The long goodbye: The pain of watching your first-born leave the nest

Pride mingles with sorrow. How hard it is to watch your child pack up her room. Photo / Thinkstock

There is no pain like watching your first-born leave home, but eventuallyevery mum has to learn to let go, says Allison Pearson.

On her last night at home, she sits down at the piano and sings a song. It's a favourite from the Great American Songbook and I've been asking her to learn it for ages. Because I wanted her to do it she hasn't done it. That's the way our relationship has been for the past few years.

The little girl who was desperate to please, who was so angelic she looked like she'd tumbled out of a television commercial, the poppet who invited me for tea in her wendy house, that little girl is no more. Instead, there is this exasperated and exasperating young woman who is aggravated by my every suggestion, sometimes, it seems, by my very existence. She tells me I am "soooo annoyyyingg". I need to "back off", to "chill". "Stop worrying, Mum, I'm not a baby anymore."

Stop worrying? I wonder what that would feel like. "Sorry," I say, "but worrying is kind of the job description."

The job began 18 years ago when they handed me this furious rosebud, swaddled in a hospital blanket. In the small hours, the midwife took her away to the nursery so I could get some sleep.

I fell down a mineshaft of exhaustion. Woke in terror. "Where is she? Where IS SHE?" Dragged my catheter down the corridor towards the sound of her cry. A cry I didn't even know I knew. It seemed to be encoded in my cells. A cry both anguished and repetitive, like a sob on a piece of elastic, stopped immediately when I picked her up, her eyes locked on to mine. She had been in the world for just 19 hours. "I'm sorry," I said, tears running down my cheeks, "Mummy won't leave you again."

I don't tell her any of that. I don't tell her about my fears that, distracted by work, I haven't been a good enough mother. (By the age of 2 she had figured out that "Mummy's 'puter", her name for my Apple Mac, was her main rival for my attention.)

I don't tell her about the Christmas carol playing on the car radio before she was born. "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." That was it, exactly. Holding her in the half-dark hospital on the brink of our new life together, a thing so commonplace and so impossibly vast, all of my hopes and fears met in that beautiful, familiar stranger. My daughter.

And now she's leaving home to go to university. "Where did all the years go?" I ask her father.

I've had several months to get used to the idea. It's not something to dread, I tell myself, this is the start of her great adventure.

Still, like any rite of passage, it draws attention to the passing of time itself. I rejoice in the idealistic, passionate, caring girl we have produced, at the same time wondering what happened to my own passion and idealism. Oh, what it would be to be starting out again! Pride mingles with sorrow. How hard it is to watch your child pack up her room. Who knew?

For the past five years, I've yelled at her every day to tidy it. Now, as teenage bombsite gives way to spooky hotel room neatness, I can't bear it. Her Audrey Hepburn poster, her sprawling metropolis of make-up, her Rupert Sanderson party shoes - my Rupert Sandersons, actually, but what the hell - all disappear into the maw of her suitcase. It's as if her childhood was being dismantled before my eyes. I don't want her to see me cry so I make frequent trips to the bathroom. I get good at super-quick weeps: Blub and Go. "Are you okay, Mum?" she asks, noting my suspiciously long stints in the loo.

There's no time to waste now on mother-daughter bickering. I let her think I've got cystitis because this other thing, this constricting in the body, as though my heart were in a cage, an apprehension of loss the like of which I have only felt twice before in my life - over a faithless lover, a vanishing father - is not her concern. For this, too, is the job description.

A fortnight before she is due to leave she has to go into hospital. During her convalescence, she needs me as she has scarcely needed me since she was wearing her Peter Rabbit babygro. This turns out to be an unexpected blessing. I can do everything for her and she doesn't tell me I'm annoying or to go away. Best of all, I can watch my baby as she sleeps, her eyelids flickering.

On her final night, the four of us go out to our favourite restaurant. As usual, we pretend to look at the menu and, as usual, we all order the steak and fries. As usual, Evie's brother ribs her mercilessly, which has always been his preferred way of showing complete adoration.

Seeing them side by side, I experience a kaleidoscope of memories. Me going into school like a fire-breathing dragon when I found out she was being bullied. Tom, absolutely enraged on his fifth birthday when he learnt that Evie would always be older than him. "That's not fair!"

I know he will be every bit as bereft as us when she goes. Why is it so hard to appreciate a golden age when you're living through it? Her father proposes a toast to the family's future Broadway star or "unemployed singer on the subway with a dog on a rope". She joins in the laughter, but there is a new self-confidence there. Now she is leaving, I see her as I have never seen her before.

"It kills you to see them grow up and leave," the novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote, "but it would kill you quicker if they didn't." And that must be our consolation. We gave them life and they lived to write their own stories.

As my daughter left the house, she kissed her brother and, when the door was closed, I turned and I saw that his face was a gash of grief. Mine too. There was even a wobble in Dad's stiff upper lip. We mourn the days that are no more, even as we celebrate new beginnings.

Two days later, we received some pictures of our daughter arriving at her dorm in New York. She looked deliriously happy. I got a text from her: "Am in meeting. Too busy to be homesick! Love you."

"Job done," said her father. Perhaps he's right, though there is no known retirement from the job that began 18 years ago with a baby in my arms.