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Author: Liza Akhaladze

Farewell

I’m ten years old. My mother is wearing a robe with blue dots, leaning against the the balcony of our house. She bought it when she was preparing to give birth to my sister. She smiles at me, waves.

This is the morning of my mother’s departure for emigration, which I remember like a scene from a movie. She didn’t want me to be left at the airport thinking that something tragic was happening, so she dropped me off at school, as usual. When I got home, I found a letter from my mother in my room, but she herself was gone.

My mother went to Italy. I used to sleep with the blue-dotted robe, and I would smell it, I would fill notebooks with notes. After she left, going to school became more difficult, I started getting 8’s in math, and many things went wrong: I lost the routine that ten-year-old girls really need (although they often don’t know it themselves).

I’m twenty-two now, and I can barely admit it to myself that every day I chase after feelings that remind me, at least a little, of what it was like to go to bed with my mother on a Sunday night with my hair freshly blow-dried. It’s strange, because I used to hate those kinds of nights, and I never thought I’d ever miss them so much.

Generational Emigration

Now, at twenty-two, I often spend my evenings in front of the parliament, but I can’t lie that I’ve never wanted to leave the country. I constantly contemplate between leaving and staying. For children of immigrant mothers, leaving has an even greater burden. When I think about emigration, the following question comes to mind, among many others: Would I understand my mother better if I knew, sitting at the airport, that I am not going on a trip?

I don’t have children, but I have a sister, a father, grandparents, friends… When I wave goodbye to people as I go up the escalator at the airport, I don’t think I’ll be able to smile like my mother, which raises another question: Why should I have to go? Why did my mother have to go? What about her mother?

My grandmother was also an immigrant. For almost a year, while she worked in another country, my mother lived with her father and younger brother.

“My father worked, but his income wasn’t enough to pay for tutoring and cover our daily expenses ,” says my mother. According to her, in addition to missing her, other feelings intensified: “ I was suffering a lot… On the one hand, I was tormented by longing, because my mother had never been far from us before, and on the other hand, I was protesting and angry at my father, because he stayed and my mother left.”

My mother did most of the housework. At the same time, she was also preparing for the university entrance exams. She says that her grandmother’s emigration gave her additional motivation to study: “I felt a lot of responsibility because my mother had decided [to go abroad to work] for me. I was afraid that I would disappoint her.”

I ask her if her mother has understood her better now that she is an immigrant herself. She replies that she has had to go to bed and wake up without her children for years, and she still thinks about how we are without her and what we have missed because of her absence: “I am sure that us being alone worried my mother more than her own pain. The years [of my emigration] have strengthened my relationship with my mother much more than before, when I did not realize what a blessing it was to be able to see her at any time, or what path she went through in emigration… Now, in addition to the love of mother and daughter, I also feel a sense of feminine solidarity towards her.”

According to data by the National Statistics Office of Georgia, the number of people migrating from Georgia in 2023 increased by 95.6% compared to 2022. In recent years, this figure has not been growing not so slowly. This means that every year more and more people are forced to leave their children at home and go to work elsewhere. However, reducing the number of immigrants in the country would have a domino effect on many other problems.

It’s true that living with your mother doesn’t eliminate problems, but it makes them easier to solve, or sometimes to adapt to, them. This is what I mean when I say that if fewer people have to leave the country, many things will change for the better, both individually and collectively: I believe that if little girls feel safe, everything in the country will improve.

Children can talk to their parents via video call, but nothing replaces the feeling of crying heartily in their mother’s arms after a hard day and then falling asleep with her. My mother sent me kisses every day via Skype, but what I missed most was sleeping in her arms — the feeling that everything was solvable.

Estrangement

My mother left for Italy in 2012, and I first visited her in 2017. Before I arrived, I was afraid that my mother wouldn’t like me. It’s strange, but the first time I felt the full force of returning to her was when I saw the towels and a book packed in my bag in the morning, ready to go to the beach. That’s when I realized that I was close to my mother again.

When talking about emigration, not many people mention estrangement. It seems that we often avoid this topic so as not to accidentally say too much. Even the word itself is foreign to us. It took me many years to admit to myself: my mother and I were estranged.

I believe that if we want this word to not burn on the tip of our tongues, we need to mention it more often. There is no one to blame here, except for the distance and the circumstances that caused the distance.

“Estrangement has a worth, a very high worth. Something was lost, but I knew you would understand why,” my mother tells me.

She tells me that until now she had an unanswered question: was it worth emigrating? She answered this question after recent events: “[I am paying the price for] your free thinking that I am here. Being here gave me the opportunity to help you get an education, which became a guarantee of your freedom.”

It’s true, but it’s not fair that grandma had to emigrate for my mother, and my mother for me, and now I’m considering leaving too. The cycle of emigration cannot and should not continue indefinitely.

According to my mother, she hasn’t been truly happy in twelve years:

“The good and the bad of my country follow me… You’re not from here, you don’t feel at home in your own country anymore. That’s emigration.”