This post is in response to Blog-Friend Spit-up-and-Stiletto’s wonderful post today, lamenting the fact that her younger sister is moving to New Mexico, which is not much closer than my family is to me. And they belong to a whole other continent. She wants to know where the transporters are.
Well, S&S, I can only tell you that I have my 3,000-mile-away nephew and godson (the one who first made me an aunt and from whom I moved away three years later) sworn to work on the transporter thing as soon as he’s completed his Physics Higher (exam) next year. (Good grief, that means he’s almost sixteen).
I miss my family horribly. There is definitely a grieving process to go through, and sometimes you think you’re over it and then, thirteen years later, someone plays a song that makes you bawl your eyes out.
But you can absolutely find ways to make the best of it. The Internet is a godsend, especially now, with Skype or video calls (Get a good camera for your computer so she can watch TheBoy romp, from afar. I’ve even had people keep an eye on my boy while I went to the bathroom, from 3,000 miles away. Didn’t work out too well. He climbed up on the table anyway…). Cheap phone rates are your friend. Text messages and phone-to-phone photos help. Blogs help (get her on board with this too). Flickr helps.
But no. It’s not the same, and some days you will just want to go over there and have a cuppa and a chat, and you will rail against the universe at the unfairness of it all. (Last time I visited my sister it almost made me cry that I didn’t know my way around her kitchen. I should know my way around my sister’s kitchen!)
Then you’ll pick up the phone and it’ll be a bit better. And you find ways to work with it. And you don’t love it, but you learn to live with it.