I’m the out-of-town sister.   My dad and step-mom live in Texas. My mom and step-dad live in Utah, as do my two siblings.  I live in Kansas.

I left home when I graduated from high school in 1980, and I only returned to my childhood home in Orange County, California for one summer.  Now several dominoes have fallen, and my now-married sisters live in the same county in Utah as my mother.

Since the summer of 1981, I have lived away from my parents and my siblings to pursue college degrees, to work full time to support myself, and now to support my husband as I followed him from grad school in California to his first job in West Virginia to a promotion in Kansas.

I travel regularly by plane or by car to see my extended family.  In my twenties, I made a dozen long car rides by myself between DC and California to see my family.  When my two children were born, I took them to see their grandparents annually for several years.  Every once and a while I mail things.  At least we have the phone and other means of connecting that did not exist 100+ years ago for my ancestors who were separated by immigration from England, France and Germany to the US.

But these efforts to bridge the distance are not the same as living within an hour’s drive.

Wherever I live, I observe people gathering with extended family on a regular basis.  At church, I see several pews occupied by older adults sitting with an adult child and grandchildren from that child. My daughter’s best friend has a cousin who attends the same school. The two families go out to dinner, go to sporting events, and even go on family vacations together.

Extended families who live near each other can help offer an extra pair of hands to drive kids places, bring meals when someone is sick, drive each other to doctor’s appointments, shuffle furniture among their various homes, and pick up items at the store.

I do try to create strong connections with people wherever I live. In the last decade I have even started calling them “fictive kin,” a term academics use to describe connections that are closer than “friends” but lacking literal blood ties.  My fictive sisters and I list each other on forms as “emergency contact,” we drive each other to the airport, we loan each other recipe ingredients on Sundays.  It’s some comfort.

But now that my parents are moving through their 70s and accruing more health concerns, living an 8 hour drive from my dad and a 16 drive from my mom is a growing problem. Not being there for Thanksgiving is less upsetting than not being there for recovery from a surgery.

I try to travel, but it’s harder to jump in the car when I have children now in addition to paid work and volunteer work duties.  I have an ache in my heart that I try to soothe by visiting older women in my town whose children live out of state, making them my fictive mothers or grandmothers. (I have a friend who is 104, so I still have one fictive grandmother even though I’m in my 50s.)

Sometimes fostering these relationships with women who live in my town helps me feel better.  At my most peaceful moments, the concept of literal blood connections between people expands so that I see how I’m connected to everyone in my path as children of common ancestors thousands of years in the past.  And I frequently note that I am connected to everyone because we share the same Heavenly Father.

But then I hear women around me talk about not getting significant help from their own “out-of-town” relatives, the ache grows again and I have to decide how to soothe the ache: Travel to them again this year? Call them more? Push my husband to look for work in the same state as one of my parents?  Rent a house in Utah or Texas for an entire summer? Serve locally as a fictive daughter, sister, cousin, aunt, mother or (now that I’m getting older) grandmother?   Pray, sing hymns, read scriptures, read devotional literature, meditate, see a therapist?

Sorry to close with more questions than answers. I don’t have an easy response to this situation to offer even though it’s something I have tried to address for three and a half decades.


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