My daughter is gone and leaves a hole
It was a planning mistake that couldn't be changed, or better still: a coincidence. My holiday was already booked when my daughter told me she was moving out. While I was away. I briefly swallowed empty-handed, but told myself that it couldn't be changed now.
And then I came back to the flat after my holiday and she was actually gone. In other words, she had left some things behind, everything she had no use for at the moment. There were still books, boxes and pictures in her room.
It leaves a hole in the shape of the child it once was.
I strolled through the empty room and tried to be brave. On the doorframe are still the lines that show her growth from toddler to schoolchild to teenager; we lived here together for almost her entire life. And now we don't. She leaves a hole in the shape of the child she once was.
I thought I would take it cooler. She had left her children's plates behind, as well as her ski equipment, and her hair was still in the hairbrush. I sniffed it a bit and wet it with my tears. I didn't think it would be this bad.
She had always been travelling somewhere with plans for a few months now. I was happy about that. She's mature, I thought. But now, in view of her latest developmental step, I feel like a mountain biker who is riding down an ever steeper slope, suddenly recognises the approaching abyss and wants to put on the brakes. But it's too late.
«One person is missing for you and the whole world is empty,» writes Joan Didion in her classic book on grief, «The Year of Magical Thinking». Fortunately, my daughter is alive and well - but I have still lost something, something big: the child she was.
With every decision in favour of something, you also decide against things - but would life have been better if I had decided differently?
When we are confronted with situations that overwhelm us, the mind likes to resort to magical thinking. If I had worked less, baked and played with her more, made her a nicer home, I think she would still be here now. I know that's nonsense. She's twenty, an age when you're old enough to live your own life.
When I look at her photos on Instagram now, she looks more grown up. I know her moving out is the natural vanishing point, the goal I've been working towards. But as is so often the case, when a big goal is achieved, you don't find the satisfaction you were hoping for, but emptiness.
I see parents everywhere with their children, playing cards on the train or simply walking hand in hand, and it gives me a twinge. «I should have enjoyed it more!» I say to myself. I've missed out on too much. But I know it's a fallacy. With every decision in favour of something, you also decide against things - but would life have been better if I had made different choices?
Now she's gone, the daughter, and it feels like a sentence without a full stop behind it. I would have loved to have helped her pack, to have sorted out with her what to take and what not to take - we could have reminisced about our shared past. And find an ending. Together.
But now I'm standing there alone, crying into a hairbrush. How ridiculous love makes us. And at the same time, it alone makes life worth living. We are happy to accept a little ridicule.
