Saturday, September 17, 2011

Family, Relationships, and Being 6000 Miles Away When Your New Niece is Born

I have a new niece. Her name is Smushy (according to her Doda Lauren, that is; other family members call her by the name on her birth certificate). She is adorable and wonderful...and 6000 miles away. Which sucks.

When I moved here, I had one niece who was old enough to look at me on the computer, identify me by sight, and semi-carry a conversation. Our conversations have since progressed to playing hide-and-seek, making faces at each other, and her telling me about her day. Smushy can't do that yet; as an infant, she knows people by voice (sound), smell, and feel, mostly the middle and last ones now. I won't be seeing my niece until she's about 9 months old (assuming I go back to NY for the summer like I plan to). I held Squishy the day she was born; Smushy is going to be 9 months old before I hold her or see her in real life, and she might not even let me hold her because she won't know me. That really, really sucks; my own niece who I love so much not even knowing me.

I knew that at some point this would happen. I don't expect my family and friends to stop living their lives because I'm not there, but each time something big happens there, it hurts and it's hard. I'm happy here, I really am. It's just hard when life events happen without you there.

I don't even want to think about when more family and friends get engaged, married, and have kids and I won't be there.

This was depressing. Sorry. But this is one of the hardest-hitting and most bringing-you-down-to-reality, if you will, parts of making aliyah without all of your family and friends.

2 comments:

  1. That's the thing about moving to israel or any other foreign place...at the end of the day, you are foreign, and there's nothing you can really do about that.
    שנה טוב ומתוקה

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  2. Anonymous-- it's not that I'm foreign or in a foreign country. It's that the rest of my family and friends aren't here also and it sucks to not be near them.

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