(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) It's a common fact when you're a resident of Dubai that one or all members of your family don't live anywhere near you. Often, they are spread across the globe and you're lucky if you get to see them more than once a year.
During the recent Eid break, I had a family reunion with my siblings who came to visit from London and New Zealand. All four of us are close in age, share a lot in common and have copious amounts of fun when we get together.
On the third day of their visit, I realised that I hadn't in fact been in the same room with all of them and our parents in almost three years. This bothered me. How had I let so much time go by without seeing my family? Didn't I miss them? Didn't they miss me? Had this not come up in our conversations . . . the answer hit me with the same momentary shock one gets when their phone goes into a vibrating fit from an on slew of incoming messages. My siblings and I have a WhatsApp group.
We constantly message each other and conversations on a particular subject can last minutes or days, despite our varying time zones. Along with my parents, we also have another WhatsApp group and do weekly Skype sessions every Friday or Saturday. All the conversations, jokes and random thoughts we would have shared in real time have transported themselves into a digital living room. Sure, the intimacy of our conversations may have changed, but there is a frequency and immediacy, a no mess version of how we talk, bond and exist in each others lives that is only available online.
Through messaging and voice notes, only the real essence of our conversations and opinions are shared. Annoying logistics, yelling across the house to ask each others opinions on unimportant issues, the arguments over what to watch on television, who lost the remote control and who should be helping clean up the dinner table don't exist when we can respond and react to each other at our own convenience. This constant availability somehow tricked my mind, my feelings and altered the passage of time to seem shorter than it actually was.
My mother left her family in Baghdad, Iraq as soon as she married my father in 1978. But for the occasional visit, she stayed in contact with her sisters and parents through infrequent phone calls and hand written letters. To me and my generation that sounds completely Victorian. Given the conditions in Baghdad and my family making a permanent move abroad, it would be almost sixteen years before my mother saw her father again and twenty years before she saw her brother. Unfortunately, my grandmother passed away during that time and my mother was never able to see or hear from her before her death. These facts, completely blow my mind when I think of the ease of communicating now, not only with family but friends as well who are stationed around the world.
But what does that mean to our relationships? Am I just as close to my siblings or even closer to them since our relationships have made a transition into a digital sphere for the time being? Now I need to consciously remind myself to respond to their messages. I need to think, write out my thoughts instead of blurting them. We have a more concentrated understanding of the parts of each others' lives that we choose to share on WhatsApp as opposed to being in one another's peripheral vision in our home, where our lives are forcefully intertwined whether we'd liked them to be or not.
I don't have an answer if the fabrics of our relationships changing from one generation to the next, thanks to the advancement of technology, has enriched our bonds, deteriorated them or evolved them in a way that is still unclear. But we can agree that staying in touch everyday is definitely a blessing my mother and her generation missed out on with their loved ones.
Towards the end of their stay my siblings and I were irritating each other the only way siblings know how to. I would like to point out that there was six of us staying in a small two bedroom flat for over two weeks. And, yes there was a constant and ongoing war for bathroom time. But on their last day, when they all left for the airport at the same time, a sad silence filled the flat. I understood then that no amounts of messages or voice notes could replace the sometimes irritating, but always entertaining cacophony of voices of ones own family.
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