Sweet Potato

She'll be back

The Potato left last night on a plane to Thailand. She is fifteen now. She is my baby still, but she is grown and last night she disappeared on a bus to the airport, for six weeks living her own life and doing her own thing and doing everything herself for herself and learning about another culture and being humble to that culture and learning to cook and care for other people and care for herself.

We’ve been apart before - the longest was a month, but it was me that went away. She has been away for one week, once, on camp. She is happy, she is grown, she is resourceful, she is fine. She is my baby, she is fine, she is a grown up, she is great, all is great, it’s great she’s doing this, she will learn so much, and I just made a soup I like though she doesn’t like it, because it doesn’t matter, because she is not here. And we can watch the new Paolo Sorrentino film all the way through, and even start it at 6:30pm if we like, because suddenly, all of a sudden, we are childless again. Parents still, but with no child here at home.

I bumped into a friend at the IGA, she has a baby and I said, it’s funny, you’re at the start of childhood and I’m at the end. It does feel like that. She will always be my child, but just now it feels like that part of life, the childhood life, is over. When she returns she will have looked after herself entirely for six whole weeks, in another country. She will cook us thai food, she has been told there is no other way. The dynamic will have shifted to an adult household, or at least we plan for this to be the case, and she knows it, and she agrees. It will be different I know. It is different now. Her absence on this continent is such a stillness, it’s in the air - when she stays with friends or goes on camp her existence still vibrates around me. This time geography has spoken, it is really, really still.

When she was born I remember grieving and grieving over her tiny body, holding it to me, and allowing it to detach from my cells. I didn’t know then, but the purpose of that was to let her go, in preparation for the moment long ahead when she would leave and not look back, as I did, as is supposed to happen. My job was to raise her to the point that she would fly away and live her own full life. Of course she would always carry me with her, but the job was that she would have all the resources she needed in herself and not need me at all. The feeling of detachment was agony, but somehow a part of my being chose to do it then, rather than leave it until later, to be floored and shocked at her departure, or worse, leave her unprepared for life without me. I wept in the dark and now I can feel, fifteen years later that that small border between us I created back then is present somehow in there in my deepest soul, giving me the ability to accept this distance, though my heart is sore. How to love a creature so very much and be capable of letting them go, even for a second? The ultimate altruistic love - to do it right is to set it free.

Ah, I miss her, the smell of her sweet temples where her hair meets her skin, so close to her brain, her beautiful mind.

Why she asked that I call her The Potato in this writing I still don’t know, but it keeps holding, like when she requested her nickname in the family be Chips. Ha - I just realised the link. My little Chippie. She didn’t know one day she’d be a Potato.

Varda, my other favourite Potato