Across Borders, Beyond Wounds: Nurturing Ageing Parent Bonds Overseas
By Rinchaal Patel,
Mindset and Relationship Coach,
YOLO Academy
Contd. from Nov month
Navigating Guilt and Boundaries
One of the most common emotional burdens migrant children face is guilt:
• Guilt for leaving them behind.
• Guilt for not visiting often enough.
• Guilt for not being their primary caregivers.
• Guilt for feeling frustrated or resentful.
But guilt alone does not serve relationships—it often leads to resentment or burnout. Healthy relationships with ageing parents require boundaries:
• Recognising that you cannot meet all their needs alone.
• Sharing responsibility with siblings, relatives, or professional caregivers.
• Setting realistic expectations about what you can provide.
• Accepting that love expressed consistently, even in limited forms, is still love.
Boundaries do not mean neglect. They mean loving without destroying yourself.
Healing the Inner Child While Caring for Parents
Part of maintaining a healthy relationship with ageing parents is tending to the younger self inside us, the child who still longs for validation or nurturing. Practical ways to support this inner healing include:
• Therapy or counselling: A safe space to process unhealed wounds without projecting them entirely onto parents.
• Journaling: Writing letters to your younger self or even unsent letters to your parents.
• Community: Sharing stories with fellow migrants who understand the complexity of cross-border family dynamics.
• Self-parenting: Learning to give yourself the emotional care you once sought from your parents.
When we care for our inner child, we show up for our parents with more patience, less bitterness, and greater clarity.
The Power of Acceptance
Ultimately, maintaining healthy relationships with ageing parents across continents is not about fixing everything. It’s about accepting dual truths:
• They did their best, and it wasn’t always enough.
• We love them, and we sometimes resent them.
• They are ageing, and so are we.
• Some conversations will happen, and some never will.
Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means living fully in the relationship that exists, not the one we wish existed. Within acceptance, there’s still room for joy, humour, gratitude, and connection.
Conclusion: Love Beyond Perfect Words
As a millennial living in Australia with parents ageing in India, I’ve come to see our relationship as a living thing imperfect, evolving, and tender in its own way. We may never have all the conversations I once longed for. We may never perfectly understand each other across cultural and generational divides. But we can still choose love, forgiveness, and connection—one phone call, one visit, one gentle gesture at a time.
Healthy relationships with ageing parents aren’t about erasing the past; they’re about weaving healing into the present. And sometimes, that is more than enough.
