“I can live without Leonard Cohen playing”

WHEN your squalling, perfect fiends burst into your life demanding years of nurture, you hit the ground running and pretty much maintain that pace — give or take the odd sprint — for a couple of decades.

Raising kids doesn’t allow much time for existential musings; like a bird nudging her fledglings out of a nest and along a branch, I was too busy to mull over why or where I was nudging them.

So when my eldest son reached the end of the branch and took off, it came as a shock. ‘Away,’ I thought dumbly, as I stood in the airport and waved him off to South America for a year, ‘that’s where all the nudging leads’. I felt winded by the realisation, knocked sideways by a sudden ache of missing.

I’d arrived at the airport equipped for crying; I had tears in the back of my throat and tissues in a bag.

My husband had to use them all at check-in, which was enough to set everyone else off. By the time we’d got to the departures gate and my son had walked through it, I heard his 16-year-old brother — who’d made a heroic stab at stoicism but caved like the rest of us — say under his breath. “Thank Christ for that — I can’t take much more of this.”

At which point, my eldest waved and was gone.

In a fit of heart-sick frenzy I repainted his bedroom the next day and hoofed my 16-year-old into it — the bed looked better with someone in it. Gradually, I got used to not seeing my eldest crack out laughing at Family Guy and adapted to not tripping over his schoolbag and guitar.

Somehow or other, I became accustomed to missing his teenage soundtrack — the Muse and Killers songs — that used to make me crazy and the ceilings throb. Maudlin retrospectives diminished and lost out to common sense; the family dynamic re-jigged itself and we moved on.

On his return home a year later, he extricated himself from our jubilant embraces in the airport, “Jesus, what happened to you, you lanky fecker?” he asked his younger brother, when he saw him.

My second son had grown a foot and was about to embark on his own outward-bound trajectory and my girls were poised on the brink of adolescence.

I’d changed; my domestic bubble — the familiar one I’d inhabited for 20 years, had burst; my eldest son’s departure had signalled the end of act one — in which I’d played a pivotal role — and the beginning of act two, in which I’d budge over to the periphery of my children’s daily lives.

Fixed points started to move in the second act and ‘us’ became mutable. Now, the boys arrive home for pit stop visits, during which I trip over their shoes and find myself smiling unexpectedly at the sound of their gunshot laughter, while I’m emptying the dishwasher.

Then they’re gone and the house recalibrates itself again.

When my eldest daughter leaves this month, another soundtrack will fade, but it’s about more than a soundtrack, of course — I can live without Leonard Cohen playing on a morose loop — it’s about the pervasive presence that daughters have, which will evanesce when they go.

My daughter’s presence infiltrates everything like oxygen, from my head down to my knicker-drawer (which lost its private status the second my daughters entered their teens).

Her moods can blacken a room like squid ink in a tank, but whatever ambience she creates — and most of the time she lights my house up — she creates it wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. This ambience is about to vanish and I’m going to miss it.

Her bedroom window — out of which she used to smoke in imagined secrecy — will stop banging shut in guilty panic at the sound of my footsteps. That astringent fury — over who borrowed what without asking — will direct itself towards her sister — and me — no more.

The third act is odd but it’s also exciting; while I’ve been nudging my fledglings off the end of the branch and seen all sorts of new possibilities open up for them, new possibilities have opened up for me too.

But peace and quiet have inched their way into the heart of the house and this takes some getting used to.

My youngest daughter’s soundtrack is the only one playing now, and despite the fact that it’s Lady Gaga on a loop, I need to hear it for a while longer. I’m not nearly ready for the last of my perfect fiends to go… even if that meant that my knicker-drawer might finally regain its private status.