How To Cope When Your Kids Fly The Nest by:Virginia Ironside
Virginia Ironside is one of Britain's leading agony aunts
, and she has contributed regularly to Woman magazine, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Mirror. Many people enjoy her direct and charismatic approach to self-help and she has published a number of books on marriage, bereavement, fertility and family life. Her 'Dilemmas' column appears regularly in The Independent and she also contributes to The Oldie.
With thousands of young adults setting off on gap years this summer, or for their first term at university in September, many parents are starting to get a horrible inkling of the ghastly experience of empty nest syndrome.
Psychiatrists have claimed that this time is one of the most traumatic in a woman's life, bar birth and death, and yet this poignant moment is still hedged with taboo.
When my son left for his gap year trip of five months in India - several years ago now - I suffered weeks of depression that compared with the feelings I had when my father died a year earlier. I wondered what was the point of everything.
'She felt redundant'
I couldn't help remembering the sad death of a school friend of mine, Nicolette Powell, the wife of Georgie Fame. She threw herself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge due to depression partly triggered by the 'empty nest' syndrome. As her husband said in a statement: "She said she felt redundant because all her children had grown up and no longer needed her constant attention."
Friends are generally unsympathetic. "At last you can do your own thing!" they say, me-generation smiles glued to their faces. "Have your own space! Write that novel! Be free of the non-stop thud of rock!"
But what if your 'own thing' is bringing up children? If what you enjoy more than anything in the world is looking after little people and raising them up to be big people?
What if, like me, you would prefer by far to make a suit out of black cardboard, wire and old sheets for your son to wear in the Ants' Chorus at primary school, than take an Open University Course? What if you don't want to go hill-walking in France to discover, now you are free, the delights of old Norman churches?
Are you happiest being a full-time mum?
What if you would much prefer to be watching your child hurtle down the Log Flume at Thorpe Park or winning the three-legged race at school? What if you'd rather be in the kitchen, knocking up a huge bowl of pasta for a bunch of hulking teenagers in Doc Martins? Or sitting on the sofa, with an arm round a warm, giggling body, watching crap DVDs on the telly?
If that's how we feel, then we're made to seem like some dreadful clinging mother who 'can't let go'.
Letting go
The problem is that a good mother does let go - and therein lies the pain. The very job of mothering contains, if successfully carried out, a self-destruct device that explodes in her face 20 years on. A child leaving the nest is a bereavement and a redundancy all rolled into one. Your primary job has gone at a stroke and so has one of your best friends.
Or, perhaps, the best friend because many partnerships founder the moment the last child flies the nest. Couples find that what has glued them together for the past two decades has been discussions about schools, shared jokes about their children's friends, shared delight in their success and happiness and shared anxiety at failure and sadness.
The person you each married may be quite different all these years later; once the child has gone, you may find you have nothing left in common. If your marriage was a second marriage, this moment may actually be the first period you have ever spent alone with each other in your lives.
Dads feel it too
Even if the relationship is strong, a child leaving home is one in which both parents often feel bereaved, not just the mother. True, when Barbara Taylor Bradford went through her mother's things after her death she found a note in her diary. "Barbara went to work in London today, and all the sunshine has gone out of my life."
College life offers structure but freedomBut Graham Taylor, the ex-football manager, was also quoted as saying that the day he dropped his 18-year-old daughter off at college for a four-year teacher training course was the worst time of his life. Forget about the football disasters. "I have never felt so empty, lonely and upset as the day she started her own life," he commented.
What many couples don't realise is that since both partners grieve in their own way for the loss of their children, and anger is an integral part of grief, they often take their misery out on the other.
Coming of age is a time for the child to celebrate, and leaving home happily is a sign of successful parenting, hence the feelings of grief often get overlooked. Anyway, the parents themselves may feel it is quite inappropriate and selfish to allow themselves to acknowledge their unhappiness at a time when everyone else seems to be wreathed in smiles and congratulations. How dare they be unhappy! How selfish!
Let your feelings show
So how can one cope with the pain? The first thing is to acknowledge it. Getting the grief out into the open is often helpful, and it's good to talk about with your partner and to acknowledge that he or she may be feeling just as sad as you.
Travelling can be the start of independent life
The sadness should be acknowledged, too, to the child - but how? A mother who bursts into tears, clutching at the straps on her child's back-pack howling: "Don't leave me!" is the mother who deserves to be left. No child would ever return willingly to that mother for Christmas.
But depression and sadness are hard to hide from an affectionate child; and better than pretend that everything's fine and dandy, which might, if presented convincingly enough, make the child feel that his or her departure meant absolutely nothing, there is nothing wrong with a simple confessional.
"I am so glad you are striking out on your own, but I am sad too, of course," is quite easy to say without putting a massive guilt-trip on the departing kids. It also does give an opportunity for the child to say a few affectionate words which can make all the difference to a sorrowful parent.
If the pain is too great
Whenever any pain gets too great and if it goes on too long and turns into full-blown depression, a visit to the doctor for anti-depressants, or counselling, may be in order.
Throwing yourself into some other occupation may help up to a point - some parents start taking university courses themselves.
But this grief is, actually, a natural rite of passage and as the day turns to night and as the tides come in an out and the moon waxes and wane, children give pleasure and pain in equal measure. The grief can't be assuaged. Your own parents probably felt bereft when you left home. One day, remember your own child will be grieving when your grandchildren leave home.
There is only one consolation.It is not much of one, I have to say. But it is worth remembering that while one job is finished, another beckons. Ahead lies a new, and far more difficult, job - the parenting, the agonising 'hands-off' parenting of an adult, when you have to communicate as half-peers, half-adult/childand eventually, who knows, some moments when each role will be completely reversed.
But that is another story.
Read more about family life at
http://www.tom-brown.comAbout the author
Virginia Ironside is a contributor to
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