Snail Mail Still Has Meaning
By: Tammie Bullard
Tags: Humanity, Connection, Connect, Family, Working From Home

Snail Mail Still Has Meaning

Connecting online can never replace tangible touch

Scattered postcards | Image by Tammie Bullard

Rifling through a pile of books today, looking for something important, I found a stack of old postcards and suddenly nothing else seemed to matter for the next hour or so. They’re not ancient and faded, or from some long forgotten relative, in fact, not one of them is more than ten years old.

On picking them up, I was surprised by the stark reminder of the pain that working away from family can cause, but how one small gesture, consistently maintained, can mean so much to those waiting at home.

I never intended to spend any time separated from my children when they were growing up, but circumstance intervened and it became unavoidable. The first few times I had to travel, they were young, school aged boys. It wasn’t far, only a couple of nights were necessary and they were happy, perhaps a little excited even, by the change in domestic dynamics.

By their pre-teens, it was suddenly ten days away and four at home, for a year or so and I hated it. I soon learned how difficult it was to concentrate unless I had a strict, military precision type of routine to restrict just how much time I had to let my mind wander home.

I lay awake many nights and considered hiring a car to make the eight hour drive to get there by the time they woke for breakfast. Instead I lay in bed until the early hours and questioned every decision I had ever made in life, that led us to this point, and berated myself for being the terrible parent who wasn’t there for bedtime stories each night.

My packing reached expert level, always ready with an emergency bag in case I needed to head home in a hurry.

I unintentionally became highly skilled at crying on aeroplanes. More than once I was silently hugged by a thoughtful flight attendant, astute and experienced in noticing these things.

On Australian domestic flights, Qantas have a signature song that often plays when passengers disembark and it’s heart wrenching. “Feels like home to me.” An absolutely beautiful sound to hear on arriving to loved ones waiting at the luggage carousel. Feels more like hell to me, though, when I hear it as we touch down, thousands of kilometres away, on the other side of the country.

By the time the kids were in their mid-teens, I hadn’t been away for a few years. We had moved interstate and re-settled into our happy routine easily. Other than their sleepovers with mates and the night shifts I worked, we ate dinner together most evenings like a regular family.

Fast forward to another move though, horrific upheaval and life-changing events, we found ourselves back to the travelling days. Only this time, my trips ranged from eight days to five weeks. I dreaded it while I was packing for the first one. Cried the whole way there. Lay awake more often than ever.

This time was different. They weren’t little kids, happily bumbling along in life, but young adults. Working their way through what would turn out to be one of the worst years of their lives.

So, how to connect from such a distance, when so much needed to be said?

It’s not easy conveying much-needed hugs and closeness by phone.

It’s impossible to keep up meaningful textt conversations for more than a few days at a time.

It’s hard to rely on emails enough to demonstrate heartfelt care and emotion.

From the very first day of that new, temporary travelling phase, I found a post office near the airport, bought some colourful pens, a book of stamps and popped a handwritten card in the mail. Then the next day. And the next. Rinse and repeat for the entire trip.

I started finding weird and wonderful variations in different shops wherever I went. I’d carry around each day’s card in my lunch bag or backpack and write snippets of it wherever I was. It grew to include a daily bad joke, just like at home. A fascinating fact to keep them learning something new. General chit chat about what I’d been up to, no matter how mundane. No questions or reminders or pressure on them to respond, all they had to do was read it and feel the love without expectation. Once it was full, I’d drop it into a postbox and wish it well.

They loved it. I didn’t realise until the first trip home just how much, when I was there, drinking coffee in the kitchen, to see the youngest, and our dog, jump up on hearing the postie.

They ran down the driveway to collect the mail and I saw for myself the happiness created by new cards arriving. Despite always being a few days behind, the excitement was palpable.

From that point onwards, it was our thing. We still spoke on the phone. We carried on texting and sharing photos. We emailed if there was a lot to put in writing. But holding us together, from my hand to theirs, a well-worn, well-travelled postcard as physical reminder of that unbreakable bond.

In a world with technology so readily available, it’s no wonder that we forget the value of pen and paper. I certainly didn’t appreciate it fully, until necessity made me seek other options, and for any parent, partner or person separated in our digital age, you might find that reaching out in old-school ways strengthens your connection on a whole new level.