The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 87 were maintaining a positive perspective even in the face of all the unknowns. And while it would be easy to blame the State Department, nobody seemed to know how the department could have done things differently. Christina says that her kids are “used to me traveling far away, but for me this was different: No way to return in an emergency is hard!” Her children are now settled, well, as settled as they can be during this global upheaval. One is living with a friend, while the other has found employment in her hoped-for field. The family has been lucky, she says, but she hopes that in the future the department will have “better back-up planning” to help families like hers. What’s Next? As for us? We finally got our son back to post on a State Department OpMed (Operational Medicine) flight. He’s tak- ing a gap semester (or year? Who really knows?) and working at the embassy— something that certainly wouldn’t be available to him if we were in the States. So the initial negative—feeling like our son was stranded and out of reach—has turned into a positive as he works to make this gap time meaningful. I’ve been grateful for the supportive community of parents I’ve found since the start of the pandemic. The Foreign Service College Bound Facebook page is full of parents like me, all going through this together and finding different ways to reach that light at the end of the tunnel. My son’s university has a fairly robust parents group, and I was touched by the number of parents, whom I’ve never met and never will, who learned of our situation and immediately raised their hands with offers to help my son move, or to help him safely stay at school if he chose that option instead.