt can be like homesickness – coming in waves, rather than constant, sometimes taking you by surprise.”

Tanya Crossman (Distance Daughter) 

Likewise, my husband and I are very accepting of our geographically dispersed family, but that doesn’t mean our kids don’t feel pangs of guilt when they think about how little time we spend together and the magic grandchild moments we miss out on.

Carole Hallett Mobbs, an expat life mentor and consultant, reminds us that guilt for Distance Sons and Daughters doesn’t stop with the left-behind family. There’s the guilt of children who may not settle well or who are struggling with schooling and/or a new language and just plain missing their grandparents. If you’re a parent, at home or abroad, guilt is ever-present.

Guilt imposed upon you

This is real and too often showered upon Distance Sons and Daughters by those who love them the most. The emotions of your distance parents, grandparents and friends are not your responsibility, but while that’s fine in theory, it’s easier said than done.

The guilt imposed on Distance Sons and Daughters is reflected in the language of their parents and grandparents. In Being a Distance Grandparent, I talk frankly about the less than helpful language they sometimes use when communicating with their family from afar. I call it The 3 H’s: the Language of Progressive Acceptance. As they grow in their acceptance of their situation, their language improves.

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The 3 H’s – Language of Progressive Acceptance of Distance Grandparenting

Level One – Harmful

“How dare you take my grandchild to the other side of the world. What is wrong with this country? Do we not have any say in your decision?”

A natural response, but likely destructive. Those words are never forgotten.

Level Two – Human

“I miss you so much. I can feel the distance. I just want to be there and give you all a hug. I wish you could come home.”

Honest, understandable and still best shared with friends.

Level Three – Helpful

“This is your decision and I respect your choices. I am proud of you and will keep loving and supporting you from afar.”

Wisdom that will reap benefits.

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Distance parents and grandparents who’ve read The 3 H’s have commented along the lines of “I needed to read this” or “I’m Level Two and that’s not helping”. 

A sad by-product of having parents who shower Distance Sons and Daughters with guilt is that you share less with them. Your actions are understandable because it’s all too hard. But as a result, distance parents and grandparents end up ‘out of the loop’ about what’s going on, and most times, they don’t know why. 

Homesickness

“You will be a perpetual foreigner, someone whose heart belongs to different lands and different people, different versions of yourself… The muted yearning will never go away. Some days barely ache; others are filled with breathtaking pain. A pain I have to get used to, because if I left and went back to that land that still calls me, there I would just yearn and suffer for this one.”

Melissa Meza-Rapp,contributor to Somewhere: Women’s Stories of Migration

Tanya Crossman talks of homesickness “coming in waves”. This reminds me of a tide calendar. When you live in a country like New Zealand surrounded by oceans, a tide calendar is a commonly pinned item on a kitchen noticeboard.

Tidal movements are predictable when you keep an eye on the calendar. If you visit the beach and haven’t checked the calendar, that broad stretch of sand you were hoping for could well be underwater. Homesickness is like this. It can come in predictable waves and patterns, but when you haven’t thought about it for a while or something unexpected transports your brain thousands of miles away, just like a spontaneous visit to the beach, the tides (or emotions) can take you by surprise.

Another angle comes from anthropologists Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen, who write about ‘An Anthropology of Absence’. Their overriding message is that what is missing is just as important as what is there. As they explain, “People’s engagement with the world does not simply consist in deducing the meaning of people, places and things or what they represent, but also in presencing that which is absent in one way or another.” Homesickness is the presence of what is absent in one way or another.

Homesickness is the presence of what is absent in one way or another.

The senses have a lot to answer for

A whiff of a familiar meal in a marketplace, the taste of a favourite food from home, a strange but familiar accent heard in a crowd, the sight of a familiar flag in an unexpected place and the feel of a handwritten letter received in the mail; all of these can trigger homesickness. They elicit feelings of belonging to somewhere far off. 

When I was young my mother would cook a roast dinner every weekend. The ritual was divine and as children we never bored of it. Years later, when I was a Distance Daughter in London, a friend had an oven – a prized amenity rarely found in budget ‘digs’ – and he invited us over for a roast lamb meal. Decades later my mouth still salivates when I recall us all sitting on the bed with plates on our laps and that oh so familiar smell and taste transporting me home. That roast dinner boosted me for weeks – at a time when Maggie Thatcher ruled with an iron fist and life was pretty tough. 

I’ll finish with more lyrical words from Melissa Meza-Rapp: “I am bound by bonds that can’t be broken to that land, those people, the streets I walked on to go to school when I was 15, the sound and smells of the countries that I can’t forget, that I don’t want to forget.”

Reflection

When researching for this book, it was hard to ignore an article titled ‘Why Gratitude is the Best Answer for Difficult Expat Emotions’. The author, Jodi Harris, has 20 years’ experience in social work, teaching, conflict management, mindfulness and global coaching. She’s worked with every type of migrant or expat you can imagine. Jodi explains, “Learning to engage with gratitude provides unique ways in which to deal with many of the difficult emotions that plague our unpredictable international lives – so that we can always feel exactly the way we want to feel, but so that we can better address the very real emotions that sometimes knock us flat… If you’re feeling helplessness, sadness, envy, anger, rejection or grief, it can be helpful to process those emotions by seeing them as part of your complex life – a life that also includes good things… even good things directly related to the challenges you’re facing.”

I’m a great believer in gratitude, and those who know me will confirm I tend to look on the bright side wherever possible. I’m not resentful that my children and grandchildren live overseas. I’m grateful they are safe, well and leading full lives.