“Parenting is a life-long lesson in the art of learning to let go”, is what a friend of mine said to me once when I was newly pregnant and asking anyone I knew with kids for advice.

She was not wrong.

My son turns 19 next month. That is 19 years of loving him, keeping him safe, teaching him things and letting him go, slowly and surely since the day he was born. The first time you leave them with a babysitter, first steps, first day of school, walk to the local shop, sleepover, school trip, school disco...

There are so many firsts of holding your breath and letting them go and praying to the god you may believe in that they come back to you safe and sound. Over and over and over again.

I never realised until now that all of these exercises in letting go are really the dress rehearsal for when the love of your life turns 18, finishes school, and begins to leave you for good.

It has always just been him and I. Our perfect little family. The two of us against the world. It has always been me making the decisions, drying the tears, celebrating the achievements and championing his choices and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The freedom to be the strongest influence in his life has suited this feminist whose lessons of consent and equality for all were never diluted by someone else’s opinions on parenting.

Sure, lone parenting is challenging sometimes in ways that only another lone parent can understand, but it was how my life turned out, so I knuckled down and got on with it. I could not live in the empty space that being a lone parent creates, as this space, for me, held only the loneliness and the knowledge that I alone did not create this wonderful human and I alone should not, in a perfect world be navigating it just so.

Life gets busy when you are raising a child and it never dawned on me for all of those years that there would be an end to it all, that it would happen in the blink of an eye, and that I’d better get used to the change and grow with the change, if I wanted to hold on to my relationship with my very grown-up son.

My mother always told me that she borrowed us for a while - her three children who she loves fiercely. I left Ireland when I was 18 years old to go live in Canada as a nanny and for the life of me, I cannot fathom how my parents let me get on that plane. After becoming a mother myself I have often asked her what she was thinking! She always has the same response, “Sure, how would I have stopped you? It wasn’t my place to do so”. I never really got it until recently when my son became the same age I was when I left. If he chose to go now, to move anywhere else, I know I wouldn’t stop him even if my heart was breaking.

Look, I would love to stop time. I would love to go back to when he was little and I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I would give anything for a few more years of him needing me and hanging out with me and doing the “I love you’s” at the side of the bed, but I know that if he was asked he would laugh and tell me to Feck Off and head out the door to his very new and exciting life that he is embarking on. Who am I to stand in his way?…

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Untitled+design+%2838%29.jpg — thoughts on letting them go

by Ellie Balfe

Last year he went to the Longitude Festival for the whole weekend. His excitement was palpable. Mine was not! I couldn’t breathe at the thought of him being up in Dublin, staying in a hostel and heading to his first festival. My imagination ran riot to the point that I nearly booked myself into a hotel myself so I could be nearby, but thanks to Westlife and their two gigs, not a room was to be found. I cringe at the idea now a year later. Imagine me up there! He would never have forgiven me. Instead, I took the sage advice of a female friend who has walked this path before with her three grown daughters who told me that “No news is good news”. To have a check-in once or twice a day and after that, if you are not being contacted about them all is good. So that is exactly what I did and you know what? We both survived, and he had the time of his life.

We await with bated breath for the Leaving Cert results next week. This will mark the end of his schooling. The end of my support of his schooling. It is already strange not buying the books and the uniform and the making of school lunches and I find myself muttering on a daily basis, “Now what”?

Now what, indeed.

It has always been just him and I. I have never really needed anyone else, but now, in the space that his growing creates I am left with the realisation that I too must grow, and I too must change to survive the shift of parenting a child to parenting an adult without doing damage to either of us in the process. This means me figuring out how I am now defined in the absence of being ‘Mum’ as I have been since he was born. He no longer needs me to keep him safe but to be his safe space when things go wrong. He no longer needs me to hold his hand, tie his shoelaces, make his school lunches, kiss his boo-boos or tuck him in at night. As I write this I am struck with an emotion that is a cross between fear and awe, sadness and excitement, both for him and for me, as I too am embarking on a new journey, one that I would not choose but that comes to us all eventually.

I understand now why they call it Empty Nest Syndrome.

He is ready to fly and this is because of me. I made him into the strong, intelligent, kind, inquisitive, loving young man he is today, and he is not mine to keep.

If I tried to keep him with me the world would be a sadder place without him and neither of us would survive that. Instead, I choose to let him go, to watch him take flight and to allow his excitement to fill the space I now find.

It is time for both of us to grow and even though my heart is breaking a little bit I am excited to see what comes next. For us both.

Alex Slye, September 2020.

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