This week, my daughter finished school. She still has her final exams in a few weeks but the formal part of school - the lessons, the teachers, the assemblies, the packed lunches (by her not me since she was about 9), the homework - is all done.
Meanwhile, I have a friend with much younger children who has been struggling a little lately. She's at home on maternity leave with a baby, a toddler and a primary schooler. She is exhausted, bored and feels like her brain is turning to mashed avocado.
“Sometimes, I just need everyone to stop speaking to me and wanting me every minute of every day of my life,” she told me in an early arvo vent message when all her kids were momentarily occupied. “I’ve been playing trains and changing nappies and going to the park for almost nine years now and I feel like I will never move out of this stage. Some days feel like death by park.”
This is my second experience of a child finishing school and once again, I'm feeling overjoyed and devastated about it all at once. Another friend is experiencing it for the last time as her youngest child graduates and it's hitting her extra hard. “I’ve been parenting for 20 years and now it’s over,” she texted me yesterday as her son headed of for muck-up day. “Being a mother has been a huge part of my identity for so long and now it’s like my work is done and I’m just….gutted.”
The days are long, the years are short.
I’m not sure who said that about parenting but my god did they nail it.There are periods of motherhood that you do wish away no matter how many misty-eyed old ladies come up to you in the supermarket and urge you to “cherish every moment”.
Look Old Ladies, I understand the sentiment and some days I too get dangerously close to whispering these words into the stressed ear of another mother with tiny kids but then I remind myself to shut up because not every moment is worth cherishing while you’re actually living it and some of the moments would be more enjoyable if you, say, punched yourself in the face.
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Thank you for your honesty. My only daughter starts the HSC course this coming term 4 ... she will graduate next year. She is at boarding school as we moved to Brisbane last year, she is in Sydney as she did not want to change schools. I have had a steep adjustment to the fact that my job as a parent was to get her to adulthood. I will not be there while she undertakes her last year of schooling ... your right ... when i left school it was my milestone not my Mums ... and I coped!
I teared up even just reading this. My eldest is in year 12 and I’ve been so focussed on getting him through the year that I’ve only just realised that this is the end of his schooling. He’s applied to join the ADF and if he is successful he will leave home next year. I will be incredibly proud but I’m feeling the thud of realisation that once he goes he won’t come back and that breaks my heart a whole lot.