My husband and I raised three children. Now they are all grown-ups and gone. Our youngest daughter started it all. She left the nest to fly to Michigan for her graduate studies in survey methodology. We saw her off at the airport with a heavy heart. When she and my husband cried, I couldn’t. The tears came later after the reality of it all was confirmed.
Every day that I passed by her closed room proved to be an ordeal. As if my legs would not carry me beyond her closed room. It was only after a few months that I felt the strength to finally get inside that room. I spent hours sorting through her stuff, figuring out which ones had to go and which ones she might want to go back to when she comes home. If she comes home.
Our eldest daughter left after a year, leaving for Maryland to teach S.P.E.D. Although the farewells were not as dramatic as the first goodbye, it was still hard to let go of someone you nourished for 20 or more years. There were fits of crying—alone, of course, so as not to disrupt the normal routine.
At least we still had a son but he lived apart from us. The transfer to our new home in the suburbs distracted me for a while. But when my son broke the news to us about his posting to another foreign country, I could not hold back my tears, again in private. And every time he comes home for a week or two, it is like a new life for me. When he left us again and again, it’s like a piece of me is torn and broken each time.
Honestly, I’ve come to dread the day any one of them would come home, then leave us again. I lived through all of these, thanks to the following measures that I took: prayer and meditation, teaching, gardening, raising cats and dogs, beading and crocheting. Now I am also writing and soon journaling will be another therapeutic activity. In between, I go shopping with my sister who is in the same situation. Over cups of tea and coffee, we share our heartaches and little joys at good news from the other side of our world when the children remember us with their emails.
