So I’d been living in Australia for 10 years before finally being able to go back and see my family. I surprised them with a 6 week visit with my wife and two kids.
Everyone seemed over the moon and it was great seeing all of my family but things were not the same at all. I get that 10 years is a long time but all I could feel was ‘my family have removed me from their life’. I started feeling this before I went to see them because I was the one initiating conversations and calling them but I believed it’d be different when I seen them in person.
When I got there a lot had changed. My brother had taken over the holiday house, my room had been completely changed and my sisters used mum as their baby sitter most of the time. My dad was also very distant. He was never quite affectionate but I feel like he didn’t make an effort to get to know my wife and children very much even though we were living at his house. Seeing my grandparents turn so very frail also broke me and I can’t seem to stop thinking about losing them and not spending more time with them. The family dynamic was no where near the same as when I was there.
I feel this void in my heart and even though I got married and had children I still long to have those good times with my parents and extended family like the good old days. Is this something other people have felt when going back home? Is there a way to stop being so sad about it?
I left my home country 25 years ago. Meanwhile I changed to 3 countries and 2 continents… when I left, my parents lived in a big house where I grew up, my grand parents were always around making drama or dinners, we had a few local markets and I knew the town by heart… my parents divorced. My father remarried and had 2 new kids, my childhood house got sold and torn down, the government invested billions in my hometown to the point that there are now highways connecting suburbs, international supermarkets, immigration issues and all the “modern” life… my grand parents died, there house are now part of tall buildings, I had uncles and aunts who also died, cousins who died, my primary and my middle schools got torn down and are new high buildings…
I talk to my sister and mother every week on visio phone… they even came to visit, but we have grown apart… we essentially talk about the past, but what I regret as the good times they think of it as obscure times… because they wanted to evolve while I did not what that. This hard and difficult paradox between what my memory tells me about what the place should be and what the place became is not bearable to me… so I decoded to stop thinking about my home town in term of a place. But more a place in time. While I can always go there geographically, I cannot go back in time… so I accept their calhange and accept that regardless I won’t be affected… so I try to be happy for them and learn as much as I can of the time that lapsed since my last visit