What to do when your partner won’t let you take your child to visit family abroad
It’s 7:30 on a Tuesday night, I’m folding our 6-year-old Mia’s dinosaur pajamas, laptop open to the Portuguese visa application page on the kitchen counter. My partner Jake comes in from mowing the lawn, cracks a beer, and leans against the fridge. “I still don’t think this is a good idea,” he says. “I don’t want you two going without me.”
I haven’t seen my parents in four years. They moved to Portugal after I finished college, and COVID hit right after Mia turned two, so the last time they held her was when she was still in diapers. My mom finished breast cancer chemo six months ago, and all she’s asked for is two weeks with her granddaughter, walking the beach where I grew up and eating pastries at the shop down the road from their house. Jake can’t get time off—his firm just pushed back a big product launch, and if he takes leave now, he loses his annual bonus. We can’t afford to pass that up, not with Mia starting first grade next year and new school fees to pay.
Mia runs in a second later, holding up a rock she painted bright purple. “Is it time to talk about grandma and grandpa? Can I bring my T-Rex?” I brush crumbs of goldfish crackers off her cheek and tell her we’re still sorting out the details, and she runs back out to the backyard to dig more rocks.
I was furious at first. I slammed the laptop shut. I thought, how can he do this? This is my family, they haven’t seen her in years, my mom just went through cancer. I thought he was being controlling, that he didn’t trust me to take care of our own daughter. We didn’t speak for the rest of the night. I slept on the couch, ate leftover cold pizza for breakfast the next day, and spent an hour ranting to my best friend on the phone about how unreasonable he was.
Two days later, I went into the living room to grab my sweater, and he was sitting on the couch scrolling through old photos on his phone. It was the album from when we all visited my parents when Mia was a baby, her in a frayed sunhat on the beach, sand crammed in every fold of her outfit. He looked up at me and his eyes were red, and he said, “My coworker’s ex took their kid to Mexico last year, and she just didn’t come back. She changed the locks on their house, refused to send the kid back. I know that’s not you. I know you’d never do that. But I can’t stop thinking about it. What if something happens? A plane crash, you get sick, Mia gets sick, and I’m 5000 miles away and I can’t get to her.”
I sat down next to him, and I realized I’d been assuming the worst this whole time. I never asked him what he was actually scared of, I just got defensive. I pulled out a notebook and a pen, and I told him to list every single thing he was worried about, no matter how silly it sounded. He ended up with four clear worries: Mia gets sick on the trip and I can’t handle it alone, something goes wrong with travel and I can’t get home when he needs me, we lose cell service and he can’t reach us for hours, and if something terrible happened to me, he wouldn’t have anyone on the ground to care for Mia until he could fly over.
Instead of dismissing each fear, I worked through them one by one with small, concrete changes. For the medical stuff, I bought a $25 travel insurance policy that covers emergency room visits and medical evacuation, saved the phone number and address of my parents’ local clinic into his phone, and left an extra $400 in our joint account just for any unexpected costs. For the getting stuck problem, I paid an extra $180 to get fully refundable plane tickets, so if he needs us back early for any reason, we can change the flight without losing all the money. For the no cell service problem, I downloaded offline Google Maps for the entire area we’re staying, shared my live location with him permanently through Google Maps (it’s free, I didn’t know that before), and booked a rental car through a company that has 24/7 English-speaking roadside assistance. For the worst case scenario, I went to the post office downtown and got a notarized letter for $10 that says my mom has temporary permission to make medical and legal decisions for Mia if I can’t, left a printed copy in his bedside drawer, and uploaded a digital copy to his Google Drive. We also agreed on a non-negotiable 7PM video call every night, his time. If I can’t make it for any reason, I have to text him at least an hour ahead.
A few days into working this out, I realized Mia had been picking up on the tension. She started having nightmares again, which she hadn’t had in over a year. She woke up crying two nights in a row saying she didn’t want anyone to go anywhere. That’s when I remembered: kids always know when something’s off between parents, even if you only fight when they’re asleep or not in the room. They fill in the blanks with their own fears, usually thinking it’s their fault, or that the family’s going to split up. So the next day, we sat down with her at the kitchen table with a big bowl of goldfish, and we told her plainly that we were working out all the details to make the trip safe, that we both loved her, that we weren’t mad at each other anymore, and we’d let her know the second everything was confirmed. That night, she didn’t have a nightmare.
A lot of people I’ve talked to about this said I should just go without his permission, or call him controlling and walk away. But that never felt right to me. Everyone has different levels of fear when it comes to their kids, especially when they can’t be there to see what’s going on. It doesn’t make him a bad partner, it just means we had to work through it instead of picking a fight.
For other parents stuck in this spot, the small steps I took work better than big dramatic moves. Start by asking for the full list of worries, write them down, don’t interrupt. Most of the time, the big scary “he won’t let me go” is just a bunch of small unspoken fears piled up. Then address each one with something concrete, even if it’s tiny. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money—sharing your location is free, writing down emergency contacts is free. And don’t hide the tension from your kid. Tell them what’s going on in simple terms, so they don’t make up a scarier story than the real one.
We leave next month. Jake still says he’s going to be checking his phone every time it dings while we’re gone. I don’t blame him. I still worry a little too—what if Mia gets motion sickness on the drive from the airport, what if it rains the whole week we’re there. But we’ve got a plan, and we worked it out together, instead of yelling at each other about it. Last week, Mia drew a picture of the four of us on the beach, and Jake taped it to the front of the fridge, right next to his work calendar, with our departure date circled in red marker. It’s not perfect, and there’s still a lot that could go wrong, but it’s the best we can do right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What to do when your partner won’t let you take your child to visit family abroad