My last son’s flying the nest and oh, the hole it’s left in my heart
It’s the moment every mother dreads. But even worse, says OLIVIA FANE, is the realisation that no child can ever love their mother the way she loves them
C HILDREN simply don’t realise how loved they are. This is a painful fact of which I am fast becoming aware. Perhaps they have to wait until they are parents themselves, with their own children to love. Then they will understand.
Until then, the balance of love — or at least the outpouring of it — will be heavily tipped to one side. Mine.
I’m coming to this conclusion as I prepare for my two youngest sons to leave home next month. Nineteen-year-old Oscar will be heading west, without a backwards glance, to Bristol University. Joe, 22, will be nonchalantly disappearing up the M1 to live and work 200 miles away in Leeds.
If there are tears, it certainly won’t be Oscar and Joe who are crying.
It’s true, and it’s heart-breaking. This moment of fleeing the nest is a moment of huge impact for both of you, but it’s not a shared moment, and that’s the pain of it.
There is no emotional ‘We’ll get through this!’ because that’s the point. The ‘we’ stops being a ‘we’ from the day they leave this house and start paying their own bills.
After that, our relationship will never be the same again. They will choose what to tell me; they will edit their news. I won’t see their moods, their hopes and disappointments first-hand. They will hide the most interesting parts of their life from me.
And how this huge change affects me will be totally irrelevant to them — my happiness not even a second, third, or fourth thought.
As the mother of five sons, that old saying ‘a son is a son until he takes a wife, a daughter is a daughter for life’ has been quoted to me many times. One son is already married, two have long-term girlfriends, Joe is with me for another 25 days, Oscar 37. It’s a real countdown.
THERE
have been a lot of birthdays. I’m not sure that I’vee quite baked 1333 birthday cakes, but over thee years, my place has very defi- nitely been in the kitchen onn my sons’ birthdays — baking flapjacks, pouring bags of Twiglets into bowls, making sure the sausage rolls aren’t too hot for the kids.
How selfless, you might think. But those birthdays were far from selfless. As I saw it, they were also all about me. My eldest was 33 this year, and I woke up on his birthday and relived his birth all over again — as I do every year. The moment I met this person I’d carried within my own body for so long.
When you’re young, you associate the word ‘love’ with everything romantic. You obsess, you desire, and if you win the object of your love you become a rather more perfect version of yourself: sexy, fun, flirty.
When you become a mother, you learn that Eros has nothing to do with real love. Eros is about self, about what you’re looking for. Mr Right is going to come along and satisfy all those yearnings in one fell swoop.
But when you become a mother, you take second place — you just can’t help yourself.
The baby is like this extraordinarily precious gift and is utterly your responsibility. You are the centre of his universe, and you have to make things right for him. If romantic love requires you to remain attractive, to keep that buzz alive for both of you, then living up to your baby’s expectations is even more demanding.
For him, you are all-powerful, all-knowing, just and loving. When he wakes in the night, you get up to soothe him, feed him, change his nappy. And you do all these things — or hope to — with inexhaustible patience and kindness, because you’re all he’s got.
It was my sons who taught me how to love — and there’s nothing conditional about it. You can’t say: ‘If you’re good, I’ll love you more,’ because that’s not even true.
When my eldest two boys, aged six and four, found some spray paint in the garage and decided they wanted to repaint the family car, rusty old banger that it was, I had to punish them, of course. I had to tell them that what they’d done was very wrong.
But when I imagined them finding the paint, egging each other on, wanting to make the car beautiful (for they’d certainly sprayed it with care), I could only love them.
This is what being a mother has taught me about love proper. It requires nothing in return. Nothing at all. While some of my boys
would like to sit on my knee and hug me, others were more independent. But I loved them simply because I knew them.
And I knew them because I had watched them closely, emptied their pockets of little shells and stones they’d picked up during the day, sat with them when they were ill, cheered them on when their team played a schools’ tournament.
They cannot imagine how I’ve been with them every step of the way — how much every moment in their young lives has mattered to me. The hours their dad and I have spent hoping, despairing, discussing and enjoying their very individual characters.
And now my youngest two are about to leave home. In little over a month, this house, this home, will be eerily empty.
My husband Mark and I find ourselves being ever more sentimental. This summer, we were eager to have one final family holiday in Normandy, for old times’ sake. But the boys sent us off alone, insisting that they’d look after the dog and the house and we should have a good time.
I rang them every evening: ‘How is everything?’ I’d ask. ‘Fine, good,’ they’d say. One day I had to ask: ‘ Are you missing me?’ Joe laughed. ‘Do you want the honest answer?’ he said. ‘We’re doing just fine without you. Things don’t feel much different.’
Oh, the pain of it! And yet also, on reflection, the joy, too. That’s the role of a parent: you look after a child just long enough for them not to need you anymore.
I’d even taught them to cook: they’d done a ratatouille one night, with roast chicken and baked potatoes. They didn’t even need me to provide a good supper.
When the children were small, every time I met a young man or woman from another country who was living and working in England, I’d ask them: ‘How long have you been away from home? Doesn’t your mother miss you terribly?’
They would laugh and say: ‘Of course she does! She’s my mum, isn’t she?’ And I’d plead: ‘Please ring her tonight! Please tell her you love her!’ The idea of my sons
ever fleeing the nest was simply intolerable to me.
When we got back from holiday, the clean washing was still just where I’d left it, telling them: ‘This is yours. You will put it away, won’t you?’ And the shelf in the fridge door had broken with the weight of the beer they’d squeezed in.
Would it have felt better, or worse, if the house had been immaculate? If they’d hoovered the carpets and done every last bit of washing up?
Well, I clean better than they do, that’s for sure. And the first thing I did upon our return? Go out and buy pizzas for us all.
In a few weeks, Mark and I will be eating fine fish — which is economically possible only when there’s just two of you. But it’s not a meal I’m looking forward to.
Children and a sense of loss are bound up with each other. Sometimes our children used to sleep between us, and we both knew that what we were experiencing was inestimably precious.
When my second son, Will, was a self-conscious adolescent, I found a photo of him aged 18 months, lying naked in a shallow puddle on a sunny beach, not a care in the world. ‘Where’s that dear little boy now?’ I wondered. ‘Just where has he gone?’
I have been, I hope, a good daughter to my parents. Over the years, I have phoned every week, visited every month. My mother died seven years ago. She was quite a character, often tricky, but now that she isn’t here I see again and again all that she did for me — the part she played in who I am today. I love her now, in death, more than I ever loved her in life.
When I grew up, it was my friends I turned to when I was in trouble. I found myself editing my life for my parents so they wouldn’t worry about me. The first time I confessed to my first marriage being on the ropes was when I told them my husband had walked out.
Now my own children are adults, is that how they’re going to treat me? Are they going to remember to phone me from time to time? Are they going to tell me the truth, or give me only the good news?
My looming empty nest is a real thing. ‘They’re always your children,’ my friends tell me, and technically, of course, that is true.
But I am far, far away from being the centre of their universe. I no longer have to be the all-just, allpowerful one.
They know now that actually I’m a human being after all, who gets grumpy and tired.
I take a huge interest in their lives but they feed me snippets, and even then only reluctantly.
JOE
is going to share a flat in Leeds with another lad who’s starting work at the same time. I don’t even have the address yet, despite asking numerous times.
Yesterday I asked to see a photo of his flatmate. ‘Why do you want to see that?’ Joe asked.
‘He might end up as your best friend of all time — I want to know what he looks like,’ I told him.
‘The chances are you’ll never even meet him,’ Joe replied.
‘Of course I’ll meet him! I’m coming to visit you, you know. You’re not escaping that easily.’
Joe shrugged. I get the feeling that ‘ escaping easily’ is exactly what he wants to do.
He wants ‘home’ to be another place entirely. He’ll probably meet his wife there and settle down for good. It’s unbearable to me. All that loving, just for this? Joe tells me there are fit girls in Leeds. He wants a night life, music, beer, all those goodies of young adulthood. He’s on the hunt for Miss Right. He thinks that’s what love is all about.
When he has a child of his own, perhaps he’ll know better.