I’ve never had this conversation with my parents.
But I think about it sometimes. What did they picture when they had me? I’m an only child, so for them, it’s just me. No siblings to fill the gaps.
Most of my family lives within an hour of each other in the South of France. The “far” ones are maybe three hours away.
Then there’s me. Continents away.
I left home at 14 for boarding school. University at 17, two hours away. Then Australia, England, Paris... back to the South of France but still three hours from home... and then I properly disappeared. North America. Four years of travel. Now Bangkok. My parents don’t have passports. They don’t fly much. They don’t visit.
I’m always the one missing things. Birthdays, Christmases, Sunday lunches, baby announcements, the random Saturday get-together that nobody planned but everyone showed up for. I don’t just pop by.
I imagine they pictured something different. Me living nearby, married to a French woman - they love Rosie, genuinely, but a French wife would have been more practical, more familiar. Close enough to visit a few times a month, to just show up for dinner without it being an event. And grandchildren, obviously. Kids they could look after for a weekend while we went away. Kids who’d come over after school, just because.
That’s what I had growing up. Both sets of grandparents nearby, always around. Sunday lunch at my paternal grandparents, every week, for years. It was just normal.
They won’t have that version. Not with me.
Rosie and I tried to have children. It didn’t work out, and that chapter is behind us now. So it’s not just the distance they’re dealing with - it’s a whole picture that won’t come together the way they imagined when they became parents. And beyond that, there’s another chapter ahead none of us have figured out yet. One day they’ll be older and might need me around. I have no intention of moving back to France right now... so that’s something future Jeremie will have to navigate. Another expectation, on both sides, that might not go the way anyone planned.
Rosie’s parents are in a similar spot. Three kids. All three married foreigners. Two living abroad for fifteen years. The one who stayed in England is four hours away. Not exactly the weekly Sunday roast.
And Rosie has her own version of those childhood memories - the family holidays, the birthdays, the time with her grandma. We both grew up surrounded by that. And neither of us is able to give it back to the people who gave it to us.
I wrote about expectations a few months ago in The Expectation Trap. The short version: expectations are a double-edged sword. They help us dream and plan. But when life doesn’t match the picture, the gap becomes the source of all the frustration, the sadness, the quiet disappointment.
My parents couldn’t have predicted, back in the late 80s when they were dreaming about the future, that it would become this easy to live on the other side of the world. The world they imagined for me was the only world they knew. In that world, I would have stayed close.
But I didn’t. And I’m genuinely ok with that - I chose this life, and I’d choose it again. But I can also acknowledge it came at a cost, for them, and for us. And that more of those moments are still ahead.
The hard thing about building expectations around your children is that at some point, they grow up and make their own choices. Choices you can’t control. The life you pictured for them, or with them, isn’t yours to decide.
At some point, most of us will have to grieve a version of our life that we thought would happen but didn’t.
For Rosie and me, that’s the version where we become parents. (Though even that is complicated - whether we are parents or not, given the losses we went through, including a TFMR, is actually a whole conversation in itself. Maybe the subject of a future newsletter.) We’ve had to sit with that. Accept what isn’t going to be. Make peace with experiences we won’t get to have. It doesn’t fully go away. But you learn to carry it differently over time.
Our parents are doing something similar. Grieving a version of family life that didn’t quite materialize. The grandchildren who didn’t come. The table that didn’t fill up. And the uncertainty of what’s ahead - how it’ll all look when they’re older, when they might need us around.
What do you do with that? You can spend a lot of time in the gap between what you expected and what is. Replaying it, wishing things had gone differently. But it doesn’t change anything. The past is the past.
What’s left is acceptance. Coming to peace with the life you actually have, not the one you planned. And learning to make the most of what is - not what you hoped it would be.
This isn’t just a thing that happens to people who made unconventional choices, by the way. It’s universal. The parent who imagined a daughter nearby. The couple who planned on children and it went another way. The person who pictured a career, a relationship, a version of themselves, that never arrived.
We all carry something like that. A life we imagined that didn’t happen.
The question is just what we do with it.
J