The sorrows of goodbye

I drove my youngest daughter to the airport on Tuesday night.  She’ll be away for six months.  

It’s not quite the empty nest syndrome, but when I came home earlier in the afternoon after two days at the beach with my husband and grandsons, a terrible pall descended and I recognised the nagging sadness of farewell. 

My daughter will return and the six months of her time away will pass soon enough, but things will never be the same again. 

A trip like this is bound to be life changing, especially for my daughter, who is going to expand her mind, despite her ambivalence about leaving.  

On the trip in the car on the way home after we had watched her go through the opening into the departures zone, where people queue for ages to get through customs and to their eventual flight, I told my daughter’s boyfriend about the reasons for my desire to avoid travel except when necessary. 

For him, my daughter’s leaving is saddest of all, as they’ve not been long together.  She’s been planning this university semester overseas for more than a year, well before they recognised their connection. 

In any case, as we walked back to the car after our tearful farewells, I told my daughter’s boyfriend how it was when I was a child when relatives visited from Holland, or in the case of one of my uncles and his immediate family, from Indonesia. 

The joy at the airport, the pleasure of my extended family in Melbourne coming to greet relatives from overseas and my mother’s delight were all palpable. 

But at the other end, when it came to say goodbye, my mother’s grief swamped me as she waved to her father, on that last time she ever saw him after he had walked through those doors.  

My grandfather was already in his late seventies and soon after his return to Holland he developed blindness and later died at the age of eighty-six years.

 My mother was not able to be with either of her parents when they died.  And both died not long after respective trips to Australia.  The trips must have taken it out of them, those long journeys by sea and later by air.

I can still feel my mother’s pleasure against her grief the moment I go through those electronic doors at any airport.  

The crisp air-conditioned comfort inside, the reams of people lugging suitcases across the walkways up and down escalators, the people who mill around signboards to read the names of destinations, the flight numbers and airline logos splattered in neat lines that keep rolling over. 

There’s a sign to let you know that certain flights are closed and if one was your flight you’re too late to take it now. 

And one to tell you your loved one’s plane has landed and you rush down the escalator to the arrivals section underground where all arrivals disembark.  And wait and wait and wait until your loved one has cleared customs. 

People hang over the iron bar with you and wait for the doors to open to reveal their loved ones who are coming for the first time or returning from a trip.

There’s a buzz in arrivals with the occasional whoop of joy when some new longed for person goes through the double doors and looks to right and to left along the corridor that leads out in either direction. 

They look to find someone they know, someone who’s expecting them and when they lock eyes on that someone there’s the mutual grin of satisfaction, the squeals of joy, the brisk movements that signify they’re together at last.

All this joy at arrivals, but on the next floor above we see the sorrow of goodbyes where couples hug one another, families like ours give one last squeeze to a departing daughter who will be back soon enough, but the ghosts of past relatives who once went through the departure doors – my aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandparents – hover on the sidelines. 

These relatives could not return.  Their lives were lived elsewhere, but for a while during visits, their lives joined ours and we could be together in the flesh.  But in that first hello, as Gillian Bouras writes, we heard the echo of their goodbyes. 

We’ll skype and text and use Facebook I tell my daughter and she tells me the same, but it’s not the same. 

The virtual world is a poor substitute for the real one, where people like me who are not big on touching cannot reach out to touch, to stroke a cheek, to hold a hand, to pat a back.  The deprivation seems unbearable even as when we are together in person I might hold my distance. Now the actual distance divides more acutely than any skype screen can allow.

My grandsons are young.  They will wonder in a few days where their aunt is, but for now, although we have told them she’s gone away for a few months, they cannot know what her absence means. 

They will recognise it only in a slowly dawning sense of loss. 

More than our ovaries

My husband and I are about to become empty nesters.  I first heard the term, empty nester,  many moons ago when I was studying psychology and social work at university.  Then I shuddered at the thought. 

In those days I found the idea of living in a quiet, largely empty house daunting. 

How do people do it?  Live alone? 

For all her struggles my mother gave the impression that she too preferred to live in company.  In the hubbub of family life when her every minute was circumscribed by some one else’s needs and her own wishes and desires fitted further down at the bottom of the hierarchy, only after other people’s needs had been met. 

For the past thirty or so years I have viewed my own life similarly, though in recent years I have become more ‘selfish’ to use a word I loathe.  More like a man, perhaps. 

Ever since I can remember I marvelled at the way the men in my life, beginning with my father and my brothers, my husband too, never seemed to need to take their leave in the same way we women and daughters have needed to. 

Why is this ?  A relic of the patriarchal ways, where men are seemingly self determined and women tied to the apron strings of children and the so-called kitchen sink.  We women must account for ourselves and beg for leave. 

The phone rings.  I answer.

My youngest who left home last night for her first night away in college asks if I can be around at 12.30 today to be there for her friend who plans to drop in to collect her camping equipment which she had left with us as far back as January. 

I had planned to go off to do my Keiser weight training at 12.00, something I try to fit in every Sunday before the place closes.

‘If I’m not back yet your dad’ll be here,’ I say. 

‘But he doesn’t know where everything is.’

Even away from home my daughter has needs, small needs but they intrude on the timetable of my day.

No matter, I tell myself.  I have always told myself.  I enjoy these incursions into my day.  I am driven by the need/desire to help others, beginning with my children, but sometimes my generosity wears thin and resentment creeps in.

Be careful of what you wish for, they say.  If you’re not careful you might be left alone, a lonely old thing with no one to care about. 

Once years ago my mother complained to me that she could no longer do anything for me, not like when I was a child.  When I was a child I had needed things from her, but not as an adult, not in the same way.   

And so we had grown apart as if our relationship was based entirely on her looking after me.

Now it’s in reverse. 

I’d like to think there is another state whereby two adult women, mother and daughter, can relate in a type of friendship.  The pull of the past as mother and daughter will never disappear entirely but maybe a different sort of give and take might exist rather than the hard core mother to baby, daughter to elderly mother experience of yesteryear and today. 

My daughters teach me new things about the world.  They teach me so much.  They keep me young.  Without them I fear my mind might shut down.  They lead me in new directions. 

For instance:

Jo Wainer the wife of a doctor, Bertram Wainer, who was once repeatedly harassed by antiabortionists and politicians gave Ted Talk in Melbourne called Sex and the God trick.  In the talk among other things Jo discussed the ways in which most medicine is based on the male body, as if women were males, too, only with ovaries.  She gave an example that stays with me. 

Most of us have heard or read about the typical signs of a heart attack.  Tingling in the arms.  A crushing sensation in the chest, as if, as one doctor once told me, an elephant is sitting on your chest.  These turn out to be typical symptoms for a man suffering a heart attack and a man suffering these symptoms, if he knows about the signs and is not too far into denial and fear, will call an ambulance and shift straight into cardiac care where he might well be saved with less damage done, of course depending on the severity of said heart attack. 

A woman, on the other hand, is likely to feel nauseous and sweaty at the onset of her heartattack, very much off colour, and her first impulse might be to call her daughter who will come over and make her a cup of tea. 

In other words, it will take much longer for the woman to call for an ambulance, by which time the consequences of her heart attack are likely to be far more serious.

They do not teach these distinctions to the general public or at medical school, says Jo Wainer.  When a man comes home from work after a stressful day she reckons, he is likely to scream and yell, or put a fist through the wall, whether literally or metaphorically.  

In other words he is likely to act out his rage and frustration in some way or another. 

A woman, on the other hand, is likely to act out her frustration and rage after a hard day by her tendency, as Jo Wainer puts it, to ‘tend and befriend’. 

This notion rings bells for me.  I am one who tends and befriends, while my husband gets more into the out-with-it-rage variety or a total withdrawal like a sleeping volcano.  And I have often wondered why. 

Is it our hormones, our education, our socialisation, or in our stars? 

I expect there are exceptions and plenty with much in between but this dichotomy resonates for me.  

What do you think?  I ask.

The masculine and the feminine, the yin and the yang and we all have a  bit of both, only some tend to have more of one than the other, and not only because of our gonads or ovaries.