A mother supported by GlobalARRK shares her deeply personal creative writing piece, offering a poignant insight into the reality of life as a ‘stuck’ parent.
Beautifully written and deeply moving, her words capture the complexities, challenges and emotions of parenting while unable to return home.
Read her powerful piece here:
“So I can’t travel back home with my kids and start again there?”
A strange dizziness comes over me.
I am sitting in a dark, untidy workroom in someone else’s house, making a call to an
international family law firm. Someone else’s papers are scattered across the desk.
Someone else’s life surrounds me.
I listen, ask questions, try to understand what is possible and what is not.
Then I hang up.
For a moment, I just sit there, holding the phone.
And somewhere inside me, a large black door closes.
From the hallway, I hear my children talking and playing.
Something in me softens.
I don’t know it yet, but the heart I am carrying in that moment will have to grow much
bigger, stronger. A heart that can carry both the life I have lost and the life I still have to
build.
It has been a turbulent first immigrant year. I hardly know anyone, who to trust, who to
call when things get hard. I have worked here and there, but no stability yet.
Still, I have a few people around me. A small network. And that has to be enough.
The first thing I need is a house. It has to be cheap, because I have no income yet.
Eventually I find one, and we move in. Years later, we will remember it as our haunted
house.
To make it feel more like home, we become a foster family to two kittens. One for each
boy. They give the children someone to laugh with, cry with, care for.
A few months later, like a gift from heaven, I find a job. Later still, we manage to move
to a better place.
Piece by piece, I build what I think my children need most: stability.
But what is stability, really? Not only a roof, a job, a school, a safe address. It is people
around who know you, to grow up with, people who will still be there when life gets
difficult.
I try to create that kind of network around us. The kind that, in another life, might simply
have been there as family.
And for a while, it works. We build friendships. We receive help. We make a life. I fight a
long, painful legal battle for what I believe they need most, apart from love: stability.
But somewhere underneath, a question I cannot fully silence: would it have been better
for them to grow up close to family, old friends, an intact family around them?
I never find a simple answer. I only know some doors had been tried hard, and had
closed.
So I turned towards the doors that were still open.
Twelve years later, something I could not have known back then has become clear.
The network I worked so hard to build was real. It mattered. Norway has given us more
than I could have imagined.
But it was never quite the same as having your people around you.
My children are still pulled towards family and friends in the Netherlands. So am I.
I look at them now: sixteen and eighteen. And I see two strong, grounded, wholehearted
young men. We grew here after all. A small family, still standing.
But building a life and feeling that you have truly landed are not necessarily the same
thing.
Perhaps that is what being a stuck parent taught me. Sometimes you cannot choose the
place where your roots would most naturally grow.
I did not choose this soil. I simply had to make something grow in it.
