I'm up late now due to a combination of insomnia and also I've missed a holiday in my native country.
This holiday means zero to my children.
I'll fly back, a journey that will require me to travel with an 8-year-old and 5-year-old girl and a very active 2-year-old boy, first to a hotel, where we'll need to wake at 2AM (they won't settle for their 7.45PM bed time, I can tell you), for a flight to Amsterdam, and thence, for a 9-hour flight across an ocean. And I have anxiety disorder and depression.
I'll have to do it again, on my own. And every year from now, as my husband can't get time off in summer easily and fortnight's holidays aren't long enough.
Soon enough, the 8-year-old might start balking about spending her summer away from her boyfriend/best friend and friends (people tend to hook up here young and stay together). Or we'll be going with said half-Canadian boyfriend and his mother in tow with him dis-embarking at Toronto.
See where this is going? It is very likely I will lose my daughter to North America, and lose her quite shortly, she's nearly halfway there, whilst I cannot go with her for the other two. There's no life for that daughter or said boyfriend here.
There's no good steady jobs, no colleges or universities, no homes to rent affordably let alone buy. There's everything for them in North America, two Scots with the gift of dual nationality. And if not him, there's plenty others to fill his place or her own desires.
I see people moving even farther away and I think, if it's for a better life, they do what they must. I totally understand.
I'd never want my own life for my children. I'll do the best I can to stay in touch, to be close.
But it comes at a price, a huge, huge price. That's what you're learning now.
Sorry to be harsh, but that's how it goes.
My old landlord is a dear friend, and two of his brothers went to Australia in the early 70s. There was nothing for the Glaswegian children of poor Irish immigrants here then. So they left. Became teachers, married Australian women, had Australian children. Came back on their own for the funerals of their parents, who gave their blessings for them to go, as they had gone, to go to a place where they could have an education, a lovely house, a decent job, where they'd not be treated like scum.
Only one of their children has even visited. And she didn't stay. Why would she? She's a nurse, she has good jobs in Australia. She's Australian, not British.
When you make the decision to leave, you have to accept such things.
Things like the wedding are just the tip of the iceberg. Her children won't know you. Your children won't know her children in teh same way. They'll grow up and be Kiwis or Aussies and see the world in such a way. They'll see your clinging to the UK as silly and pointless and it will bruise and scar you. They may even despise the UK - say it's backwards and classist and a rip-off and all manner of things. They won't care for the news there, what's it to them? It's just some foreign place.