Home and Away

When I finished university back in Scotland, I was only twenty-one and felt I had all the time in the world to do what I wanted. I jumped on a one-way ticket to New Zealand. My brother quickly followed me, and we had a great few years living pay-check to pay-check in the adventure playground of Queenstown. After a few years, my brother left for another ski resort in Canada, and I fell in love with a Kiwi farmer and stayed in the southern hemisphere. During this transformative time, embarrassingly, my focus was primarily on myself. I worked as a ranger in Fiordland, a station cook in Western Australia, a vet technician and relief milker in Southland, a snowmaker on ski resorts. I gave little thought to what the future held, and even less to what that might mean for how our family back in Scotland.

My brother has now married and had kids – in Whistler, British Columbia. I have bought a lifestyle block and have a terrifying mortgage floating above my head – in Lauder, Aotearoa New Zealand. All of a sudden, life has become a little serious for both my brother and I, and this has made our fancy-free travelling lifestyle a little harder. Living nomadically in our twenties meant we had the luxury of packing a bag and leaving, and generally being happy to sleep on a floor somewhere. Now, in my thirties, I do require a bed (at the bare minimum), but also have to work out the logistics of someone to look after the farm and the animals, and the weeks leading up to travelling can be more stressful than normal.

And then of course, the pandemic happened. The impossibility of not being able to see any of my family during that time was suffocating. Prior to Covid, I never once thought that I would not be able to just jump on a plane and get home. In fact, the reason I have an emergency credit card is for this very purpose. Since the borders have opened, it has started to dawn on me that the life decisions I made in my twenties will impact not only me, but the shape of my family and its future. As my parents age, these long-haul flights from Scotland are becoming increasingly harder for them, and their priority is to see their grandchildren in Canada. Travelling there is a little easier than the thirty-odd hours to see me in New Zealand. I used to pack a bag and fly up to visit when my parents would visit my brother, but there is little chance for us to spend quality time together – we are so focused on building relationships with my brother’s children that we forget we need to learn to be adults together too. Not just faces on a screen or a message bubble in disparate time zones.

The relationship I have with my family is great, but I am keenly aware that we don’t share the mundane moments that make life so exquisite. Sitting with a cup of tea in the evening with my partner is my favourite part of the day, and it is this sort of thing that I miss with my family back home. Living overseas can definitely lead to quality time when I meet my family, but what I long for is the quantity time. I don’t need fancy meals or nice holidays with them – I yearn for the mundane moments, sitting in silence or driving somewhere.

Even though my mortgage, partner and pets would have something to say if I decided to go back to Scotland, I can’t mentally close that door because part of me thinks there is an alternative life back in my hometown with my parents only thirty minutes away, not thirty hours. I feel I have robbed them of a life with their adult children by choosing to stay overseas.

Would I have a farm back home? Not likely. Life would be very different, but my family would be closer. I don’t think I will ever know if I have made the ‘right’ choice by staying in the same country as the man I fell in love with rather than going back to be with my aging parents, but I know I am happy with where I am right now… and that I also need to go give them a ring ASAP.