Now that you’re gone
Alison Mau faces her empty
It was only once they hit adulthood, I told them, that I have never been absolutely, completely, 100 per cent relaxed unless they are both under the same roof as me.
We’ve had a longstanding, running joke with the kids of this household ever since they were intermediate school-age, and it goes like this: legitimate tenancy for youngsters under this roof expires at adulthood.
Put more simply: turn 18, and out you go. To fend for yourself, to make a life, a washing basket, and dinner of your own. Healthy dinners if you can, please.
The joke only works because there’s nothing at stake. My children know they’re always welcome here. They have friends whose family situations are more fractured and whose welcome at home is more tenuous, so they also know how fortunate they are.
But like a lot of parental leg-pulls, this little jest has its origins in my own history. I left home two months after my 18th birthday for my first job in journalism, in a parched, recession-hit wheat-belt town in rural Australia.
It was four hours’ drive from home and I had no car. There was no internet, no FaceTime or even cellphones then. Once a week, on Sunday night, I would call my parents from the single payphone in the deserted main street. I lost contact completely with most of my friends.
It was an almost unbearably lonely and miserable year, and I couldn’t wait to get back home. But the forced self-reliance had done its work – accustomed to independence, I found I couldn’t stay with my folks for long and went flatting again (with flatmates this time) within a few months.
Things have changed, of course. We read a lot about this new millennium’s children and how they can’t wrest themselves free of the family home before 30 thanks to student debt, and unaffordable housing and casualisation of the workforce. Despite our family jokes, I didn’t really expect my kids would be out of here at 18.
And yet. In the space of a week I’ll have made two trips to Auckland Airport’s international terminal in a car carrying two of the dearest people in my life (and their bags) and two lonely trips back, by myself.
To be fair, my daughter left for the first time four years ago. She loves her family and New Zealand equally fiercely and would have happily stayed put, but she’d set her heart on a course of study that’s not well served here. And so, a month after her 18th birthday, off to Australia she went. And over the next four years I trekked back and forth across the Tasman to see her, as often as I could afford it.
Technology has made it much, much easier to stay in touch, and we talk almost every night on FaceTime when she’s away. She has come home every summer, but that will change now she has graduated. Real (fully employed life) began for her this week with that trip to the airport.
At least we still had her younger brother at home. But then he turned 18 and, as his musings about uni became more serious over the past few months, it became clear he, too, was going to leave. Now Australia has both my children, and I suppose that’s karma. I left my home country for good at 23, the universe is presumably having a great laugh at my expense.
This is all very glum. Sorry about that. I’m not by nature a glum person, and I have been determined not to allow the melancholy to leak out into daily life. Who wants a woebegone mother wandering around all sad-pants when there’s no further daily mother-function needed?
So, on the surface I’ve been chin-up, business as usual. I didn’t even recognise it as sorrow until the last couple of weeks but, as my son sold his car and quit his jobs and my daughter packed her bags again, there’s been a low-level throb of anxiety that at first I couldn’t name.
It feels like dread and comes with lurid nightmares of my children in peril. I wake up in a sweat and have a little laugh at myself, for they are fine and I’m sure they’ll continue to be fine. After all, driving in Australia is much less dangerous than our rural roads here at home, I tell myself, and deaths from venomous spider or snake bite are rare. Calm down.
Go looking for information about empty nest syndrome and you’ll find a tonne of brisk advice about ‘‘retaining a sense of YOU’’ and ‘‘getting your own life back.’’ There’s a whiff of judgement to these podcasts and articles from parenting experts and psychologists; have you let your children become the focus of your life? Did you take your eye off the things, and the people, you used to value just because you wanted to make the best, best effort you possibly could as a parent?
Shame on you. You’ve now got a right job ahead of you clawing all that personhood back, haven’t you? Off you go and join a club or take up a hobby, quick smart, before you dissolve into a puddle of grief.
I deliberately avoided falling into that category. One of my main goals as a parent has been, since the kids were quite young, to foster their sense of independence. When they were little their milestones were the usual stuff: starting school, learning to ride a bike, first exams. But now the milestones rush towards us and past at a bewildering rate, as if time is telescoping (they do say this is how it feels when you get older, don’t they?)
My daughter passed her drivers’ licence two weeks back. That’s two children I’ve taught to drive, from bunny-hops around the carpark to 100kmh on the motorway. The milestones are so much bigger, with such enormous implications. It’s scary.
If I’d let myself, I could have been the hovering kind, of course I could. The notion of the dangers facing those defenceless little beings, my defenceless little beings, every second of every day was almost suffocating. I pinched and squished and battered it down so that feeling wouldn’t show on my face, so they could learn and grow and fly. My smiling face said ‘‘I’m so happy!’’ when inside I was always the tiniest bit anxious.
It was only once they hit adulthood, I told them, that I have never been absolutely, completely, 100 per cent relaxed unless they are both under the same roof as me.
Of course I saw this coming, I’m not wilfully unaware of the passage of time. I was even clueless enough to imagine this moment, the empty nest moment, wouldn’t affect me much. Children grow up, and they leave. We are lucky to still have a wonderful teenage presence in our house thanks to my partner’s girl.
But it’s time to get used to the new normal. No more dinners for five. No more driving my kids to basketball or dance, no more teenage parties, which will be great news for the neighbours no doubt.
I don’t need to find out who I am again. I know who I am. That’s the really satisfying thing about being the age that I am.
And in a couple of weeks the lachrymose me will be recovered and I’ll be back to normal, I’m sure. I don’t want my kids to stay here just because leaving is hard for all of us. Ironically, I can’t be happy unless they’re off doing exactly what they need to do.
Give your kids roots and wings, as the saying goes. Coming to terms with it when it happens, is harder than it sounds.