In 2024 we did something we'd dreamed about for years: we showed our parents — both Dikshya's and Roshan's — the country we'd made our home. A proper road trip through New South Wales and the ACT: Sydney, Newcastle, and Canberra, with both families along for the ride.
If you've migrated, you know how big this is. For years, your parents only see your new life through a phone screen. They picture it, they worry about it, but they don't really know it. Bringing them here — letting them walk the streets we walk, meet the place we chose — closes a gap that no amount of video calls ever could.
Two families, one minibus
There's a particular kind of joy, and a particular kind of comedy, in having both sets of parents together in a new country. Two families who'd only met around our wedding, now sharing hotel breakfasts and long drives and opinions about everything. A lot of translating — between languages, between generations, between two families' very different ways of doing things.
But underneath it all was the thing that matters: our parents, the people who sacrificed so we could build lives across the world, finally getting to see what those lives actually look like.
For years our parents pictured our life from the other side of the planet. In 2024 we finally got to hand it to them in person.
Sydney, Newcastle, and the capital
We took them back through Sydney — where our Australian story began — then up the coast to Newcastle, and inland to the ACT. Showing your parents your adopted country is a strange and beautiful thing. You see it fresh through their eyes, and you catch yourself feeling proud of a place that isn't even where you're from.
It remains one of the best things we've ever done. The whole point of building a life far from home is, eventually, being able to bring a little of home to it. In 2024, for a few perfect weeks, we did exactly that.
