THOMPSON
LETTING GO
by
Kate Thompson
From the moment she was held aloft in the
delivery room we knew that our daughter Clara meant business, for at 5.30 am
on the 3rd January 1987, she surveyed her brave new world with an expression
of cool detachment as if to say: ‘Okay. Now I’ve finally arrived after those
nine endless months, I’m gonna make the most of it. I’m gonna kick some
ass.’
My husband Malcolm and I were utterly clueless as parents. We had never held
a newborn infant before, let alone bathed one, changed a nappy or tried to
ease tiny limbs into the straitjacket confines of a baby-gro. The screeds of
conflicting advice made me weep - literally. Feed on demand. Don’t feed on
demand. Let her sleep in your bed. Don’t let her sleep in your bed. Put her
lying on her back. No, no - put her lying on her front. In the end, we
decided that we’d muddle through somehow, and simply try to rear a happy
human being, and a friend for life.
Clara was intrepid. She swam before she crawled; her crawling was more of a
prance than a shuffle; and when she finally found her feet, the expression
on her face was that of an explorer who’d just discovered a vastly exciting
new territory.
As she grew, she terrified me with her audacity. The first time she saw a
fire lit in a grate, she greeted it with an intrigued ‘Hello!’ before
tottering towards it with her arms outstretched in welcome. On her first
excursion to a playground she gave me a disdainful look when I set her on a
baby slide, and promptly crossed the tarmac and climbed the steps to the
highest one of all. In supermarkets she turned into a miniature commando,
deploying evasive action and scooting off any time my back was turned. I
would cast around wildly, bowling along the aisles between toiletries and
household goods like Jack Nicholson negotiating the maze in ‘The Shining’,
until I found her. Invariably she’d be sitting on the floor, delving into a
box of éclairs, chocolate all over her mouth. In an attempt at foiling her,
I invested in a pair of ‘childproof’ reins, but when I strapped them on, she
doffed them with the chutzpah of a Houdini.
Any time we went on walks, Clara would set off on her own the moment she was
unleashed from the constraints of her car seat, heading straight for the
tantalising glimmer of the horizon. She routinely flouted the ‘Stranger
Danger’ rule, engaging men, women and dogs in conversation – she showed
scant inclination for social intercourse with other children. Once, on
Grafton Street, I rang the changes by slipping away myself, hiding in a shop
doorway as an exercise in observation. I watched her toddle along the busy
thoroughfare, oblivious to my absence and chatting away happily to anyone
who’d listen. I was finally obliged to emerge from my hiding place when a
woman whose shoes Clara had been admiring started looking around anxiously
for a parent or guardian to make their presence felt. ‘I was wondering how
long it would take her to notice that I was gone,’ I told the astonished
woman. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have fazed her at all.’
That evening, I picked up the phone to my own mother. ‘Was I like that?’ I
asked her.
‘A little,’ she conceded. ‘You lived in Cloud Cuckoo Land most of the time.’
‘So when do you stop worrying about them?’
‘Never,’ she said. ‘You never stop worrying about them.’
The more Clara’s independent streak burgeoned, the more Malcolm and I
realised it would be wrong not to encourage it. It was time for us to start
letting go. When she was twelve we suggested that she do a course in Scuba,
so that she could come diving with us on holiday. The first time I sank
beneath the murky surface of the Irish Sea with my daughter, I spent the
duration of the dive trying vainly to shepherd her – an impossible task.
Underwater, Clara was as elusive as Tinkerbell: she sent my heart tattooing
at such a rate that I vowed I would never dive with her again.
At the age of fourteen, she made the decision to leave Dublin and become a
boarder in Kylemore Abbey, that fabulous Gothic edifice that makes everyone
who lays eyes on it think of Hogwarts. There she roamed freely through the
wilds of Connemara, climbing mountains, exploring forests, swimming in lakes
and giving tourists extremely precise directions as to where to go to find
leprechauns.
At eighteen she headed off with the British Schools Expeditionary Society to
spend two months in Kwa Zulu Natal, in South Africa. There she slept under
skies ablaze with shooting stars, listening to the sound of lions on the
prowl through the bush, and the coughing of cheetahs. She learned to shoot a
gun, and to skin and gut an impala. She trekked zebra and acquired all the
skills of the game ranger, she climbed high into the Drakkensburg mountains
and white-water rafted, she nipped adroitly out of the way of charging
hippos and hurled abuse at marauding monkeys.
During those two months - because the only means of communication with the
expedition was via satellite phone - we heard nothing from her, apart from a
couple of e-mails sent from hill stations. We were learning to let go a
little more.
The toughest call came later that year, when Clara announced that it was her
intention to go off Inter-railing through Eastern Europe with three girls
from the UK whom she’d met on the African expedition. She took her mobile
phone with her on this trip: but every mother knows the terror generated by
the phone that’s out of range, or the dread induced by those automated tones
that deliver you straight to voice mail. Most mothers I know have learned to
resist the temptation of trying to make contact with their daughters by
mobile because if no answer is forthcoming, worst-case scenario inevitably
sets in and one’s imagination spirals into orbit. Twilight is said to be
‘the hour between dog and wolf’, but for me it’s four o’clock in the morning
when your daughter’s out clubbing and there’s no text message in your inbox.
That’s when the instinct to make that phone call is at its most dangerously
insistent – and that is the phone call you know you really must not make.
Fast forward to the summer of 2006. Clara sets off with the same three
girlfriends, this time armed with an itinerary of places to visit in
Thailand. Their first destination is Koh Tao, down South. It’s a Lotus Land
of an island that proves to have the allure of Bali Hi in the movie South
Pacific, for, a week after arriving in Bangkok, Clara ends up watching from
the beach as her girlfriends set sail back northward on the ferry. She has
broken the first rule of the backpackers’ code: she has abandoned her
travelling companions, seduced into staying on the island by her rediscovery
of Scuba.
Dear God in heaven. My beautiful girl is living alone in a beach hut on an
island in the Gulf of Thailand...
I get an e-mail from her. It reads: ‘What kind of parents encourage a kid to
do something as fascinatingly brill as this!!!!’ And I find myself wondering
exactly what kind of parents actively encourage such free-spiritedness? Have
we in fact been arrantly irresponsible? Have Malcolm and I put our only
child in jeopardy by fostering a passion for what is effectively an extreme
sport?
But more e-mails follow, breathlessly telling us that she has completed her
advanced course, that she has done speciality courses in peak performance
buoyancy, deep diving, night diving and underwater photography, and that she
intends to return to Koh Tao next summer to undertake a Dive Master course.
Her final e-mail was sent an hour before she was due to leave the island and
rejoin her girlfriends in Bangkok: ‘Last night we went out on the boat with
the sunset and came up under a canopy of stars. I saw a turtle!!! the one
thing I hadn't yet seen! we were practically bursting with excitement as we
followed it through the water... promise that u will come and visit me here
next summer when I do my Dive Master course! then I will be qualified to
take you round a dive site. I want to thank u guys again for introducing me
to this world which is so unbelievably perfectly me. I have never felt so at
home somewhere away from home - diving. I really look forward to seeing u!!
I have so many stories for u!!! love love love. xxxxxxxxxxx Clara’
It was then we knew that we had done the right thing. We had muddled through
nineteen years of parenthood, and somehow managed to rear a happy human
being, and a friend for life.
During Clara’s last month at Kylemore when she was sitting her Leaving Cert,
I would send her cards on a daily basis, with affirmations on the front.
These affirmations took the form of quotes from illustrious personages -
such as this from Winston Churchill: Never, never, never give up. And - from
T.S. Eliot - Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far
one can go. And the following, courtesy of Eleanor Roosevelt: Do the thing
you think you cannot do. My own personal favourite comes from Lewis
Carroll’s ‘Alice Through the Looking-Glass’, and it goes like this:
Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
On the day of her final exam, I made Clara promise that she would not look
at that day’s card until after she’d completed the paper. This is what she
found when she opened the envelope:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t
do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the
safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Anon.
Inside the card I had written: But always remember that the safe harbour is
there for you any time you need it.
I’ve let her go. My daughter, my baby, my friend, my dive buddy (correction
– my dive master!) may, as you read this, be perched on a mountain peak in
the Himalayas; she may be floating over a coral reef in Egypt; she may be
spinning through the air at the end of a bungee cord; she may be sharing a
bowl of goat soup in a Jamaican shantytown; she may be huddled in a bivvy
bag dreaming of Connemara. But my lovely, liberated girl will live in the
safe harbour of my heart forever.
© 2007 Kate Thompson
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