Although it’s the end of September, and the skies are grey and the rain is falling, it’s weirdly hot. The horse chestnuts are already autumnal brown, infected by a canker that accelerates their seasonal swap. The day feels out of sorts. I sit under a silver birch tree, sweating, as tiny yellow leaves float down in the breeze above me, dancing like phosphorescence in a night-time sea. It’s all out of whack. Maybe that’s just me, or perhaps it’s just how all big life transitions make us feel. Discombobulated. A bit sad. Stuck with one foot in the past and one in the future. Simultaneously.
You see, my baby is off to university. Her sister went two years ago and I have been dreading the day she leaves too. When the nest really will be empty. The big departure creeps up on us. I’ve been spring-cleaning her bedroom, combing with her through the accumulated stuff of her eighteen years. Clearing it all out. It breaks my heart to take to the charity shop her precious marble collection, and the forest of furry animals who have – until now - still lived in her bed and an alcove.
We sort through bundles and bundles of super-neat schoolwork; commendations from her teachers, boxes of old A level and GCSE revision cards, rainbow colour-coded. So much time, so much hard work. All paying off now as we drive her to Manchester so she can start her university course.
There is some family hilarity that her dreams of freshers’ week clubbing have been dashed by a compulsory three-day geography field trip to the Lake District – requiring a calculator, a clipboard and waterproof trousers. She is adamant in refusing the latter, not good for her street cred apparently. I say when the rain is lashing her freezing legs and it’s a 10-mile trudge back to her hostel she’ll wish she had them. But with a pang I realise that I won’t be there, I can’t insist. Can’t protect. That it’s her life now. Her decision. But it’s hard to put down the habit of two decades of intensive mothering.
We went on the obligatory trip to Ikea, where, along with all the other parents and university fledglings, we bought saucepans and bedding, towels and a mighty bank of plugs (so she can charge her speaker, phone, AirPods, laptop and vape all at the same time). I veer between feeling inordinately proud that she has made it to Manchester, the place she most wanted to study at, with her hive of good mates (who have basically lived in our house for the last two years), and feeling entirely bereft at their going. Our house has been a kind of informal sixth form common room for the kids at our local comprehensive; we live just round the corner. I find myself welling up when I think of the kitchen being quiet, her bedroom empty, the house devoid of teens. It’s going to be awfully quiet around here.
And there is something bigger too. The end of a massive life phase. We became parents nearly twenty-one years ago. Practically every day since then we have been tending to kids’ needs; making food, running baths, picking up towels, getting them out of bed, chivvying about homework, hanging out watching TV, going for walks. Keeping them and their needs in mind. Being present, keeping them alive. And now the everyday-ness of that is over. In its way that is as humongous a shift as becoming a parent in the first place.
With both daughters gone, the days seem endless, luxuriant. There is so much time for me, for us (me and my long-suffering husband of nearly thirty years), for my work with the community I founded for women in midlife www.noon.org.uk (I call them Queenagers). Yes there is a lot more time to indulge all my passions: cold swimming, promoting my book Much More to Come: Lessons on the Mayhem and Magnificence of Midlife, just published by HarperCollins. But there is also a sense of having several extra arms that are not being used. A bit like when I was made redundant from an incredibly busy and hectic job and just didn’t know what to do with all the hours I suddenly had in the day. This empty nest business is another massive midlife shift. Another step change. I know, having survived one big transition, that what initially feels strange and alien eventually becomes normal. That slowly we adjust. That it is difficult, but possible.
But that bigger knowledge of how change happens doesn’t help in the moment. When I look at pictures or her photo flashes up on my phone, I am easily undone by the thought of my baby in her student kitchen, frying eggs or boiling pasta in her new pans without me. In the days before she goes I find myself struggling to hold back the tears when I clasp one of her hands and find it still endearingly squidgy. She looks at me like I’m going mad, seeing my eyes fill. How can I tell her that to hold one of her hands is to be teleported back in time; that a vivid memory is playing inside my head. She is a toddler, standing on my lap on the bus, her blonde curls and cheeks pressed into mine. We’re playing our favourite game.
I say: ‘I love you ALL!’
She says: ‘I love you BIT!’
I pretend to cry and she gives me a sticky hug and shouts: ‘No – silly Mummy – I love you ALL! Not BIT’
We play this game over and over again. Her relishing her power to withhold her affection. Me helplessly adoring.
I have a theory that children who have been particularly well loved have a Ready Brek glow around them; a kind of undentable force field that says the world is a benign place which will greet them with a smile. Providing that, and only that, is the true parental job.
A friend said to me once: ‘The love we give our children is non-conditional, it is their birthright. We are here to love them as much as we can and we ask for nothing in return. Just the joy of giving that love, of nurturing them.’ He is right. I love that. So much parental love can feel a bit conditional. We can fall into the trap of thinking that they owe us, or should be like us, or should be grateful – but the truth is, our kids don’t owe us anything. We give our love freely to propel them into the future. In the same way that we gave them life.
I think about all of this as her departure draws closer – just wandering into her bedroom full of packed bags makes me weep. Her going is like a constant internal ache. I well up whenever I think of it. I wear my golden Queenager sunglasses like a mask to hide from her how much I mind. I don’t want to burden her with my grief when she is off on her big life adventure.
I find it comforting to talk to friends; we whisper to each other how we feel. We share this secret grief for the grown-up child leaving the nest; for the end of that daily care and tending. I’m not the only one battling the tears that well up, the loss of a role. My husband feels it too; I could see his eyes watering as he sat with one child either side of him on the sofa where I once breast-fed; hugging them tight.
I know my sadness is silly because she will come back and I am lucky to have her and no one died; and as a pal who has a differently-abled child reminded me, at least mine can go away and live independently. Her big grief is that hers never will. Her nightmare is about what will happen to her beloved autistic son when she is no longer around to love him. That he will never leave her. I know all that. I know I am lucky. But all I can say is, this sorrow, this empty-nester grief is very real. Very raw. It’s like stopping breastfeeding or when you first drop them off at Primary School or they go to big school. A huge maternal shift. A tugging loss. An ache.
But still. I have tools to cope. I offer up a silent prayer of gratitude for the fullness of my life. I am different from when my first daughter left two years ago, when I had just been made redundant and was all over the show. Rather than fleeing from this current pain, numbing it, shutting it out, which means it erupts at the worst moments and feels overwhelming, I know now to let it flow through me. That however agonising, if I let myself really feel it, give into it, then the intensity of it will pass. That if I move towards it, welcome the grief in with all its jaggedness, holding myself tenderly and with love – using some hard-won self-compassion - then the tears will come, but the moment will pass. I let the sadness flow through me; knowing it won’t annihilate me; that grief is just love without a home. I chant to myself: ‘This too will pass’ – remembering that grief and loss are the price we pay for love. I know that my girls need to spread their wings, and that it is a sign our job has been well done that they are flying off into their own futures. But this pain is so real.
I comfort myself by reading the Kahlil Gibran poem ‘On Children’, he writes:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent
forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends
you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Reading those wise words I realise that this is the task: to be the ‘stable bow’ – to swallow down the agony of the departure and the empty nest, to stand strong so that the offspring can venture forth unencumbered. It is not about us and how we feel; it is about them and their journey into their hard-worked-for future. I know this, but that doesn’t stop it hurting any less.
All endings involve loss and grief. But we have to remind ourselves that in the space that a loss leaves, there is room for new things to grow.
Buy Much More to Come: Lessons on the mayhem and magnificence of midlife here