On Letting them Go

As a single mum of many years, often parenting feels very ever-present and in my face. Do you recall the feeling of being ‘touched-out’, when your kids were babies? It feels like that sometimes. That feeling of being physically attached almost all the time. And of the very up close and personal nature of knowing all their bodily functions so intimately that your own body clock starts to synchronise. You feel the approach of a two-year-old’s, eh, morning ablutions, deep in your psyche, it occurs from their birth - the clock is set. For what feels like forever.

‘Oh, it’s time for her morning poo, I hope she can do it in creche ok…’

‘I wonder will he be brave enough to ask to go to the loo in big school, he’ll be bursting to go around about now…’

Mums worry will her daughter be ok if she gets her period in school, or with her Dad for the weekend, or on a playdate. Basically anywhere you are not.

Now, bear with me, this piece isn’t about puberty and toilet habits, I promise. It’s about what it takes to let them go - your precious kids; the brand new humans you’ve held close as part of your own body and taken personal responsibility for. And pride in their growth, in their worldliness. And how strange, hard, confronting and confusing it is.

It’s confusing because wanting them to go, to proceed, to fly those wings, is what we, as their guardians, are primed to do. We are on duty to oversee their physical and emotional evolution towards the sole goal of their personal independence. But it’s confusing, because we love them and we don’t want to let them go. We love them so much that it hurts. So much that we want them to never encounter fear or danger, so much that we cannot imagine the pain of ever losing them. We love them so much that hearing of that poor woman who lost her husband, son and daughter - her entire family- in that car accident in Donegal this week brought us to huge, shaking sobs of sympathy and empathy.

Well it did me, anyway. I don’t know how she has found the strength to wake up each day since.

But losing them and letting them go are thankfully very different scenarios. One is final, and one is freeing. We must always let our kids go. For that is the only way they will grow - alone, and without the helicopter effect of our presence hovering over them, watching their progress, waiting for their mistakes so we can swoop in and pick up the snotty mess, reverting back to the dependancy of baby time in a flash.

Which would be wrong. For all of us.

No, our role as parent is to fully champion the letting go, the small separations and essential independence that life offers - starting school, walking to the shop solo, sleeping over at friends, baby-sitting and then, almost last of all, going out at night, going to college, going out of the country - wah!

And so it goes.

But it does gets easier.

In our setup, my daughters stay with their Dad every Wednesday, and every second weekend. They’ve done that since they were babies; it’s standard now, and we all need it. I need the time to decompress from what feels like holding up the sky, and the three of them need connection time, which is its own story with its own narrative - nothing to do with me.

It’s the ultimate ‘handing over’. I feel like I am giving them away. Every second week I still cry when they go.

After almost nine years of being a co-parent, I’m still not used to handing them over. The silence is deafening. I could fill my house with friends and family, and still feel a void.

This week, so many of us parents are letting our kids go in stranger circumstances than the usual summer’s end. Letting them go into schools and colleges where all feels weird. Where everyone is uneasy. The kids are nervous, no matter their age. Us parents mildly freaked out but smiling anyway, bags packed, lunches made, game faces on. We’re doing it.

Like so much of this pandemic, we’re focussing on putting just one foot in front of the other. All other choice seems diminished. The path has been set. We follow compliantly, and we let them go.

I have one guiding thought though, one sentence that flashes through my mind when I feel overly concerned about my eleven year old Aspie, when I feel like I want to swoop in and over-mother (smother?) her.

And it is this; ‘trust the child you are raising’.

Trust her.

She is awake, aware and alert. She has her own instincts to tap into. She has her own guide. And isn’t that what I have spent years trying to teach her - trying to lead by example so she learns that her own radar is valid, is true and will not set her wrong…

Autism spectrum aside, she’s clued in and super smart. She knows about Covid; she knows about hand-washing, coughing and distance. Both because I’ve taught her, and because she is bearing witness to the whole thing, as we are. Adults are not the only ones at the races, our kids are here too, taking it all in and processing it just as they need to. And often more pragmatically than us!

Trust the child you are raising.

Trust your little junior infant in the uniform that swamps them.
Trust your shy eight year old to raise her hand and ask to go to the loo.
Trust your senior school newbie to settle in and say hi to new table neighbours.
Trust your exam year teens to see through the process with eyes on their future.
Trust your college student to be safe, and cool, and enjoy having their mind expanded in a million different ways as they launch on the world.

Trust them, and trust yourself. You’re not losing them, you’re letting them go. And that, dear heart, is love in action, and what gritty, gory, glorious parenting is all about.

This poem by Cecil Day Lewis, speaks so beautifully of this moment, and can be felt whether you have children of your own or not, as we have all been that ‘winged seed’…

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

Ellie Balfe, August 2020.

How have you found the letting go dear reader, tell us in the comments below…