Letting go of my daughter has given me a remarkable gift

Lesson 1: My fears are unfounded

When I took my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter on a year-long caravan trip around Australia, I thought I was giving her the most well-rounded education any parent could possibly give their child.

She might have missed preschool, but by the time she walked into grade 1, she had absorbed so much of our vast, contrasted country: the unforgiving dust of the Pilbara, the thick heat of a far western Queensland cattle farm, the noise of Melbourne’s lively food markets, the wild oceans of Tasmania’s windy west coast, the rattling thunder of a road train shaking our car as it passed, and countless ways to occupy herself and her younger brother on the long, long drives between towns.

The author and her daughter, Kate, in London in 2014.

She learned Sydney was my hometown, Canberra was Dad’s and that hers was the Gold Coast, but most of all, that beyond the place she called home, there were so many other exciting places to discover. By the age of five, her view was already worldly, and I believed she had the worldly confidence to match.

And yet, for those first two weeks of school, she cried every single morning, not wanting me to leave her side. With the teacher firmly holding her back, I would hasten out the classroom door, clouded with that ridiculous guilt only a mother feels and deeply questioning why I took her around the country in the first place. I could have given her a stable, sensible year in preschool, and I wouldn’t be burdened with this sobbing mess of a child, who couldn’t extract herself from my side.

Late into that second week of daily morning tears, catching the concern on my face as I returned for afternoon pickup, a teacher’s aide said to me: “Do you know she stops crying the moment you’re out of sight?”

I felt duped. She was absolutely, totally fine without me.

Lesson 2: My parents went through the same pain

Our children were not overindulged in travel during their school years. Our holidays were regular interstate trips to see family and friends or camping by the coast. A big highlight for us as a family of five was a two-week motor home jaunt through New Zealand when she was in grade 6.

In high school, the only overseas trip she got was a “cultural experience” homestay to New Caledonia, at the age of 15. The homesickness gripped her so hard that she phoned me in tears almost every day. Staying with a local family had its cultural challenges, especially the time they skinned a deer and hung it in the garage of the house.

But by the time she reached year 12, travel seemed to be the top of her agenda. Seven months after graduating, aged 18, she was London bound for that Australian rite of passage – the European backpacking trail.

The day we drove her to the airport, it was my turn to feel hollow with that gnawing ache of impending absence. It’s like homesickness in reverse. I was not prepared to do any letting go.

The anticipation of the goodbye at the departure gate that day was all consuming. I couldn’t focus on any conversations, I fussed over what she was making for her final lunch, I got snappy with my other two children. I wanted to protect my baby girl from discovering the world and yet, her whole life, I had been intentionally preparing her for it.

I wanted to cry all the way home from the airport but didn’t want her younger siblings to witness my pitiful coping skills.

The irony of this moment was that I had put my own parents through the same pain when at age 19, I went to live in Athens for a year, working as a nanny to an American family. If my own mother felt any sense of loss, she diverted it into writing regular letters to me over the year, those blue lightweight paper aerograms filled with news of home but mostly with unconditional love.

That year abroad opened my small, sheltered world to the real world.

So, with a mother who spoke glowingly of her transformative year in Greece and a father who travelled so often for work, it was inevitable a love of travel would push its way into our daughter’s heart. History repeats, I realised.

Lesson 3: Missing hurts

With the Europe trip ticked off, her plan to live the London life succeeded and with $100 left in her pocket and a backpack full of summer clothes, she landed her first job in a dingy pub.

Maintaining contact with a busy 19-year-old immersed in London life in 2013 meant copious text messages. To her credit, she was incredibly consistent and generous at keeping in touch by text, and I was also grateful for the regular Skype calls.

But it’s those milestone moments when the missing hurts the most. The death of a grandfather, her dad’s 50th birthday, her sister’s school musical, a Christmas Day lunch – times of darkness and light, each one shadowed by the soft ache of absence.

Her two younger siblings seemed to get used to it and get on with their lives. But when her calls interrupted a family movie night or game, they would get mad.

One year, two pub jobs and three share houses later, she enrolled in a college course which meant a second year in London. At least my suffering will result in a qualification, the martyr mother in me thought.

With her course complete and UK visa expired, she finally returned home. My pathetically maternal heart got a reprieve and my family felt whole again.

Lesson 4: I miss her but my life is richer

Two years later, she landed a job in Tanzania - an incredible opportunity for a 24-year-old. For a fleeting moment, the overprotective, selfish mother in me was screaming inside, saying: “It’s not safe! Tell her not to go! Convince her to stay in Australia!”

But the mother who likes to believe she raised her daughter to be independent, strong, and adventurous silenced that scream, and shared in her daughter’s excitement and anticipation as she prepared for a journey into a radically different life, working for an NGO school.

This particular farewell was made marginally easier by the fact my husband, daughter and I had already been travelling together, and I had many more weeks remaining on my long service leave trip. I was pleasantly distracted, but it didn’t stop that gnawing sense of loss from surfacing as we hugged goodbye at a London tube station.

FaceTime, texts and regular calls were my saving grace for the next year, along with airfares booked for a visit. Regular connection is everything when you live so far apart, and thankfully my daughter understood that.

Our reunion in Tanzania, 18 months on, was overwhelming. A few days in, as we shared a meal in a communal kitchen with our daughter’s workmates at the school, I finally realised: her absence was necessary. It was her path to forging her own life.

Her absence was my lesson in letting go.

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