Parental love is right; the world is wrong

There's no fixing it, but it's wrong

I’m having a maudlin moment, but why shouldn’t I write those down, too.

What a strange thing it is, I’m thinking, that we love our children so intensely and intently, and then let them go. Of course, we have to. They have to grow and mature and find their own way. But then… it wasn’t always so, was it? Back in the day, your son might well take over your farm. Your daughter might marry just to the next village, and you’d see her often.

There are reasons, I think, to suppose that parental love can be suffocating, and that in many ways it’s psychologically healthy to have our children move away from us. But perhaps that’s all backwards. Perhaps we suffocate only because we are not learning to age properly, as we would learn if we lived in healthy communities with our parents, watching them age and relinquish control to us. We would learn how to make space for our children if we had models of our parents making space for us.

I live on the other side of the world from my parents. My sister, too - she lives in Australia. My brother is still in the UK, and nearby where my parents live. They raised three spectactularly confident and largely happy people, so confident we didn’t need them any more, and we have left them behind, but for a weekly phone call. I feel sad and wish I could be closer to them now - and much of this sadness is coming from the fact that it’s about to happen to me, too.

My older boy is coming up to university age, and will most likely study in the UK; and then most likely find a job there, live there. The younger one, too - I can’t imagine that he will choose to spend his life in Xiamen, where we live. There are too few opportunities. He can’t carve out the kind of career he wants in that city. So this little person that I have nurtured, with whom I would rather spend my time than any other human on this planet, will head off far away. And that’s supposed to be the natural and rightful conclusion of the love I have for them.

I’m not sure I can really buy into this. I would never do anything to limit those two human beings, but emotionally, I’m not at peace with it. There’s an inevitability about the arc of their lives away from me, but I will rage against it, here, with my little pot of whisky. Not in front of them, but just to myself. I rage against the fact that I will be separated from those that I love the best. Good luck, my beautiful boys.