I just said goodbye to my mom after having three weeks with her. She made the journey from North Carolina to see me, her oldest daughter, in Wales.
Fifteen years ago, I met a Welsh boy, fell in love, and moved my just-starting-out adult life to the UK, not having the foresight to realize what a huge decision this was.
How do you know, at just 22, that making a transatlantic move will not just change the course of the next couple of years, but of your entire life?
My mom understood the goodbye more than I did
I remember how tearful my mom had been upon my leaving all those years ago. I, too, of course, cried, but she really cried. She understood, given her years of life lived, I would almost definitely never be moving back. My goodbye, now looking back, was fleeting; hers was permanent.
In the early days of living in Wales, I remember calling her on Skype once a week, because we didn’t have constant access to each other as we do now. I was often crying, telling her how hard I found adulting.
When I had my three kids, each two years apart, I felt a deep longing for my mom. Not someone to do the laundry, clean the dishes, or have the baby for me in the night. I could do all of this — I was and still am fiercely independent.
I wanted her to just sit with me. And I know she wanted exactly the same.
We both felt the pangs of being apart, because it only feels fitting that the woman who carried and gave birth to you should also be there when you do the same. And to be there in those months after, when postnatal depression and severe fatigue kick in.
I got through even these wearisome years of having very young babies and toddlers, not unscathed, but I made it.
We talk daily
Since then, my conversations with her have become more frequent. We text daily on WhatsApp and ring each other a few times a week. I tell her nearly everything, and want to hear all that’s happening with her, both of us exchanging stories from our days and weeks.
And this oftentimes feels like enough to maintain a beautiful connection. It is our pattern to maintain a close relationship, although we only see each other, if we’re lucky, once a year.
But even this in-person connection is never guaranteed. Due to the pandemic and then my high-risk pregnancy, I wasn’t able to visit the US for nearly five years, and in that time, she was only able to visit twice.
When I do travel to the US to visit, it now costs me my ticket plus three others, not an easy feat on a budget.
For her to travel here, she, a 63-year-old woman whose back isn’t brilliant, has to make a very long flight and then a car ride, first here and then back.
Seeing each other isn’t easy. It isn’t popping in for Sunday dinner after church. It isn’t nipping over to celebrate a holiday or birthday.
It’s so hard living away from my mom
The hardest thing of all about living in a different country, separated by an ocean and a five-hour time zone, is that when I’ve had a crap day, other than my husband, she is the first person I want to talk to. And I can’t always do that, although she makes every effort to be available when she can.
So for those three weeks over Christmas when she was here, we both soaked up each other’s company, not knowing when we’d have it again. Although I must admit we annoyed each other for the first couple of days, trying to adapt to each other’s rhythms and ways after being apart for so long.
And when she left, it felt like I walked into a wall that hit me with all the reminders of how hard it is living away from my mom.
I had a little cry, as I often do once she leaves, and then I did what she has always taught me by example — I counted my blessings, recounted how this is making me strong, and moved on.
I have a loving mom. I have access to technology that lets me stay in frequent contact with her.
And as much as living away from her wouldn’t be a choice I’d quickly make, now that I’m older and wiser, it has made me strong and resilient. I’ve had to learn to do so much on my own, exactly as she had to do with my sister and me growing up.
Herself a strong woman, she raised a strong woman.
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