Separations

For the first time in many years my husband and I had a wonderful mini-holiday together last week.  We took our son back to university in Victoria and stayed overnight as a gift to ourselves.  It was a refreshing and delightful time.  We know that we should do this more often, but it has been very difficult to leave our youngest children before now.  One daughter in particular has a very challenging time when I am not at home.  She can barely tolerate an evening without me, and constantly asks when I will return.  She actually has quite a visceral gut reaction of abandonment when I am not home and becomes very moody and obstinate as well.  I am well aware that her reaction is often out of her control and it is all very scary for her. It is certainly not pleasant for those left behind with her!

My daughter has had some particularly difficult life experiences of painful abandonment and separation.  She never had a chance to be with her birth mother much when in foster care and had no goodbyes or closure later when her mom died.  She had disrupted adoptions early on with a couple of adoptive families and never had a chance to say goodbye to either of them.

I thought of her particularly in the "Life of Pi" movie.  There is a fascinating scene at the end when the lifeboat hits land and the rescue is immanent.  The tiger walks across the sand and into the jungle without any hesitation or turning to indicate goodbye to Pi.  Pi is completely beside himself in grief.  This scene expresses the pain of separation without goodbyes and is one of a long string of incomplete separations for Pi.  Earlier, he never actually said goodbye to his girlfriend when he left India or to his parents and brother who did not escape from the sinking ship.  He is inconsolable and yells out in agony at the final blow of the tiger's seeming indifference to their separation after such a journey together.  One day my daughter and I will watch this scene together.  She will deeply understand better than most the depth of Pi's pain.  Meanwhile, we continue to support and care for her, preparing her for each time we are apart, and giving her permission to express her feelings of abandonment and pain in ways that are helpful but also tolerable to those around her!  We all have those deeply held guttural cries of pain hidden in the edges of our souls.  Without expression those cries turn inward to our own destruction.  In this new year may we find ways to express those visceral feelings so that they do not fester and become sharp edges that only destroy ourselves and those closest to us.