What Thirteen Years of Distance Taught Me About Love Sacrifice and the True Cost of Migration By Faith Gabrielle Jalmasco

There is a particular kind of childhood that millions of children around the world share, one that is rarely spoken about in the conversations that surround migration and domestic work. It is the childhood of waiting. Of learning to celebrate birthdays without the one person you most want beside you. Of scanning the faces in a school hall during a graduation ceremony and feeling the absence of your mother like a physical ache in your chest. Of growing up strong not because strength came easily, but because there was simply no other choice.

I was seven years old when my mother left. Seven years old, which means I was old enough to feel everything but too young to understand any of it. I knew that she was gone. I knew that mornings would come without her, that nights would end without her voice, that the small and ordinary moments of childhood, the ones that other children take for granted, would now carry a particular kind of emptiness. What I could not yet know was that this would continue for thirteen years.

Thirteen years is not an absence. It is an entire childhood. It is the gap between a seven year old who cannot comprehend why her mother has gone and a twenty year old who understands it all too well. In that space between confusion and comprehension, I grew up. I learned independence not as a choice but as a necessity. I found comfort in family members who stepped in with love and care, in friends who stayed close, in studies and activities that kept me moving forward. But there were emotions I could not easily share, feelings of abandonment that sat alongside an equally deep knowledge that my mother had not left out of want, but out of love.

That contradiction, being left because you are loved, is one of the most painful and least acknowledged experiences in the story of domestic work. When a mother leaves her child to care for someone else's family in another country, she does not stop being a mother. She does not stop aching at every milestone she misses. She carries her child with her into every home she works in, into every early morning and late night, into every moment of exhaustion and loneliness. The sacrifice is total. And yet the system that requires that sacrifice offers so little in return.

This is why the right to change employer without restriction matters so deeply. A mother who is trapped with an employer who mistreats her, who controls her movements, who denies her the basic dignities she deserves, has no good options. She cannot easily leave without risking her legal status. She cannot speak up without fear of losing everything. And so she endures, adding more distance, more silence, more missed moments to an already heartbreaking tally. No mother should have to choose between her safety and her ability to stay in the country where she is working to build her child's future.

I wished, when I was small, that someone had explained more to me. That perhaps with more understanding, the sadness might have been a little lighter. That thought speaks to something important about what happens when domestic workers are not given the rights and stability they deserve. The uncertainty filters down. It reaches the children left behind, who sense the worry in their mother's voice during phone calls even when she tries to hide it. When the right to renew the Overseas Domestic Worker Visa is not guaranteed, a mother's anxiety about her future becomes her child's anxiety too, felt across thousands of miles.

The moments I treasure most are the simplest ones. Talking to my mother. Hearing her voice. Sharing the small details of our days with each other across the distance. Those moments are lifelines. But they are not enough to fill thirteen years. They are not enough to replace the arms that should have been there during illness, during sorrow, during the quiet ordinary Tuesday evenings that nobody photographs but everyone remembers. Domestic workers deserve the right to settlement so that the years they give to this country can eventually lead somewhere permanent. So that the sacrifice has an end point. So that the separation is not indefinite but finite, with a real and reachable future waiting on the other side.

And at the heart of everything I have carried through these years is a longing that goes beyond reunion. It is the longing for my mother to be seen. To be recognised not just as a worker, not just as a visa holder, not just as someone performing a function in a household far from home, but as a person of full worth and dignity who belongs somewhere completely. The right to British citizenship would give that recognition. It would say to every domestic worker who has given years of their life to this country that they are not temporary. That they matter. That the country they have served is also, finally and fully, their home.

I want to say something to other children who share my experience.

It is okay to cry, to be angry, to feel lonely. Missing your mother is not weakness. Distance might teach you many lessons about strength and love. Those words are true and hard won. But they should not have to be necessary. No child should have to learn strength through years of absence. No mother should have to teach her child resilience from across an ocean.

Love cannot be eroded by distance. I know that now, at twenty, with a clarity that only comes from having lived it. But love also cannot replace presence. And presence is exactly what domestic workers are fighting for. The right to be present in their own lives, in their children's lives, in the country they call home. The right to stop waiting and start belonging.

Thirteen years is a long time to wait. It is long enough. The time for change is now.

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