I’ve spent over half my life away from the children I love: first as a management consultant travelling the globe and most recently as an officer with the United Nations, supporting conflict-affected countries around the world. Through these experiences, and from those of countless colleagues, friends and family members, I’ve experienced both the joy and the heartache of trying to stay connected with the children I love when apart, and have witnessed similar ups and downs of many others.
For years, I just soldiered on: working in different cities, commuting between different countries, flying in and out of different war zones. I read some books, talked to colleagues, friends and family members, and did the best that I could. But in fact, I blundered through my relationships with these wonderful little people, often feeling guilty about how much more I should be doing.
And then, one and a half years into my daughter’s life, with my heroic wife just a few months pregnant with our second child, I was deployed to yet another war zone, this time for three months – which all too slowly became a full year.
Life got turned upside down. How could I leave my sweet little girl? What would I tell her? How could I limit the damage to her precious little heart? How could I leave my still-working, pregnant wife in a foreign city, with a one and a half year old, and with my second child just months away? Would she be OK? What could I do to help her? Would she hate me – would my daughter resent me – somewhere down the road? What about my little boy? Would I see his birth? Would he even know who I was when I returned? Would I return?
So I buried myself in books, scoured the internet, and asked as many questions as I could, to as many people as would listen. Both my Postgraduate Diploma in Communication and Masters degree in Management Studies (majoring in Communication Science) from the University of Waikato/Te Whare Wananga o Waikato in New Zealand/Aotearoa helped with the basics, but I needed a whole lot more.
Throughout this heart wrenching, uplifting, daunting, hopeful rollercoaster of a journey, I was astounded by the fact that no ‘one-stop-shop’ existed to help people stay connected with the children they love when they were apart. In my United Nations Department alone, over 100,000 people were deployed – on often multi-year assignments – all around the world. But this was just a drop in the ocean.
What about the hundreds of thousands of other colleagues in different United Nations entities – and in other international (and regional) organizations – scattered around the globe? Or the 30+ million men and women deployed with national defence forces? Or the hundreds of millions of travelling parents, working in all manner of different sectors, and in a huge range of different professions? Or the hundreds of millions of grandparents, uncles, aunties and older siblings, living away? Or the millions of other people in an endless number of different circumstances.
It dawned on me that hundreds of millions of people, all around the world, were – quite literally (and quite probably at that very moment) asking the same heart-wrenching questions about how to stay connected with the children they love when they were apart and, no doubt, going through similar emotional turmoil trying to find some practical, easy-to-implement solutions. Talk about another truly heart-wrenching thought!
In response, and in the hope of helping others, I founded ConnectedApart – neither as a one-way encyclopaedia of ‘Jared-bore-you-to-deathica’ nor as a basic information aggregator, but rather as a first-of-its-kind ‘platform for collaborative consumption’, on which users could both consume and create, and in so doing benefit from a far richer source of ideas than any one of us could ever provide on our own. In many ways, ConnectedApart is, therefore, a platform for people who want to stay connected with the children they love when they’re apart. I’m looking forward to learning from – and connecting with – each of you!
As outlined in ConnectedApart’s ‘About‘ page, and in ConnectedApart’s ‘Disclaimer‘, I am not a doctor, psychologist, counselor or any other type of health care professional, nor do I have training in these areas. I’m simply an everyday dad who’s spent far too much time away from the children he loves; and a person, who simply wants to share with others what he’s learned along the way.
I’m also the founder of PoemsofaDad.com: the everyday musings of an everyday dad – and, often, a reflection on my own experience apart from the children I love. You can follow PoemsofaDad on Facebook and/or Twitter.
Finally, I was born and raised in Putaruru, New Zealand/Aotearoa, am a proud Australian, and am married with two wonderful children.
ConnectedApart 