«Lose yourself» or goodbye with Eminem

Letting go is not a particularly big word. Not like love. Or home. Or farewell. In these words, meanings and contexts thunder against each other like discharges from a storm cell.

Letting go, on the other hand, sounds light, permeable, like sand trickling through an opening. And I have to let go now. Because this is my last column for this magazine. And the last as a so-called mum blogger, which is how I started my career. This career is now in late autumn, a colleague recently told me, and my children are almost grown up too. So it's time to slowly let go. With the emphasis on slowly, because it's a process. Most of the time, anyway.

All the more important to me is this last text, for which I have even chosen a soundtrack: «Lose yourself» by Eminem. You remember the famous intro:

If you had one shot or one opportunity
To seize everything, you ever wanted in one moment
Would you capture it?
Or just let it slip?

Seizing the opportunity of a lifetime, perhaps the only one - that's how I threw myself into my new role as a mum blogger. To finally be able to show what you can do, even if you're not sure you can, but to try everything to make it work. And yes, in that moment the world becomes one and you lose yourself in it. It is these moments that I also wish for my children, now that they are grown up. To find their moments, to grab hold of them, to lose themselves in them.

Difficult to let go

Success is an uncertain concept, my son explained to me. Failure, on the other hand, is an opportunity to learn something. He had to write an essay about it, but found the subject difficult. And he's right, success is fleeting. Nevertheless, you can only fail if you strive for something. Sometimes letting go is easy, even relieving. Like when you get rid of things. You always thought you still needed them, but nothing is missing when they are gone. But that's not always the case. Sometimes it's scary and difficult to let go. When you cling to things as if you were hanging over an abyss.

You better lose yourself in the music
The moment, you own it, you better never let it go

Letting go is an exercise that you inevitably learn as a mother. Who doesn't remember that first night with the newborn, the moment when the little creature makes loud demands. And while you are still trying to orientate yourself in your waking consciousness, which is assembling like Tetris, outraged by this scandalous screaming in the middle of the night, you suddenly realise: this is my child, my responsibility, my new life. The old one is over.

Snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity
Oh, there goes Rabbit, he choked
He's so mad, but he won't give up that easy? No

Once you have taken on responsibility for children and a family, the search for that one big, life-shattering opportunity usually no longer plays a major role. You simply don't have the time or energy for it anymore and, incidentally, you hardly remember what you wanted with such an opportunity. Back to reality, there's no room for dreams here. You'd better let them go.

If you don't let go, you'll never find out if you can fly. Because that's the issue now, when the children go out into the world.

It's the little things that count

But you can also see it differently. With a child, it is no longer the one, all-changing opportunity that counts. Instead, it's the many little things you do every day, the looks and touches, the laughter, singing, comforting, explaining. The love with which children are nurtured to make them big and strong. And I believe that everyone tries their best. Even if you never get all the chances in the end. And do a lot of things wrong, fail again and again. In those anxious moments of being a parent, when you doubt your ability and suitability for this job, quite a few are tormented by this question: whether the ratio between success and failure has turned out to be acceptable. Whether the balance is positive.

Parents inevitably learn to let go. Children are constantly growing and as soon as you get used to something, everything is different again. For example, there is the matter of the warm, soft, sometimes moist little hand that for a while always sought the big hand, as if guided by an invisible magnet. And then one day, usually around the time the child starts school, this little hand suddenly withdraws from the big hand, often with a bashful glance across the street, because there are friends there who shouldn't see that a mother is still attached to it. Even then it's time to let go of the hand, but also of the time when you were still the only relevant figure for the child.

It is a good life principle not to make decisions out of fear.

And so it goes on. First the little hand is taken away, then at some point the whole child, or rather the half-grown one. This adolescent now finds everything and especially the mother embarrassing, no longer wants to answer questions, but instead rolls his eyes with feigned ennui. Sometimes it would actually be easier to let go at this time. Even from yourself, or from the mother you have become after your old self has disappeared into the mists of time. But that's exactly when it becomes all the more difficult. You imagine an abyss and cling on.

It is a good life principle not to make decisions out of fear. And if you don't let go, you'll never find out if you can fly. Because that's the issue now, when children go out into the world to discover their own opportunities. And leave you alone with the question: And who am I now? What's next? But isn't that what all the effort was for? That the little ones no longer need you, that they can stand on their own two feet?

You better lose yourself in the music
The moment, you own it, you better never let it go

My children are grown up now, this is my last column in this space and I would be lying if I said it was easy for me to let them go. But I know that I can fly. And I'll be happy to flutter by again in a few years' time, when this place might need a grandmother column. And I will seize the opportunity.