When Elena's mother (not her real name) left Honduras, she said goodbye to her six-year-old daughter by buying her an ice cream. Right after her, she undertook one of her greatest sacrifices: moving alone to Spain with nothing to find a job and get a house to give her little girl a more hopeful future. She achieved it after six years, in 2022. When they met again at the airport, Elena was not able to approach her, she stood paralyzed while her grandmother, who had taken care of her all those years, encouraged her to give him a hug. “I was incapable, I had stopped seeing her as my mother,” says the girl, who is now 13 years old, sincerely.
In 2023, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued 41,000 family reunification visas. Behind this procedure, the same scheme is almost always repeated. The woman is the one who emigrates first and it takes an average of six years to bring her family, almost always her children, because the parents of the children often disappear in this process. Minors are usually left in the care of their maternal grandmothers in the country of origin. The process is so long that the children that the women left behind as babies or very young children arrive home as teenagers.
Along the way, years of coexistence and treatment have been lost in a stage in which the relationship between parents and children is defined. “My mother and I didn't talk to each other, but it wasn't out of bad feelings, it's just that we didn't know how to relate to each other. We stayed like this for eight months, during which she cried a lot, until it occurred to me to start leaving notes for her around the house. When she saw the first one, she burst out laughing,” says Elena. It wasn't until a year after her arrival that they hugged again.
The girl recounts her experience at the headquarters of the SEI association in Pamplona, which has a unique program in Spain dedicated specifically to the reunion between parents and children and to migratory grief, as the psychological process experienced by a person who leaves their country is called. In their rooms, families are able to put words for the first time to what it has meant to live together again and feel like a nucleus again, after years apart. In one of those sessions, Pedro, an 18-year-old Brazilian, asked his mother for the first time why it had taken her so long to bring him, why she had abandoned him. He was left in the care of his grandmother when he was four years old, the moment when one begins to treasure memories. He saw her mother again 12 years later, in 2022. “I couldn't call her mom,” he says. For her, however, it was crucial that he call her that again.
On the other side, there are women who have built a home in a strange country while watching their children for a few minutes on a mobile screen at the end of a strenuous day of work. Narda, 50, left a son in Bolivia at the age of 11 in 2018, whom she managed to bring to Pamplona at the age of 17. During the time she was alone in Spain, her ex-husband turned her son against her. , telling him that she had abandoned him and did not want to take him with her. Her son even blocked her on WhatsApp and refused to talk to her on several occasions. These rejections cut through her like a dagger. “Although she saw that my messages were not reaching her, I continued telling her what I had done each day and how I felt, until she spoke to me normally again,” says Narda. In her case, there was no emotion or hugs at the airport either. She acted kindly, but she felt like there was a wall. Now it is about reestablishing trust, but also authority,” says the woman. And all that, working weekends and holidays.
What affects the most is what happens closest. So you don't miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe
Narda has a degree in Law, but in Spain she has dedicated herself to caring for children and the elderly. She has lived horrible experiences like the one she had with her first employers, who prohibited her from getting into the car with the whole family and forced her to carry the children's backpacks on foot. Luckily, she got along very well with another of the older ladies she cared for and she liked Narda reading the newspaper aloud to her. In this way, she discovered SEI in a news story. “Until we talked here, my son didn't understand what I had been through all this time. I told him things like how at Christmas I didn't leave the house to see the lights because I was afraid that the police would identify me in the center of the city and kick me out of the country,” she says. Little by little, they are taking steps, like the day when Narda once again saw a glimpse of the child she raised until he was 11 years old. They were eating and she got up to go to the kitchen. When she returned, her son had hidden her plate from him. “That was a joke I played when I was a kid,” she explains with a smile.
“There is a possibility of resuming this bond, sometimes we are just a bridge for it to exist again. They are families that are fractured and have to put themselves back together,” details Oskia Azcarate, technical coordinator and family therapist of the association. This program was actually born in a public institute that began to detect the shortcomings and needs of immigrant students who began to be more numerous in their classrooms at the end of the 1990s. He joined forces with a parish to give reinforcement classes. From there they moved on to a program to help these kids build social relationships at a key moment such as adolescence. It was in 2010 when they included the family part in this intervention with SEI. “The challenge is not only in getting the papers, but in everything that comes after, in that loneliness that adolescents and also mothers experience, which sometimes translates into anger if it is not prevented,” says Azcarate. In the last year they have served 233 families of 33 different nationalities.
When cohabitation returns, another life also begins for these women, who add a new responsibility to their already busy lives. Ana Gabriela, 34 years old, tells with a smile on her face about her years of hardship, until she was finally able to bring her children Joel and Gabriela from Honduras. “I had to force myself to have a routine again. Before, I didn't care about cooking something and whether it would last for three days or I didn't care about the schedule. If I saw a job offer on a holiday, I took it. I also had doubts about whether they were going to get used to my pace or I to theirs. I constantly called my mother to ask what they liked to eat or if it was normal for them to have a headache. I had to learn how to be a mother again,” says Ana Gabriela.
When she arrived in Pamplona, in 2019, she shared a room with three other women. He had left her daughter at two years old and him at seven. She also stayed with her maternal grandparents, because her ex-partner left for the United States. She had long negotiations with him until she signed the papers to allow the transfer of the little ones and, as soon as she did, she started the countdown: “If they don't travel in a month, you have to start the process again.” At work, they advanced her the money to pay for the plane tickets and her boss personally accompanied her to the Madrid airport on April 8, 2023. Everyone around her knew how much she had suffered until she had her little ones. her with her. She was very scared that they wouldn't recognize her. “But mom, did you really think that she wouldn't know who you were?” Little Gabriela asks her now. “Of course, I had that fear, but when we hugged again I felt that that bond still existed,” she responds. The first night, the three of them slept together in the same bed.
Although in the family reunion that connection between mothers and children re-emerges, afterwards we have to face day to day life. Neilyn, a 16-year-old Nicaraguan, had it difficult when she landed here in 2022. “When I arrived in Spain, I got sick. I didn't want to leave my room, eat, or go to school. I spent months like this, until in the summer, when I was able to share more time with my mother, everything improved,” explains the girl. During the rest of the year, they barely spend two hours at home because her mother works in hospitality. It was in a meeting in this association when they expressed everything that had been left in a drawer for so many years: “I felt that for my mother I was not a big deal and she had not missed me that much in these years. But in that conversation I understood everything and I asked her for forgiveness in case she had been a bad daughter.”
Ana Gabriela feels that everything she experienced makes sense now that she has her children with her, although she knows that this is a daily struggle. What she said to her mother when she already knew that her little ones' documentation was in order, brings together the depth and practicality that only a mother can display in the same sentence: “I told my mother: 'Come with your suitcase. empty, I have prepared everything here to start from scratch, they don't need anything.' Well, I told him to pack a change of clothes in case they vomited on the trip.”
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Leaving #son #years #meeting #teenager #couldn39t #call #mom