Monthly Musing – May 2024 – School’s out … forever!

Not so small daughter is on study leave for her A Level exams which means that she’s left sixth form college and our time with children at school is over.  Ooh, it’s another milestone!  Not so small daughter is delighted not to have to do any more lessons in subjects that have lost their appeal (funny how exams do that to you) and I feel … well, how do I feel?

I thought I might feel sadder than I do, that this phase is completely over now – when big daughter was this age, not so small daughter was still at primary school so we still had high school and sixth form college to come – but actually, now that we’re here, I’m surprised to find that I’m not as upset about it all as I thought I might be.  We haven’t reached this point overnight, after all, so every day that has passed has brought us closer to this point until finally, last Friday, that was it.  Life has a way of doing that, doesn’t it?  The days turn whether you want them to or not.  And that means that it won’t be long before not so small daughter heads off first to Nepal and then to university.

How we are going to feel when we drop her off at university in September has been on my mind a lot lately.  I’ve been trying to focus on the positive that will come from not being a taxi service, not falling over shoes that are abandoned wherever they’re taken off, and not having to collect plates and glasses from upstairs because we’ve run out yet again – and not the fact that our sparky, funny girl is over an hour away in another city in another county.  She’s assured us that she will be home on a regular basis, and we have plans to visit her, but it’s an odd thought that the last bird is about to leave the nest and when she does come home, it will be for fleeting visits fitted into her new life, just as it is for big daughter now as well.

I saw a post on Instagram a while ago which read “I am not an empty nester, I am a bird launcher!” and I think that needs to apply to my husband and me as well.  We have the choice to feel left behind or to see where this phase of our lives takes us and launch ourselves into it.  It’s both an exhilarating and scary thought, having spent the last twenty-odd years being a taxi service, falling over shoes, collecting plates and the thousand other jobs that parents do, but there’s time to get used to the idea.  School’s only just finished, there’s the whole summer before university starts and in the meantime, we’re falling over boxes of things being collected to take to Nepal and uni – nothing’s actually changed that much at all!