The end of one phase of mothering brings with it an unexpected silver lining.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.I’ve now been a mother for 12-and-a-half years. My daughter – my only child, born in my late 30s – has been an extraordinary joy in my life. She’s also been a wrecking ball through that life, obliterating most of its previous landmarks and topography. But this is her final year of primary school, which means that come January , I’ll be entering a whole new era of destruction: high school.
And yet I remember that whole period with pleasure, because I was so entranced by her. A few months after she was born, I Googled “what to do if you love your baby too much”, because I was, frankly, alarmed by how much I adored her. As she hit toddlerdom, I relished all the day-to-day mum stuff: for years, the only clothes I ironed were hers I loved the parenting mysteries of how to get the knots out and keep her alive crossing roads and effectively label Tupperware.
And now these primary days are ending, and I have no idea what will happen next. We are getting close to the last time she will walk with her dad up the street to school; the last time we will sit on the plastic chairs at assembly; the last time I will, by any stretch of the imagination, be able to think of her as little.
But on the weekend, I had a strange experience that made me think there might be another path. I was at a concert, listening to a classical music piece called– the Gaelic name for a Scottish island called St Kilda, 40 nautical miles beyond the Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic ocean – when I suddenly had the powerful sense that I was deep under water, swimming upwards towards the air.
So maybe the brave new world of high school might have some familiar landmarks, as well as a lot of wild and unexplored territory. For me, as well as for her. There might be late nights; there might be loud-checked suits. There might even be canapés.
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