Warmth amid absence: life of Romanian children whose parents work abroad – photo essay

A misty silence hangs heavy over the winter garden. It is day break, early March. From a distance, there are desperate cries of the grandmother, struggling to herd the sheep and chickens into the coop. The house silence is broken by the ticking clock in the kitchen and the worn washing machine, struggling for water that never comes.

I sit alone on the sofa in the living room, as the darkness slowly swallows the afternoon. In the next room, Larisa is doing her math homework. Both of us wait for 5.30, the time when her mother finishes work and calls her when she gets home.

• Larisa and Monica’s grandmother looks through the window that connects her house to her son’s house in Vătava, Mureș, on 31 December 2023 as Monica’s infant son, Elias, sits on the floor. Monica gave birth to Elias at 19, while her mother gave birth to her at 15.

• The sisters’ grandmother looks at Elias, Monica’s son, through the window that connects her house to the parents’ home in Vătava, Mureș on 31 December 2023

Larisa’s parents have been living in a village near Valencia, Spain, where they have been working for several years because of limited economic opportunities in Romania. They left behind two daughters, Larisa, now 18, and Monica, 21.

The sisters’ home is in Vătava, a village in northern Romania, where they have been in their grandmother’s care.

Conversation between Larisa and her mother

Larisa talks to her parents at least three times a day. First, with her father on his lunch break at 3pm. Then with her mother when she gets off work at 5.30pm. In the evenings, she checks WhatsApp with both of them. For a few years, Larisa’s parents have only come home for Christmas, Easter, and important family events. Her father works at a construction firm with his brother-in-law, and her mother is employed at a cable factory.

• Mihăiță (Larisa’s father) arrive home after four months in Spain on 21 April 2024. This year was the first time in a very long time that the family celebrated Easter together in Romania.

• Mihăiță after a day of planting seedlings in the garden and Monica feeding her son, Elias, in front of the tractor on 30 April 2024.

Larisa and Monica’s parents are preparing to come to Romania for a short visit to take care of some household chores: sewing, taking hay out of the hayloft, and cutting a pig. Larisa cannot wait to see them.

The snippet of conversation reflects a painful and common reality for many families in Romania. How does the absence of family members working abroad shape the daily lives of those left behind? Romania ranks 17th among the world’s top countries of origin of migration, according to the Global Migration Report 2022 from the International Organization for Migration.Almost a quarter of children in Romania have a parent who has worked abroad in the past year, Save the Children data for 2023 shows. There is a lot of focus on those who leave rather than those who stay, with little thought about what it’s like to be left behind by family, especially early in life.

• Larisa and her boyfriend, Alex, kiss while half sitting on the bonnet of her parents’ car in Vătava on 30 March 2024. Alex lives with Larisa at her parents’ house three days a week, while the rest of the time he works as a delivery driver in the town of Târgu Mureș, 31 miles (50km) from Vătava.

• Larisa and Alex, 22, relax in bed on a Sunday at home in Vǎtava on 1 August 2024. He helps her with chores around the house and yard as well as fixing her car.

Larisa and Monica have lived with their grandmother for several years and are managing as best they can. Larisa is in grade 12 at a high school in Reghin. From October – when we first asked her – until now, her plans for the future have evolved from a nail course to driving a truck with Alex, and then to university, a word she pronounces with great distrust.

Larisa is shy, a possible defence mechanism in the face of decisions she feels she should not have to make alone. She pays close attention to the needs of everyone around her. When she cooks, she puts a portion aside for her grandmother, “Mama Uca”, then washes her plates, and when she leaves for school before I wake up, she makes sure Mama Uca leaves milk for my cereal.

• Monica holds her son, Elias, during a rowing game with Larisa and Alex in Vătava, Mure.

Monica has been a mother for a year and a few months. She moved to Bistrița about 30 miles away with her boyfriend Andrei, who works for a construction company.

Monica is the more sociable sister who wants to be a mother and seems much more mature than her 21 years. During the week, she lives in Bistrița, and on weekends she is in Vătava with Larisa, where she looks after the cottage Andrei and his parents own.

• Larisa in her parents’ room in Vătava, Mureș.

This project is about the psychological, sociological, and economic factors of the young people that share the trauma of being left behind as a teenager or younger. I want to challenge the perception that migration only affects those who leave, highlighting the effects on the children and the future society of abandoned adults.

Since their parents left the country, Larisa and Monica have had to find emotional anchors in other people: grandmother, boyfriends, uncles, and aunts. “Their [her parents’] physical absence is beyond me, but I’m mature enough to understand that for me and the rest of the family, they left to make us better,” says Larisa. “This forced maturation was good because it taught me what the world is like, but for a 15-year-old, it was, and still is, very painful.”

The two sisters’ existence has been marked by the evening phone call, a sacred ritual, during which emotions mingle with the background noises of the household and every word spoken carries the weight of a promise to be reunited.

• Larisa’s reflection in the window of her room as she prepares for the final high school exams in Vătava.

“If they didn’t leave, we were close to each other and we didn’t miss each other,” says Monica. “Daddy was building what he made in the backyard harder, and Mommy couldn’t make the furniture she wanted so badly for the kitchen. If they were home, I’d go to Vătava with more love. Now there’s a void there.”