Baby, Don't Go

In the natural order of things, children are meant to leave their parents. They travel, go away to school, or move across town, and if we are wise we prepare ourselves for that from, if not the moment they are born, then at least from an age when the inevitability of their departure looms large. If we are good parents, we take satisfaction from their competence and ability to be independent, resisting the urge to hold on or to look back with longing to the time when we took their company for granted.

From the time she was nine, I knew my daughter would be a traveler. At seventeen she went to Serbia, a country made fragile by a war not long over and still staggering under the weight of its divisions. I was nervous about it, but stopping her was not even considered. From there she went to Paris where she lived for nearly a year before coming home to start university. Even then, she didn’t stay still, moving twice to other cities for work experience related to her studies. She always came back, but one day not too long from now she will make a bigger move, a permanent one, or as permanent as anything is in the life of a twenty-something. But her temporary absences served to inoculate me, giving me a defense against the malady of loss.

My eldest son rarely went very far, but even if he was physically present, his thoughts were always on the next thing to do, place to go, friend to see. He left home in a different sense, far more involved with his friends than with his family. Earlier this year he spent a few months away, in a place he wants to live permanently, but for now he’s back home, more often than not out and about. When he does leave for good, whether it’s to a faraway place or another neighbourhood, I’ll be so used to his comings and goings that I might forget that he’s really not here.

But today my youngest revealed that he is restless and eager to be somewhere else less provincial, less familiar. He has already put his plan into action, having quit his job and freeing himself to leave. The news hit me like a bus; without acknowledging it to myself I had counted on him being there, not forever, but for a good long while yet. I feel bereft, and am taken aback by the strength of my reaction. I can only put it down to a mother’s chagrin at the prospect of a finally empty nest – a conventional, classic response.

But there is irony in this. Three years ago I began to spend a lot of time away my children, starting a new life in France with the man I love, and although I came back home regularly, it is I who left them in the first place. The natural order of things was turned on its head, and it was they who had to get used to the empty nest. Somehow I had convinced myself that everyone had come to terms with our separateness, and more than that, that we were all stronger and more independent because of it. That might be true of them, but to my bewilderment, it’s not true of me. It’s an odd feeling, to be the one in need of reassurance that I’m not being abandoned. I expect I’ll get used to it – just like they did.