POV: Your child is finishing high school

Sentimentality warning: read on if you dare!

All over Australia, Year 12 students have finished their normal classes. Award ceremonies have been had (I’m not crying, you’re crying). Soon, 78,000 seventeen to eighteen-year-olds will sit the HSC. Then they’ll rock a frock or fine suit at their formal, and be done with school forever.

For each of these students, there’s a parent whose heart is unexpectedly breaking. Or maybe that’s just me.

At the bathroom mirror, I run my hand over the spikes of my daughter’s shaved head. It’s dyed blue for an ‘Iconic Pairs and Groups’ Year 12 dress-up day.
‘Ye-es?’ Pearl asks, giving me a wary side-eye.
‘Can we talk about how I birthed you, but now you’re taller than me? And how you’re my most incredible creation, but really you created most of you? And you’re going soon.’
I say all that with my eye-balls, then actually say, ‘There’s fresh olive bread on the bench, if you want it for lunch.’
‘I’m good.’
She pins a circular sign to her red shirt. Her ear used to rest on my chest as I carried her, clip-on-koala, in the tattered canvas Ergo.

‘Thing 2′ knocks on the door, and they’re off.

Fun fact: Teenagers have ‘full grown’ heads, but the seams between the bones of the skull don’t completely fuse together until about age twenty.

For the last few months, I’ve been avoiding a creeping sadness. To be devastated that Pearl is finishing school would be pathetic, my inner-critic scathed. What am I, just a mum? A 1950s house wife? Grow up. Children grow up.

A kinder, more generous part of me knows that real feminism is about having choices. Such as having my own life and being a mum…and feeling the feels of that latter occupation. Thus, my inner-critic can shut the f*ck up. Pearl has already bought herself a one-way ticket to Singapore, flying this November. Then to Melbourne to study. Our clan of four in Mullumbimby, after eighteen years, ends in five weeks. It’s a loss. Words are a hand waving in the departure lounge.

Bright with inspiration and fearless, Pearl is physically strong and beautiful. All teenagers are ridiculously beautiful. Meanwhile, I have bursitis and a cyst in my left hip. My pelvic floor is not always reliable. A certain contrast in our condition has become apparent. As Maria Bamford said, ‘I am a withered pouch of low blood pressure in a deteriorating caul of papery skin covered in black arm hair.’

She’ll pack down her bedroom: Blu-tacked polaroids of soft-focus hugging friends, garlands of homemade earrings and rambling plants, the tipped-over bottle of craft glue. Tarot cards and collages. A den of possibility. No more Virginia Woolf novels flung about the house. I’ll miss how Pearl walks backward out of a room when conversations no longer interests her. She maintains eye-contact and then poof, gone.

Pearl is the flatmate I never had in my twenties. It will suck not having a live-in creative ally and social history advocate. I’m comforted to know how little she needs me, and will keep myself busy oiling my papery caul.

Fun fact: The word Emotion is derived from the Latin, Emovere, meaning ‘to stir the sentiments’. Instinctive or intuitive, as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.

A daggy but true cliche: My children are my greatest accomplishment. Which also makes it sound like I’ve also achieved so many other things!

I am proud of the countless hours of mind-blowing fun we have at The Cassettes. The batons of joy we pass. I didn’t deliberately keep my business small-ish so I could also be a stay-at-home-mum. It’s because I’m crap at admin. I like planning activities. Emoting through choreography. Being the salty captain of a sea-side sparkly tribe is still an exciting honour.

The bummer of my children being my greatest accomplishment is that:
1. I don’t get to hold onto it and
2. Society doesn’t acknowledge my achievement with a title (Dr Mum) or cashola.

Children are a temporary, exhausting gift. You give everything, then gradually less in a shift of sunset colours as responsibility moves from you to them. They become an almost-adult and you become irrelevant. Mother as Zen master.

Fun fact: Tibetan Buddhist monks take several weeks to create their intricate Sand Mandalas, representing a perfect universe. When finished, they are ritualistically destroyed, showing impermanence. The sand is collected in a jar, then wrapped in silk, and carried to a river where it is released back into nature.

The parenting club has more secret handshakes, clubhouses and subsets than the Masons. The worst part of these clubs is comparison, of school or parenting style: putting others down to lift yours up is never a good look. The best part of these clubs is solace: we are the parents whose children graduate or leave home in 2024.

Pearl has grown into her self-determining, almost-adult self. That she’s alive and well is a good outcome. Doesn’t every parent fear their child will die? And still, the ache.

I’m thinking to book us (me the caul-oiling mother, she the nest-flyer) horse riding on the beach. I say ‘thinking’ because it’s way more expensive than I’d thought. Still, living a metaphor is irresistible: clip-clopping with the sea of possibility on one side, the safety and limitation of home on the other. And without necessarily wanting to get Daryl Braithwaite’s The Horses playing in my mind, it probably will.

Post scriptum. Let’s pretend that’s Latin for “random extra thought”:

To be a parent of a teen is to be a baseball catcher waiting on a distant field. Their bids for connection fly out unexpectedly, like shooting stars. Sometimes you’re looking the other way. It’s OK. By this time you’re not their world. The universe awaits.