My children are now grown-ups; does that mean I’m still a mother? I’m still their mum, but they don’t need parenting. The constantly shifting nature of this relationship blows my mind, like when they were babies and I’d just get a handle on their sleep patterns or what beige food they’d decided to include in their limited repertoire, and they’d go and switch it all up.
We drop my daughter B back at university in Cornwall after an extended winter break. While she’s settling in, I walk a good length of the rocky coastal path. An old man passing me sneezes and I hold my breath, but it’s the wrong breath obviously as the spawn of the virus that got him swirls through my airways and burrows into my weak spot. An acupuncturist once told me that in Chinese medicine the liver is where you hold onto anger, the kidneys, fear, and the lungs, grief. So, it’s no surprise a day later when I come down with the wheezy lurgy that’s going round.
This giving over of my kids to their new lives is getting easier, but every time they leave, I still cry. I am in the twilight zone of letting them go.
Patti Smith said, ‘We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.’ I cracked open a skin to become a mother and break out of another to become me again, whoever that is. Both transitions were and are painful, both resisted, both a rebirth of sorts. How ferocious I was as a new mum, how streamlined in protection and love… and now I’m asked to step away from that intensity? Of course, the letting out of the cord happened in increments — the playdates and sleepovers, the first time they left the house on their own, the million trainers by the front door that told me how many friends had stayed over. Then partners and clubbing and intercontinental travel. Terrifying drives with mates across France. And now education that takes them not just to other homes and cities, but to new universes of people with whom they are creating family. And it’s good, it’s all so very right and welcome, but that doesn’t make the recurring loss any less tricky. For me.
On my cliff-top walk, a dog runs towards me. Face so eager and limbs a-jumble, he’s the personification of laughter. I smoosh his baggy velveteen ears before he scrambles back to his people. This is why we have pets, I think, to bring us into the present with their enthusiasm, their singular drive to experience the now. Like my cats whose soft sleeping bodies I can stare at for hours, the closest I get to meditation. They embody all I desire – complete and guilt-free rest, a Zen I’ll never achieve — so it’s my pleasure to facilitate their contentment and feel its echo in me. Sometimes they purr so hard, they sound like they’re singing.
Dog poo bags are snagged in the brambles along the path, weighted and swaying with their cargo. An escarpment to my left is so precipitous, only a nutty toddler would attempt to run down. Mixing with the ionised air, the occasional whiff of death drifts from the bushes. Some poor rat or bird or rabbit’s hidden and possibly violent death. While I’m experiencing the beauty of this place, these creatures exist in survival’s daily roll call. Memento mori – remember you must die.
When my kids were younger and went on school trips, I’d lie in bed trying to close my mind to images of the coach they were strapped into, being driven by a middle-aged, smoking, artery-hardened man, careening round narrow mountain passes. I wouldn’t wash B and Pi’s vaguely funky sheets for days, touching the hollow in the pillow made by their heads. The Stoic principle of being aware of the impermanence of life is meant to prepare you for the worst, but so much of that time for me was spent in fear; there really was no transference towards comfort or acceptance. And now I miss my girl and I miss my boy. Even when they’re home I’m already missing them because I know they’ll be going soon. I’m still always anticipating the loss.
During the double-buggy years, total strangers used to offer unsolicited advice, such as, Enjoy these precious moments, they’ll be grown and leaving home before you know it. Yeah right, thanks! I willed their babyhoods to pass and don’t yearn to have that time or even the toddler bit back. The chaos, the grubbiness, the noise, the lack of thinking space, and a love so intense, it was painful. Added into the mix, a bone deep PND, complicating and compounding the guilt that I couldn’t enjoy them as I was told I should. I felt robbed then and feel robbed now. But they were clean, fed, safe and loved and that was the best I could do until they became autonomous humans. They are mine, but they also belong to themselves and now the world. Watching them evolve has been my joy, the purest gift to the future, and with their every step into adulthood, I breathe. And I mourn, like heartbreak. You never get it right as a mum.
The occasional tock of ball against club tells me this coastal track parallels a golf course. I glimpse manicured Hobbity hills through the hedge and paunchy men in silly shoes. This path straddles two versions of the outdoors, the curated and the wild, the former pushing everything else to the edge, perhaps even off this cliff. I descend to a beach café to charge my phone and have a cuppa. A woman on the table behind me is talking about the pea and mint soup she’s going to make for supper, how she already has a potato and onion at home but needs to go to Asda to get a big bag of frozen peas. The waves are cresting in the hard winter sun, a pied wagtail hops round my feet for crumbs, and all the while the most boring conversation in the world is happening right next to me, but it is the stuff of living, of being present to the mechanics and comfort of days.
My kids have scavenged their favourite possessions from home to take to university, and their old bedrooms are frozen in childhood. My son Pi’s room in particular is a graveyard of obsolete tech, nerf guns, Lego and karate belts. He doesn’t want all this stuff, has no sentimental attachment to these memories of when he was little, unlike me who remembers the birthday we bought him those Rick and Morty figures, and the time he was so stoked with that foam Minecraft pickaxe, now in pieces and shoved at the back of a wardrobe. Some parents reverse engineer their kids’ rooms as soon as they leave, peeling off the posters to expose little wounds in the paint made by ossified Blu Tack, nothing a slick of magnolia wouldn’t fix to turn the room into a pottery studio or depository for rickety gym equipment. So, when those kids come back for a break, they’ll be guests in their own home, the parents having done their job, done their time. I wish I could embrace a fraction of that lightness. I wish I could unhitch from some of the layers of emotion – perhaps it’s hard because of all I missed when I couldn’t feel joy… and still the guilt persists; a permanence, like marble. Recently I found little bags of baby teeth and envelopes of soft wispy curls from early haircuts. I told someone as a joke that I could make a child shaped sculpture out of all the pieces of my kids I’d collected. She looked at me like I was a serial killer.
I gather my things to walk the path back to our Airbnb. There’s a couple of hours of daylight left and I could, if I wanted, keep going further south-west into the sun. There is nothing and no one to stop me. I climb the hill, picturing myself when we get home tomorrow, laptop on the kitchen table, thinking expansive creative thoughts without adult children surfacing at 3 in the afternoon, opening the fridge, moaning that there’s nothing to eat and why don’t we have Crunchy Nut Cornflakes like normal people, which means I’d have to think about making supper, and who knows who will eat what or when because they’ll probably go down the pub anyway so their food will get put in Tupperwares in the fridge, which they won’t heat up when they get home because they’ll just want instant noodles or toast then, so it’ll be me who hoovers up the leftovers to stop the food going to waste, and I’ll get even fatter.
When I get home, I think, I’ll open all the windows and blow something other than me through the house. To change the energy and start something new. Carpe diem — I will inhabit the wealth and minutiae my days. Albeit while coughing and blowing my nose.
Every. Single. Word of this. It's as though all the love has this new shadowed edge of loss despite the fact they aren't lost. That said, I'm also enjoying the new adult to adult relationship with A.
Mine haven’t left yet but the early years were incredibly hard, workaholic husband, starting a new business from home, lack of sleep and energy, little joy because of all of it. I felt like I was missing out or just doing it wrong. Trying to do too much or not getting enough help. Like you say- you can’t win, that much we know.