When the time comes to let go

GIVE ME A BREAK:IT WAS LIKE an old fashioned Irish wake, with aunts and uncles pressing money into his hand. And his mother wondered if her 19-year-old son really understood how far away Australia actually was.

His mother is my friend and she has been grieving. “He’s gone. In more ways than one,” she says. And there are two big questions in her mind as her post-Leaving Cert darling heads out for seven months on the other side of the world in the outback of that continent named “learning to stand on your own two feet”. Her first question is: “Will he come back?” The even more painful second question is: “Did I do enough for him?” The subtext here is: “Did I spend enough time being a mother? Was I too ambitious in my career?”

The years from birth to age 19 fly by and for working mothers the years are measured in rushed weekday dinners and weekends of housekeeping combined with trying to spend time with the kids. There’s an encouraging attitude to the children’s studies, but it’s not an over-the-shoulder waiting at home with milk and cookies sort of lifestyle.

“Did I do enough for him?” It’s a question I ask about my own relationship with my own son, who in a few years time will probably be going off somewhere. “Do I do enough?” Especially on the days when he’s a latchkey kid. Am I helping him build independence? Or am I making him pay the price for my career? For working mothers, guilt is always peeking out from behind our good intentions like a busybody twitching the lace curtains.

Did I do enough? Do I do enough? And, to make it even more confusing, what is enough? I’ve always been comforted by the view of Donald Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst of the 20th century, who believed that coddling mothers, sisters and nannies developed oppressed and fearful boys. He was raised in such an environment and spent his 80 years trying to figure this out, as psychoanalysts often do. Eventually, he summed it up in a phrase: the mother he would have liked to have had was “the good enough mother”. To be good enough, in his view, the mother provides a holding environment where a boy can, from infancy, learn that mother cannot be there to do everything for him, and so he grows and takes risks and learns his own ambitions and limitations.

Winnicott’s father was a British Methodist free-thinker who encouraged independence, while his mother was a depressive who clung to him. So as a child Winnicott was stuck between the two attitudes: one Victorian where mother meant suffocation, and the other where the adventurous father meant radical thinking and independence.

It’s a dynamic that still runs in families. We’re having difficulty letting go of the 20th century notion that mother has to be there all the time for everything, while father sets a good example by taking on the world.

My friend was hiding her tears and bravely bringing her son to the airport at 6am for a flight to Sydney, while her husband was saying: “Isn’t it great? He’s going to have the time of his life! I wish I was him!” For my friend, letting go has been more difficult because of working mother guilt. Yet as a high achiever herself, she knew instinctively that when her son’s university course didn’t work out and he set his heart on a gap year adventure, that she would be suffocating him to refuse. Forcing him to continue on a course he didn’t want would have been smothering mothering.

Here’s a story about another young man – now aged 30 – that helps put this in perspective. He wrote to me to say that he had read my column about the difficulties of international marriages because — once mortgages and children arrive — they can be very lonely for the person who has left his or her own country. You miss weddings, and funerals and family dinners and can find yourself adrift when there is know one around who really knows you to call in unexpectedly for a cup of coffee.

At the time he read my column, he was in love with a woman from another country. She gave him an ultimatum to follow her abroad, or to stay home with his mother. He chose to stay with mother. Now he wonders whether, if this woman had been the right woman for him, he would have defied his mother and gone after her. He hopes that somewhere out there, there is a woman worth leaving his mother for.

So, I have to ask my friend, which do you want? An adventurous son embarking on the time of his life? Or a son who is afraid to leave you? He’ll come back. I can’t say who he will be when he comes back, but he will be the adult that you so desired to rear from babyhood. Your courage in letting go of him is your greatest gift to him. Because even at the end of a mobile phone, you are holding him. My dear friend, you are a good enough mother.

kholmquist@irishtimes.com