Does Early Separation From a Single Parent And Reuniting In a New Country Affect Your Relationship?
Last week I sat across from Lila and her 14-year-old son Kai at our local community center coffee hour. Lila stirred a lukewarm decaf that had gone cold 20 minutes earlier while Kai slouched in his chair, picking at a hole in the knee of his jeans and staring at the skate park through the window. When I asked what brought them in, Lila blurted the question I hear from immigrant parents at least once a month: “I left him when he was 5 with my brother to get settled here. I brought him over when he was 10. Did I break our relationship for good?”
Lila’s story is the same one I’ve heard from a dozen other single parents over the seven years I’ve led parenting workshops for new immigrant families. She left the Philippines alone because she couldn’t get a dependent visa with the first cleaning job she secured, and couldn’t afford to wait for a better opening. Kai was her only child, the only person she had left, but she made the choice that felt like the only option: leave him with her older brother and his wife, who already had three kids, and save every penny to bring him over. For five years, they video called once a week, whenever Lila wasn’t working a double shift. She sent birthday presents, extra money for school uniforms, asked every week what he’d eaten that day, what games he played after school. She built the whole version of their life together in her head, counting down the days until they could be reunited.
When he finally landed in Toronto, Lila waited at the airport with a giant teddy bear and a container of his favorite adobo she’d made that morning. She ran to hug him, and he hid behind the immigration officer, wouldn’t even look up at her. That first year was a mess. Kai wouldn’t eat her cooking, said Auntie Mila’s adobo tasted better. Lila would get angry, yell that she was his mother, why wouldn’t he accept her. Kai would slam his bedroom door and not come out for four hours, just listening to music on his phone. Lila worked 10-hour days, came home too tired to untangle his middle school homework or figure out why he was so quiet, so angry, so distant. She thought the five years apart had turned him into a stranger, that she’d messed up beyond repair.
I hear this from almost every parent in this situation first. They assume the early separation broke their relationship, that the damage is permanent. But what I’ve seen over and over is that most of the conflict isn’t just about the past. It’s about two people showing up to the same relationship with completely different expectations. Lila had five years to daydream about the son she’d raise, the dinners they’d eat, the hugs they’d share. Kai had five years to build a whole life where Lila was just the nice lady on the screen once a week. His uncle, his aunt, his cousins were his real family. His home was the house he’d lived in since he could remember. Then at 10, he’s uprooted, moved across the world, has to learn a new language, a new school, new unwritten rules, and suddenly he’s supposed to be the perfect son to a woman he barely remembers. That’s three huge losses in five years: first he loses his daily life with his mom, then he loses the only home he knows when he leaves his uncle. Of course he’s not going to jump into a new relationship right away.
When Lila and Kai first started coming to my group, we didn’t do any big, heavy talks. We started with three small, doable changes that Lila could fit around her work schedule. First, no more forcing hugs or big “we need to talk” conversations. Instead, Lila started showing up to Kai’s interests without pressure. Kai spent most of his free time at the community skate park, so Lila started going with him every Saturday morning. She’d bring a folding chair and her crossword puzzle, sit 10 feet away from his group of friends, and never bug him to talk or introduce her. If he came over to get a drink of water, she’d just say “Nice trick you did earlier” and that was it. Second, Lila stopped asking Kai to adapt to her life, and started asking him to teach her things about the new life they’re in. She didn’t know how to adjust the settings on her new phone or post photos to the karaoke account she wanted to make, so she asked Kai to show her every Sunday after dinner. That let Kai be the expert for once, instead of always being the kid who doesn’t know anything about how life works here. Third, Lila stopped getting defensive when Kai talked about his uncle’s family. Instead, she started asking for details. When they planned their first Christmas together, she said “Tell me what Auntie Mila always makes for Noche Buena. I can go to the Filipino market and get the ingredients so we can have it the same way.”
Last week, when they were at coffee hour, Kai actually spoke for himself instead of letting Lila do all the talking. He said “It’s still weird. She snores too loud when she watches TV in the living room, and her adobo is still too salty. But… she didn’t yell at me last month when I scraped the side of her car learning to drive. That was cool.” Lila laughed, and wiped a tear off her cheek, and said “He still doesn’t let me hug him before school most days. I still cry sometimes when I think about the five years I missed. But he helped me plant a tomato garden out back last month, and he gave me the first one he picked. That’s more than I thought I’d get a year ago.”
I still don’t have a neat yes or no answer to the question Lila asked me that first day. Of course it affects the relationship. You can’t spend five years apart, go through two huge cross-continental transitions, and not have that change what you have together. You don’t just pick up where you left off, like nothing ever happened. But that doesn’t mean it’s broken. Most of the parents I work with expect to fall into the parent-child relationship they imagined when they left. But what I see is that you just build a new one, slowly, one low-stakes Saturday at the skate park, one tomato from the garden, one uneventful driving lesson at a time. It’s not the relationship you thought you’d have. But it can still be yours.
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