My son was eighteen last week.
My eldest daughter begins at boarding school next week.
Small pieces of me are breaking away; splinters of myself.
My mother remembers the feeling well. The loud fluttering of young wings that faded to silence when we'd all gone. Gone to school. To college. Away to work.
Gone.
She thinks it might have precipitated her first episode of Depression. Loss, she says. Loss of definition. Loss of direction. Loss of self really.
I am defiant. And determined. Not to suffer similarly.
I tell myself it's easier for me. Easier to stay in touch. How obliging technology is: at the pressing of a few buttons I can reach any one of my children. If they'd only pick up. But as much as I try to tidy my apron strings, tighten them for the slackness is disconcerting, so my manchild son is trying to disengage himself from their long reached trailing.
He doesn't pick up.
Learning to let go, to let be, is hard. Learning to understand that they need their Space is challenging when you are swallowed by the stuff. Space. Too, too silent space.
I tell myself it is easier for me to sidestep the same hell that enveloped my mother. I will not get Depressed. I will keep busy. I will focus. I will understand that they are only doing what is natural - making their own way in this big, big world. I say it out loud. Into the mirror. As if to persuade my reflection I can do this. Forewarned (my mother's own ghastly experience) is Forearmed. I tell myself.
Give them roots and let them grow wings. I read that on the wall of my pediatrican's office once. Years ago. When I was still busily immersed in a world of diapers and broken nights . I thought mine would never get to the winged stage. They needed me too much. I was in constant, greedily plump fisted grabbing demand. I read it and I smiled indulgently. I thought it was sweet. And I thought mine would never grow wings.
But they have done. And they are stretching them and beginning to beat them tentatively.
And I must hope that my own roots are deep enough to withstand the gale force of the winds of change that will surely buffet my own tiny world.
