The Mountain You Cannot See: Life as an Immigrant

August 16, 2020.

Some dates stay in your calendar. Others stay in your body.

I can still remember the weight of my suitcase, my twelve-year-old son’s hand in mine, and the strange silence of an airport stripped of its usual chaos.

That was the day we left India for the United States - in the middle of a global pandemic.

I was terrified. I had traveled many times before, but this journey was different. I stayed awake for more than twenty-one hours, watching every announcement and every change in protocol. Borders were shifting. Quarantine rules were uncertain.

All I wanted was to get my son safely to his father on the other side. My only prayer was to reach him.

Whatever comes next, we will face it together as a Family.

There were people who said, "It was your decision. You chose this."

They were right. We did choose. But choosing a path does not make you immune to fear, loneliness, uncertainty, or grief.

Every meaningful decision carries both possibility and consequence.

This is the story of leaving one home and slowly learning how to belong in another.

The Invisible Friction of Beginning Again

When you move to a new place under normal circumstances, you build familiarity through small interactions:

·       You meet the neighbors across the street.

·       Your child makes friends on the playground.

·       You learn the roads, the grocery aisles, the local schools.

Bit by bit, an unfamiliar place becomes yours. But in 2020, the world was telling everyone to stay apart.

Doors were closed. School happened through screens. Community - the very thing immigrants need most - was suddenly behind a glass wall.

My son was twelve, entering a new country and a new social world at an age when belonging matters deeply. He did much of it from within four walls. As mothers, we notice what our children do not say. We watch their faces, listen to their silences, and wonder whether "I’m fine" really means fine.

His resilience humbled me - it broke my heart and expanded it at the same time.

Functioning vs. Flourishing

When people asked, "How are you doing?" I would reply, "We’re doing well." And we were. But "well" is a complicated word.

Sometimes we are functioning - working, parenting, paying bills, showing up, smiling - while carrying an enormous weight inside.

For an immigrant, there is an invisible layer running beneath ordinary life:

·       Learning unfamiliar systems from scratch.

·       Getting legal paperwork right down to the character.

·       Making critical life decisions without family nearby.

·       Knowing that one small mistake can carry an alarmingly high cost.

The perfectionist in me wanted every form, date, and process to be flawless. Accuracy stopped feeling like a work habit; it felt like protection.

And while building a life here, I was still a daughter, sister, friend, and relative there. The time difference did not reduce love - it only changed how we had to live it. There were celebrations joined through screens, worries about aging parents made heavier by distance, and moments when all I wanted was to reach someone quickly.

Your heart does not stop belonging to the place you came from just because you are building somewhere new. It simply learns to live in more than one place.

The Small Anchors of Belonging

What sustained us through the hardest days were not grand gestures, but small, quiet kindnesses:

·       A neighbor who smiled and waved across the yard.

·       A teacher who took extra time after a virtual class.

·       A parent who reached out to include us.

·       A coach who saw my son simply as a child eager to learn.

·       A stranger who explained an unfamiliar rule without making us feel small.

·       Friends who slowly became the people we could call at midnight.

None of these moments sound dramatic. But when you are rebuilding your life in a foreign land, small kindnesses carry extraordinary emotional weight. They send a quiet signal: There is space for you here, too.

The Internal Mountain

There were hard days. Days I cried privately. Days when uncertainty felt exhausting and administrative paperwork carried more emotional weight than paper ever should.

You go to work. You cook dinner. You take your child to practice. You laugh with friends. You plan for next month. But somewhere in the background, a silent question lingers:

Will everything still be okay?

That question becomes an invisible mountain. You are climbing it every single day while appearing to simply live your normal life.

Yet, something profound happens as you climb: you adapt.

Growth rarely looks dramatic. Most of the time, it looks entirely ordinary:

·       Making the uncomfortable phone call.

·       Driving down an unfamiliar highway.

·       Rebuilding your professional identity from scratch.

·       Learning to accept help.

·       Eventually becoming the person who helps someone newer than you.

Belonging is not achieved in a single moment of arrival. It is constructed day by day through repetition, participation, and relationship.

The True Meaning of Resilience

Now in our sixth year here, my son has just started his college journey. The twelve-year-old whose hand I held through that silent airport in 2020 is now shaping his own future here. That is our family's quiet measure of how far we have come.

As a health and wellbeing coach, this journey transformed how I understand human resilience.

Resilience is not endless strength. It is not pretending everything is fine, nor is it forcing yourself to endure burnout. Real resilience is noticing what life is asking of you, navigating the difficulty with self-compassion, and continuing forward without losing connection to who you are.

We do not have to choose between where we came from and where we are going. Both can shape us.

• I am the South Indian daughter who carries ancestral values, traditions, food, language, and memories of home within her.

• I am the wife who crossed the world to reunite her family.

• I am the mother watching her child grow deep roots in a place that once felt alien.

• I am the friend and relative whose relationships stretch across oceans.

• Now, I am a Coach who understands that wellbeing is not the absence of difficulty, but the capacity to find your footing within it.

Still Climbing, But Climbing Differently

If you are building a life away from the place where yours began, your mountain may look different from mine. There is no single immigrant story.

·       Gratitude can coexist with homesickness.

·       Opportunity can coexist with uncertainty.

·       Belonging here does not require forgetting there.

·       Strength can coexist with deep exhaustion.

We are all still climbing our respective mountains. But today, I climb differently: with more trust, deeper gratitude, prayer, and the people I love beside me - even those who live thousands of miles away.

Life was never meant to be merely survived. It was meant to be lived - fully, imperfectly, and courageously - with both homes forever alive inside us.

"From one home to another - may you always climb your mountain with grace, gratitude, and a heart big enough to hold both worlds." - Lakshmi Krish | Founder & Wellbeing Coach, Mindful Manam

The Wider Nest: A Mindful Parenting Reflection

From baby steps to elementary, middle, and high school - and now all set to start his college life. Yes this is what we have been working towards and waiting for as Parents. But as we dropped our son in his college dorm and started driving back - Our hearts were heavy yet full, eyes welling with pride and tears. But looking around the campus, I realized we weren't alone; every parent dropping off their child was walking through that same silent storm of mixed emotions.

He will live on his own for the first time. He will wake up without us knocking on his door. He will eat meals we did not cook. He will make decisions we will not know about until after he has made them.

We knew this day was coming. We have had eighteen years to prepare for it.

We are not prepared.

The questions arrive in waves, often at night when the house is quiet.

• Have we helped him build strong roots?

• Will he have enough strength to fly high and still find his way back?

• Will he stay anchored in his values when nobody is watching?

• Will the noise of the modern world change the way he naturally thinks, interacts, relates?

• Will he call every day, or once a week, or only when he needs something?

• We do not know the answer to any of these questions. And we are learning that this not-knowing is the whole point.

For eighteen years, our lives orbited around his. His schedule was our schedule. His likes shaped our weekends. His milestones became our milestones. His happiness was the quiet metric by which we measured our own days. We did not lose ourselves in parenting - we found a version of ourselves we did not know existed. But that version was defined almost entirely in relation to him.

So the question beneath all the other questions is this: what becomes our anchor now?

People call this the empty nest. We would not.

Empty suggests something was taken from us. Nothing was taken. Everything we built is still here - it simply rearranged itself into a new shape. The love did not leave. It just learned to stretch across distance.

We would not call it an open nest either. Open suggests a door left ajar, waiting for someone to walk back through. And yes, he will come back - for holidays, for summers, for laundry and home-cooked meals and the familiar weight of his childhood bed. But we are not standing at the door. We are walking through our own.

What we would call it is a WIDER NEST.

The nest did not shrink. It expanded. His world got bigger, and somehow, unexpectedly, so did ours. The walls that once held the four of us, now hold our own quiet, our own choices, our own rhythm. There is more room than we are used to. More room than we know what to do with yet. But that is not emptiness. That is space.

And we are nesting again. Not for him this time. For us.

Nesting - the slow, deliberate act of building a home for yourselves.

Choosing what stays, what goes, what you want to fill the quiet with. It is the same instinct that once had us preparing a nursery, folding tiny clothes, arranging a room around a life that was about to arrive. But now the life we are preparing for is our own.

He is empowered to make new choices now. What to eat, when to sleep, who to become. That was always the goal - eighteen years of small releases, each one preparing him for this. But here is what nobody tells you: his empowerment unlocks ours. His freedom to choose reminds us that we also get to choose. What to do with the mornings. What to care about. Who we are when we are not managing someone else's schedule.

Mindful parenting, at this stage, is not about managing our kid(s) life. It is about managing our own response to our kids leaving their home. It is about letting go without letting the silence swallow us. It is about trusting that the roots we gave them - the values, the resilience, the quiet conversations in the car, the meals we shared, the boundaries we negotiated, the apologies we learned to make - are deep enough to hold him even when we are not standing next to him.

We do not know if he will remember everything we tried to teach him or if he will have to learn it all over again, the hard way - the way we all do.

What we do know is this: we did not raise him to stay. We raised him to build a life of his own.

And we raised ourselves, in the process, to become people who could let him.

As a Health and Wellbeing coach, I spend my days helping people pause, reflect, and tend to themselves. I tell them that wellbeing is not a luxury. That small practices matter. That noticing is the first step.

Now I am practicing what I preach. We both do.

So we would not call this an empty nest. Or an open one. It is a wider nest - more space than before, for all of us. Him, stepping into a life he gets to design. Us, nesting again, building a home inside our own lives for the first time in eighteen years. All of us empowered. All of us choosing.

We are still figuring it out. That is the most honest thing we can say.

If you and your partner are in this season too - whether your child is leaving for college, starting a new chapter, or simply needing you differently than they used to - we see you. The questions are hard. The quiet is loud. But wider is not empty.

It is just space. And space, given time, fills with new things.

Wishing you and your children the best health and happiness in life.

Navigating your own wider nest chapter?

If you’d like support setting a mindful rhythm for this next season of your life, I’m here to walk alongside you.

Book your Free Wellbeing Strategy Session here

May you be healthy & happy - from my Manam to yours, Lakshmi Krish | Wellbeing Coach