One minute your child needs a cuddle, the next minute they're leaving home without a backward glance.
One minute they’re climbing on your lap wanting a cuddle, the next minute they’re off without a backward glance. Before Mother’s Day, Jane Phare reflects on life after her son moved out and talks to other mums about their experiences.
It’s the immaculately tidy bedroom that gets me. So quiet, empty. Empty coat hangers and drawers, empty bed (neatly made), empty floor. Who knew there was so much carpet in his room?
He left for Otago two summers ago; first a year boarding at Knox College in Dunedin and then to Castle St in probably one of the grottiest flats in the ‘hood.
A beloved only child, conceived after years of fertility treatment at a cost that might otherwise have been spent on a beach house, gone.
“You must miss him,” friends say mournfully.
“Not really,” I tell their startled faces.
And I don’t think he misses us much. He’s having too much fun, living his best life.
He misses his dog Buddy, he tells us, and my cooking. But judging from the Snapchat videos he sends from his kitchen – lamb loin seared pink, avocado, rice, diced red onion and baby spinach leaves - I guess that’s fading too.
There are things that I miss: the hugs, the size 11 sneakers (not all of them his) on the porch, the laughter and teasing at my expense, taking carloads of teenagers to festivals or on holiday with us. My husband misses Saturday morning rugby, yelling advice from the sidelines that none of the boys can hear; watching sport with him on TV; picking him up/dropping him off at parties or mates’ places.
Here’s what I don’t miss.
Instead, I have perfected the concept of being a helicopter mum from 1433km away. That way I don’t realise how little notice he’s taking of my advice. Nor do I witness first-hand the “events” - partying on rooftops, RTD-fuelled escapades on an electric scooter.
I am withdrawing slowly. I no longer text him on Monday nights to remind him to put out the flat’s rubbish and recycling bins. After maggots appeared around the bin lid, he taped a reminder on the kitchen wall.
I’ve learned not to phone when a) he’s in a lecture b) at the gym c) at his girlfriend’s d) at kickboxing e) at rugby practice f) at jiu jitsu g) with his mates or h) when he’s driving, which means there is never a convenient time to ring.
Instead, we communicate most days through Snapchat, texts and Instagram. Snatched vignettes of his life captured in irritatingly short videos: playing cricket in the backyard; students jammed into courtyards jumping to DJ Dyzzle; pages of statistics swot to prove we’re not wasting uni fees; sea lions and aurora lights at Dunedin’s Tunnel Beach.
My helicopter parenting reached new heights last month when he planned to go camping with a group of mates over the Easter break. We couriered two boxes of camping gear down from Auckland the next morning.
He never went camping. Instead, he and his flatmates decided to make an ice bath out of an old freezer, sealing up the edges with black silicone, filling it with water and switching it on. The resulting Snapchat image filled me with terror; what if water leaked into the electrics?
I sent a text: “Water + 240 volts = electrocution and death!”
The next morning, we sent an RCD (Residual Current Device) on an urgent courier to Castle St. Would it arrive in time before the ice bath ended in tears?
If anything, I seem to be more connected to my son’s everyday life than I did when he was at home. But other parents have found it harder to adjust when their offspring turned and left. One, I’ll call Anne*, an Auckland mother of two daughters, broke down on the phone within minutes of us talking, apologising for being “a hot mess” when talking about her children.
She “pre-grieved” before her two daughters left home, years ago.
“I started crying three months before they left. There’s no place for logic. People who understand, it’s a very small circle.”
Realising she was struggling, a friend bought Anne a book, Celia Dodd’s The Empty Nest, which helped her realise she wasn’t the only one to go to pieces when grown children left home.
“People think grief can only be applied to death. This is a real thing to be grieving for because that part of your life is finished. That child has gone.”
Mother of two, Ingrid Thomas, of Queenstown, cried all the way home after settling her daughters into boarding school in Christchurch. Daughters Holly, 18 - now at university in Dunedin - and Gemma, 16, were both 12 when they left to board at St Andrew’s College.
In front of the girls, Thomas put on “a big smiley face”, but she remembers that first time, dropping Holly off at St Andrew’s and the non-stop tears on the trip home.
She assumed her daughters would go to Wakatipu High School and live at home. But her husband Richard, who boarded when he was young, wanted the girls to at least consider the option of St Andrew’s.
Thomas found their decision to leave for boarding school “really hard”.
“I didn’t want that. I still don’t. What’s wrong with staying home?”
She misses the teenage talk that used to happen in the car, to and from sport or school, when the girls shared snippets about their day.
“I miss the everyday chat because they’re not great on the phone.”
Anne also grieves for the loss of what she calls “proximity parenting”. No chance to perch on the edge of the bed at night for a chat or to have dinner together.
“They’ll tell you stuff about what’s going on in their life.” That doesn’t happen now, she says.
Newstalk ZB Kerre Woodham remembers missing everything that went with being the mother of a teenager - the energy, the noise, the chatter, the pool parties in the backyard - when her daughter Kate left home 18 years ago to go to university and later to live overseas.
“Just having the girls come round raiding my wardrobe, getting ready to go out at 11 [pm] when I’m ready to collapse into bed, being exposed to all the new music the kids find, just the fun and the vibrancy and the colour and the nonsense. That’s what I really missed.”
Kate also used to accompany her mother to events when she was a teenager.
Back then Woodham ran a pickup/drop off service she nicknamed Kez’s Kut Throat Kabs, available 24/7.
“Any of the kids could ring and I would go and collect them.”
Now the lost daughter is back as a married mother of two, a son, 8, and a daughter, 6, who live upstairs from Woodham in a shared house.
“Now I’m allowed to share in the fun with the grandchildren, which is indescribably fabulous.”
For Anne, the departure of two daughters within two months of each other triggered questions that still haunt her, including her purpose in life now that she is no longer “needed”.
“Because if you’re not needed, are you still a mother?”
To other parents going through the same feelings, she says don’t be embarrassed about feeling sad.
“I don’t think it matters if it’s London or Perth or Invercargill. Because if they’re not there, they’re not there.”
After Herald journalist Anne Gibson’s two sons, Campbell and Oliver, left home, she wrote a poem, Fledged, in which she talks about the remnants left behind – the dismantled slat bed, the skateboards, hair gel and school photos - “smiles, frozen in form class”. Campbell had the poem carved into a piece of ancient swamp kauri.
Fledged (an abridged version)
They leave in the rain and the wind
A car they drove so far, it has become theirs
They go slowly and swiftly
Shoulders square, no backward glance
They leave in the sunlight, or else at night
Moving forward into their grown men’s futures
Their tall stick frames made tiny once again
As they vanish onto their own horizons.
*********
These days I keep my son’s bedroom door closed to curb the pang of sadness the stillness brings. I don’t know when my larger-than-life man-child will be back from Dunedin or if he’ll move back home in the future. Maybe, just maybe, I miss him more than I’ll admit.
*Name has been changed to protect identity
Jane Phare is the Herald’s deputy editor of print.
Even spent vanilla pods and coriander stems deserve a second act in your kitchen.