A Pint Became a Phone Call. So Why Am I Pleased About It?
Three children, and the leaving has not happened all at once. One has moved north and built a life of his own. One is close enough that we still get the news while it is news. One is still at home, and growing up faster than I had planned for.
Nobody warns you that it happens in instalments.
You picture one day and one car. What actually arrives is a series of departures, spread over years, and every one of them looks like good news.
He Went North
My eldest moved a long way up the country a few years ago. New job, new home, and now engaged to the woman he moved there with.
Everything in that sentence is what you want for your son. He is building a life that is entirely his, in a place he chose, with someone he chose. Nobody arranged it and nobody is propping it up.
Watching him become his own man has been one of the better things about the last few years.
I also miss him. There is no version of this where those two things cancel each other out.
The Conversation Has to Be Arranged Now
What changed was not how much we talk. It was the effort it takes to talk.
There was a time when catching up meant a pint. No date in a diary, no working out whose weekend was free. You went, and the conversation happened because you were both sat there with an hour to fill.
Now a visit is a journey with a plan attached. A call is two people finding a window that suits them both.
None of that is a complaint. The calls are good calls — often better than the pints ever were, because we both turned up in order to have them.
But something easy has gone, and I notice it.
The catch-up used to be a by-product of living near each other. Now it is a thing we have to decide to do.
Close Enough to Still Get the News
My eldest daughter is into the last stretch of university.
She set herself a set of goals a while back and has gone at them harder than I ever would have at her age. Watching that has been its own kind of pleasure — less the results than the working, which is the part nobody can do for you.
She is near enough that we see her more than we expected to. I had braced for less.
So we still get the news while it is still news — the small stuff, the thing that happened this week, the friend who did something ridiculous. That is what goes first when somebody moves far away. Not the big updates. The small ones that never quite justify a phone call.
The One Still at Home Is Not Standing Still
Then there is the youngest, who is still here.
Except she is not quite the child I was picturing when I started writing this. She is turning into a young lady in front of us, at a speed nobody agreed to.
She has years left at home, and I know that. I also know exactly how quickly the last few went for the other two — so I have stopped treating those years as a lot of time.
What catches me out is that I am doing this for the third time and still getting it wrong. You would think there would be some benefit to the practice. There is not. Each of them goes at their own speed, and each time it seems to happen without much notice.
The Quiet We Are Heading For
At some point the house will be quiet, and my wife and I will be the two people left in it.
I do not think I am dreading it. Ask me on the day. But the thing you are supposed to feel about it — that something has ended, that a phase is closing — does not quite match what I actually feel, which is that we did the job we were meant to do.
Three children. Three separate lives, all of them being built somewhere.
We have already started making plans, and most of them involve turning up at somebody’s door with a bag and being a nuisance for a weekend. I am fairly confident we will be welcome.
Fairly.
The pint became a phone call. That is not a thing going wrong. That is what it looks like when it goes right.