Child of an away from home parent
My Experience As a Child of an Away from Home Parent
Being the child of an away from home parent was quite difficult for me. As a child, I struggled for attention as the eldest of two children. My sister was four years younger than I was and I was often given a brunt of the chores because I was older than she was. My mother was a business person and also attended college at night when we were very young. She would get home after midnight and travel for weeks at a time to different countries which began when I was five years old.
When my mother would reappear, she would always bring us t-shirts and souvenirs from her travels. We would be happy to see her but she had no real idea about what was going on in our personal lives. She would not know about school events, homework assignments, illnesses etc. Even though we loved her, we still felt like she preferred her lifestyle over being a parent to us. My mother worked for a company that rarely promoted women so my mother would work long hours, weekends, and travel abroad to try to get ahead. She wanted to become a very successful businesswoman because her mother had not gone to college and neither did any of her three sisters and five brothers. My mother finished her MBA after we were born in order to go up higher in the corporate world. I felt like this decision hurt her role as a parent because she could have found a job with fewer hours and travel commitments.
As a child growing up in this situation, my father was often left with a large burden. He had to be both mother and father and would work early in the morning. He would leave for work at 4 AM and pick us up from after school daycare at 5:30 pm. My sister and I would only see my mother if she was dropping us off at school, by the time I was in sixth grade, we were walking to school by ourselves every day. Because of this, we often felt very introverted as teenagers. My sister and I mainly kept to ourselves because we were at home doing chores or spending weekends with our paternal grandparents. As adults, we had issues trusting men and my sister has never been on a real date with a man and she is twenty one years old now.
As a parent now, I am a stay at home mom because of the upbringing that I had. I went to college and met my husband through a long distance relationship; we eventually were able to make our relationship work by me moving to his hometown. My greatest fear has been becoming too distant from my three year old because I did not have a mother that was around a lot. I feel like it is hard to be a child of an away parent. It is very hard to balance the commitments of a job and the parent child relationship when you are away from home for extended periods of time. It was not right for my family but with new technology it is becoming easier to stay connected and involved in your child’s life while away.
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gloria pinn
said:
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... I found this articles very honest and interesting, each generation trying to make the work life balance work for them and their children, it is very difficult to get it right no matter how hard you try. |
