Time the Healer

Been a long time...

And reading my last post, I just cant believe how much my feelings have swung.

I'm not talking hormonal fluctuations, just the normal passing of time and what it does with the things that happen to us.

Last post - just a few months ago - I couldn't think about daughter 1 and her impending departure to uni without flashbacks to her childhood and tears welling in my eyes. Maternal guilt was running rampant.

This post - well she's gone. And am I crying? No. Do I think about her all the time? No? Am I waiting with baited breath for her calls and her Blackberry messages? No.

We talk and Blackberry message quite a lot which is great. I don't feel cut off from her. I still know what is going on. I still feel like her mother.

But I'm quite happy without her. The other three children provide enough entertainment and work to more than fill the time that I'm not working.

Next week, she is coming to stay for a few days with her boyfriend. And I am looking forward to it. But I'm also mindful that it will mean extra work for me (lazy lazy person that I am).

How far have I come from the distraught mother of 5 months ago?

So what do I draw from this?

Not much really.

Yes time heals. But everybody knows that. And it never helps at the time.

And I don't believe that the fact that I am thinking and feeling so differently now invalidates what I was thinking and feeling then.

That my children will leave me is a tragedy - a completely right and reasonable tragedy - that I will sometimes experience again. That the bossy five year old with a squeaky voice has gone is another tragedy that I know about but am not experiencing now.

So maybe what I have learnt is that time doesn't exactly heal. But it does change things. Until, of course, it changes them again.