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### Letting Go Of Young Adults (which is when…?)
My friend is leaving her daughter. Behind. When she emigrates. There is nothing wrong in that, for the child is 19 going on 20 and my friend is bringing her infirm parents back to their homeland to die in peace. My friend is acting as a daughter herself, self-sacrificing herself anew. She is a very courageous lady.
It has not been as done-and-dusted a deal for her as it may sound, however, and things niggle at her still. She tries to make sense of these difficult choices when her own heart feels torn, by understanding that sometimes going your own way is good for everyone. It can give that necessary push the bird needs when its nest has become too comfortable. The question each parent still has to ask themselves, always, is how do you know when the time is right? The question that racks me is, how can we find a time that is right for everybody at the *same* time?
### In the balance
If we weigh up the sacrifice of a mother and a daughter (say, in the example of my friend) we would like to think we end up with even-Stevens. However, reality is seldom that fair and level. In the example of my friend, her mother failed to bring much maternal care to the table. But we forgive her as a struggling immigrant. We may even forgive her for her self-pity later on in age; her temper tantrums, her sharp tongue, her insensitve, unsupportive, authoratiative ways. She did what she knew how to do and her (self-)knowledge was limited. That’s life for many of us. Heck, maybe *even* me!
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### Sense of abandonment
It takes little for a person to feel abandoned. It’s a vast world surrounding your speck of self, after all. It is part of one’s spiritual progress to abandon oneself even! That little childish self who says me, me, me.
#### When a child is ready to accept more responsibility over their life (get their act together) we trust they will rise to the challenge. Is it mistrust or insight when you sense that they would like to but cannot? What when you see them rush ahead towards a steep drop over a cliff? Does all this belong to the risk a parent must take when "it is time to let go"?
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### Keeping Faith
I am a lot harsher about my own situation compared to the one described for my friend. I am a little younger, so I grant myself some leaway in that I may become more nuanced in my attitude over the coming five years. The situation is also different in many marked ways, because of my long history with my son's special needs and the challenge plonked in my lap to "let go" of my son **overnight** (when he got snatched up by a girl whom I call the psychic vampire, and became compulsively addicted to her, ie. fell under her fairly dysfunctional spell). It means, however, a great divide in our (my friend's and my) destinies we do not seem to be able to merge into a mutually beneficial support plan. And that seems unfair to me.
How different precisely - from a greater distance seen - our fates really are is difficult to asess. My mother may have been more dedicated in her attentions towards me, for a start. I, however, hate her with a passion right now. Tut-tut! What about compassion and kindness? Hmm…. The window was open, and a gust of gale-force wind suddenly ripped it out of my hands, my heart, my head, out of my range of possibles. It looks like I intend to be thousands of miles away from her when the time comes that she might need my care.
### Transitional Tension
All at once, it can happen, just when you feel you have established an equilibrium, that patience implodes upon itself, compressed by betrayal. It can happen when it comes to light what one really always thought of you all along. It turns out they have been stringing you along out of a general fear of abandonment. It may have to happen several years in a row before it is truly done.
Also this belongs to karmic resolution, which is largely a gruesome battle field. When you are fighting denial and martyrdom and the cold paralysis of fear warmed up on gallons and gallons of always more wine and a packet of crisps, there comes a time when one’s heart explodes and - to one’s horror - hatred comes oozing out, just like that!
### Embedded in Loneliness
##### One conclusion to make is that it's not a fair fight of alchol v sobriety.
It makes one wonder what love is. Was there ever any *love*, really? One may wisely ask. Or was it always condition piled upon condition, like pill upon pill to aid the constant sleeper to fall into a higher consciousness, on the hymn of the night? But they never will.... Or must we always give love a chance? Probably, but I feel like the messiah if I keep on loving her right now! And that would be the most dreadful hubris.
##### Another conclusion we could draw is, one day, people find themselves irrepairably damaged by a lack of warmth and interest taken in their personal life.
If you then also don't know how to pray for mercy, there will only be the bottle to turn to. Nobody said, life was not tragic.
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### The Myth of Motherhood
It is an age old myth of Sophi-Isis-Maria splendour; but in our age of irony it has also been diced into fryable cubes. I haven't had the chance to obtain a copy of Jacqueline Rose's interesting sounding essay (she also wrote about Proust’s poorly voiced Albertine, which brought this author to my attention) but many have written about the myth in the modern negative sense of myth which needs dispelling. I am not sure I think that is called for.
In Sweden they seem keen to dispell it with enforced government-supported child-care schemes that push women back onto the workfloor and separate them from their infants as soon as possible. Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, seem to follow the example, leaning towards the generally accepted desire of the majority of women wanting to be relieved from a biologically-imposed duty which has proven itself to have few rewards and adds barely any credit to one’s name. I used to deplore boarding schools which add up to the same freedom for women; and nannies, likewise, felt like a cop-out. Now, I may think differently; after all I am not so great on the cuddly-snuggly front and down-right dreadful on the kiddie entertainment front. Perhaps, I would have made a great father!
### Blazing or smouldering? Love must be a-light.
Not that my own father ever set a great example. He has completed his remit of love by way of taking good financial care of me. I have no good examples of the important support to motherhood fatherhood may lend, but I think it may well be critical.
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I may have come from an autistic family, but my heart yearns all the more for its right to speak and listen; to meet and embrace; to endorse and uplift. This desire has rendered me half insane, by the standards of my rational family. On top of that, I show an unhealthy curiosity in the world according to Steiner. Somehow this has declared me impossible to love. Yesterday, my mother has proclaimed me officially "lost" (I read that as abandonment). She ignores my state of mourning and takes my grave forlorness at having had to take one step forward and two steps back for the pace of my son's development the past 21 years as a non-issue. She offers me her sleepless nights and suggests I see the humour of it.
Wow. Deep man. Is she a Spirit-Woman Shaman after all? Of course, over the long course of time, it will all seem hillarious. Even Alexander the Great looks a bit like a nonce now.
I leave to one side the wine speaking, and the harrowing cry of help in all her allegations. She has no choice left to her but to find life one big joke (or else she would find herself trapped in a Hieronymous Bosch painting).
### To Love = To Grow
Cogetating this given, I have to ask myself, do I - unconditionally - love my son? Is love not also care and concern? Devotion and sacrifice? Is it not converting wisdom into something your child can take with them into the future (a next life even) where new growth is possible? Is love not a seed of fire you plant in their heart?
##### Love is in the making, the consuming, the burning. We cannot call it love, therefore if we do not see it grow the child, mature the child, develop it. This is not to control the individual that is not yours to control; but to protect and nurture it in a controlled environment.
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What though when this is not enough? Where does the love go you were sure you had given? Are there limits to love? Is there a great leaching of love? Or is there only my limited view? My roaring impatience? My barren loneliness?
##### We must try to remember: what blemishes we may see, are inevitable with the emergence of an Individual I.
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### One-way love is too quiet
Love can be very quiet. In the background. So I am told. I am sure I will age into this perception yet. But as a mother I find there is something very **willful** to love. It needs to move. It needs to rush in. It needs to spill over, and then to be admired as we mop it up together. It needs the other as much as it needs a powerful I.
This is why we expect to see the effects of our love in the gestures our children make towards us. The little things they appreciate, which we contributed to. It is why we like to recognise something of ourselves in them - the bits we wanted to improve upon and preserve.
### Empty-Nest Syndrome?
Sometimes we catch glimmers of our own watering. Then someone comes and corrupts it all. Or is it too soon to say that? Is my grief blurring my vision? Is my sadness too gelatinous still, and only about my own conditionality; my own childish needs?
There will always (nearly for all children save the very needy) come a time when other people will surplant the presence of a mother in a child's life. It would be unhealthy otherwise (may Fien Troch's upsetting film "Home" leave no doubt about that!!). Healthy relationships change with personal developments, and children must change.
Maybe partings, ruptures even, distances are only temporarily; or maybe for evermore from that point on. Some karmic ties are there to be severed.
Leaving home is not the same as leaving your mother behind. The odd script for me, is that my son is dependent on me but has no particular fondness for me. Can he even "leave me"? Has he ever found me?! He certainly doesn't want to leave home: his balance sheets point to that as an unfavourable choice.
Leaving your child behind is only objectionable when a child begs you to stay or when they need their mother as primary care-giver (which may be force of habit or may be dire necessity). The subtle differences give us tricky scenarios. When do we have the right to ask eachother to stay - out of love? When is going a great gift of selfless love?
Specifically with regard to parental roles: are we too old-fashioned to understand the love it takes for mothers/parents to leave their children in great trust, instead of waiting for them to leave without a thought? Often these transitions are fluid and gradual (college/university). But drugs or crime or other tragedies can make them unnatural and these then become the great mis-steps for life.
### Burning Questions
Have mothers got rights? They say women do (some of us in some location). Why, then, is my life lived on my son's timing? And my sense of having lesser rights than him still being instilled by my mother?
These family dilemmas make for a glimpse into the future, when blood commits to nothing and parental powers lose their domination over the innocence with which an individual is born. Then we will no longer inherit the dispositions and habits of our parents. Our genetic forebear can then be easily vanquished by turning over our DNA with our own free will, as we plant new seeds of love from an extended family of the brotherhood of man.
Ahhh…. The blessed thought of it! But we ain’t there yet, folks.
### <center> More on the lessons of motherhood failings in my next post.</center>
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##### Photo in Header my own of soapstone carving by Syollie Weetaluktuk (1906-1962), Inukjuak,
“Mother and Child”, 1957; taken from the book: “Inuit Art, an Introduction” by Ingo Hessell. *The mother is pulling up her spacious hood to protect the infant emerging from her amaut (rear pouch). Her calm, archetypal, expressive gaze inspires great awe in me, both for motherhood and the newly born alike.*
##### The detail of the devil eating a human is by Hieronymous Bosch, from the right panel depicting Hell, in the tryptych, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, ca. 1500.