November 3, 2015

We recently had the experience of a 19 year old son leaving the house for a career in the army, with a daughter in year 12 short on his heels.  He wanted to join the army since he was a little boy and through some unfortunate circumstances (for him) it took 8 months before he could finally leave.  We didn’t mind at all because we had him with us a little longer.  We had ample warning and knew his departure was coming up.  However, absolutely nothing prepared the three of us for the final goodbye and return to a house with a big gaping hole where he used to be.

I am ferocious reader, daily munching my way through countless blogs, posts, newspapers, magazines and books by the heap.  What I find totally fascinating is that I have never come across other parents, mothers or fathers, writing about the experience of their children leaving home.  It is also something people don’t often talk about.  My sister’s son also recently left home for an overseas adventure and through her experience I was exposed for the first time to the full impact such a move can have on the parents that stay behind.  Let me just be clear, I accept it as a perfectly normal stage of life for teenagers or young adults, it is their next developmental task on the road to adulthood and their successful completion of this stage sets them up for life.  As a parent your goal has always been for your child to one day stand on his/her own two feet and take care of themselves and live a happy life, chasing their own hopes and dreams.  Mentally I knew all of this, it was just my heart that wasn’t prepared for the pain of separation.

This experience then reminded us of our own leaving of the nest.  If you are a teenager leaving home, you don’t spend much time, if any at all, thinking about your parents that you are leaving behind.  You are so excited about the adventure you are departing on, it never enters your mind that your parents may experience deep grief at your leaving, never mind all their fears about you and if you will be able to make it on your own in the big bad world.  When we were young all the boys had to go to the army to fulfil their 2 year conscription military service.  As a girl with just one sister, I didn’t spent too much time thinking about that either, just that boys in uniforms looked very sexy and grown-up.  It was only in preparing myself for a son who wanted to join the army that I realized what every mother in South Africa must have gone through.   Talking to my husband and spending time with friends over countless barbeque fires gave me a glimpse of what life in the army must have been like and reiterated the sorrow that every parent must have felt in letting their son go.  It gave me a new perspective on my mother-in-law who had to go through this experience four times!

My train of thought then took me back through the ages and I gained a new perspective on our collective experience as parents.  We are born, grow up, fall in love, have children of our own, try to raise them with as much love and wisdom possible and then let them go off on their own to find their own adventures.  With sons (and daughters) leaving home to join the army to fight a war or serve their country in a similar way, there is added danger involved that makes the last goodbye so much more final and intense.  If a child stays at home while studying or working, it makes the separation more gradual and everyone involved has time to adjust to the new definition of the parent-child relationship and prepare for the final move.

Then another thought hit me like a ton of bricks.  We haven’t just left ‘home’ once, we left it twice.  My husband and I were almost 40 when we decided to move to Australia.  We left our parents, brothers and sisters, extended family and all our friends behind to pursue our adventure in another country.  We spent a lot of time thinking about the move and the impact thereof on our friends and family, but just as when we were 18 years old, we were so focused on the future and everything that needed to be done, that we couldn’t fully comprehend what our parents went through.  As the ones who did the moving, we had adrenalin rushing through our veins that protected us from the pain to a certain degree, which helped us to face the enormity of the task at hand.  After the move and when things quiet down, you realize the full extent of what you have done and then slowly and surely have to go through the grieving process.  It differs from person to person, some take it in their stride, while others spend years on an emotional roller coaster before they feel happy and content in their adopted country.  It is only now with our own children leaving the house where we feel the separation with our own bodies, minds and hearts, that we can get just a tiny glimpse of the pain our parents went through when we left the house, not once but twice.

The aim of my post are three-fold.  First is to give my own pain an outlet, to try and express some of what my husband and I am experiencing and maybe typing words out on a computer will make it just a little bit better.  Second is to tell or warn my friends and family who still have children in the house that this day may come for you too and it may hurt more than you ever expected.  Try to find time to spend together even if everybody is busy and it is tricky to find something that everybody will enjoy.  Lastly but not least, I would like to give a voice to the parents who went before us, including our own parents, who experienced grief when their children left home, without the opportunity to express their feelings as they came from a generation where the expression of too much emotion were frowned upon.

Travel safe, young ones.  Remember that you are always loved and always welcome back home.