Feeling Like An Immigrant Again

I feel like an immigrant again. It's an early foggy morning with the dawn just ahead of us. I'm en route to the airport for a day trip. I know my way around. I know the roads. I know the distances. I know the language, the jargon, the jokes, the greetings. Even where i can get tea in each terminal. I know the business I'm going to conduct in a few hours. Yet, I feel like an immigrant.

The pain of departing my homeland almost fourteen years ago so vivid in my heart. The joy of seeing M again after a long separation overwhelmed the pain.  I remember the fog in the air the first day I landed in Toronto. The light of the fading sun; the smell of new kinds of pastries; the smooth drive to an apartment that was to be my home for the next six years; the anxiety to reach a long distance phone and call home.

I miss my mother.

I wonder what if A also packs his bags one day and fly far far away paying me visits just over phone just once in a while. 

I wonder how parents endure. What a sacrifice!

I will be back home tonight enshala. Possibly past m's bedtime. I wonder what she feels about her day.  Will she miss me? I will be back enshala and I will hold her when she wakes around midnight and I will nurse her and I will caress her fluffy hair.

I feel like an immigrant again and I hope to burry this feeling within me so my kids don't have to experience it, ever.