Grace Yambao's eldest son, Rayan, was just six weeks old when she had to return to work as a nurse in a hospital in the Gulf, leaving him in the care of her mother in the Philippines.
"It is so hard," she says simply. It was the start of a fragmented family life for her and her husband, Ravenal, who was also working in the Gulf at the time.
Their second son, Gerald, was born in Saudi Arabia and was brought home to live with his grandmother when he was three months. But after their daughter, Kristina, arrived, Ravenal returned to the Philippines with her, to take over the care of the three children.
Grace has been back only for holidays since she first went abroad in 1985. Now 50 years old and working in the high-dependency unit in Our Lady's Children's Hospital Crumlin, she admits there was no closeness between her and her children when they were young. They bonded with her husband, while she worked far away to support them and extended family.
"I am a strong person, but deep inside it is so hard," she says, her eyes filling as she sits on the sofa in a small three-bedroom house in Drimnagh.
The first time Grace went back to Rayan, when he was one, she would say to him "where is your mother?" and he would point to a picture of her on the wall.
She also remembers on another of her annual visits, three-year-old Kristina being upset by her mother's unaccustomed presence in the house and saying "tell mum to go away".
"I was just crying and crying," says Grace.
She came to Ireland in 2002 and, two years later, her husband and three children were able to join her here. For the first, and probably the last, time they could live together as a family.
"I had to adjust to them and they had to adjust to me also. I had been away from them a long time and we were being together when they were already big."
They had just two years in the one home before Rayan, now aged 20, returned to the Philippines, where he is studying nursing.
Kristina (15), who had been attending Assumption College in Drimnagh, went back too last summer, much to the dismay of her parents. It was particularly hard for Ravenal, who had never been apart from his daughter.
"I was just surprised when she decided to go home," says Grace. "I think she misses her friends there." She says life is freer and more open for children in the Philippines. "They were always staying in here. They just had the computer."
Only Gerald (19) has opted to stay and he is studying psychiatric nursing at Trinity College. "But the tuition fees are so much," she laments. "Seven thousand for one year" - in the Philippines they can complete their training for considerably less than that.
"I have to work hard," she laughs with her irrepressible good humour. By both working here, she and her husband are supporting not only their own children, but also siblings, nephews and nieces.
"We are really an extended family, everybody who asks we are helping." Indeed, the whole economy in the Philippines depends on workers abroad like them.
But Grace sees friends who stayed at home and are happy, and she wonders if she and her husband had not tasted the "sweet life abroad" before they started a family, would their lives have been different. There is no underestimating the personal price Grace has paid for living apart from her children.