Empty nesting

Last week I visited Manchester University with our 17 year old daughter, MIa.
While Mia went to a " student-life," talk, I went to a " help for soon-to-be-bereft parents," lecture.
 After we had been told about applying for loans, setting up bank accounts, filling in forms, teaching our chilldren how to cook, turn on washing-machines and do-all-thosa-other-things-we-never-actually-make-them-do-at-home lessons, a picture of an empty bird's nest was flashed up on the screen in front of us.

Lowering her voice to one that was calming and soothing, rather  than chatty and informative, the speaker gave us  empathetically meaningful looks and said:
" Last of all,  I want to talk about, empty nest syndrome."
Around me parents shifted uncomfortably in their seats as though their secret had been discovered.
Next to me a mum turned and stared wistfully out of the grey-sky filled window.
And for the first time in the hypnotically tedious talk ( and mostly due to the words "last of all,") I woke up.
Empty nest syndrome is not something that  I"ve ever seriously considered.
I've dreamt of a day when our house is not scattered with teenage clutter - used make-up wipes, discarded clothes, half-drunk smoothies, unattached phone chargers, sweaty socks
I've imagined a house that is as tidy when I get home from work in the evening as it was when I left for work in the morning.
I've fantasised about not being constantly asked what's for dinner or why there is never anything good to eat in our house.
I've let my mind wander to a time when I can  go a whole day without someone demanding where their T-shirt, new jeans, PE kit, lip stainer,  homework or anything-else-that-belongs-to-them, is.
But I've never actually thought about how I will feel when the house is teenagerless and empty.t
For years, my husband Ninesh and I, have been making plans about what we will do when we are free.
How we will spend our time when our days are no longer shaped around parenthood,.
 What we would do with the days when the hours belong to us...
We are already thinking about which camper van we will buy.
Ninesh has already started pouring over maps, planning the route of our carefree future.
But as I sat in that university lecture room in Manchester, I began to worry.
Not so much at the sense of emptiness I would obviously soon be feeling, but at the thought that I might not feel empty enough.
From the moment our children take their first steps, they are walking away from us.
As a parent, it's hard  to watch them fall and even harder to watch them struggling to pull themselves up again.
With every bone in your body, you are aching to do it for them, to pick them up, give them a comforting hug and set them back on their feet,  heading in the right direction.
But deep down inside, we know we have to let them do it by themselves.
Being a parent is never easy.
You never stop feeling guilty, never stop believing you're doing it wrong, never stop wishing you had more  
patience, more time, more energy, more understanding of text speak.
The best gifts we can give our children are a sense of self-worth and self-belief and help them to become independent thinkers.
Washing and cleaning they can learn the hard way, knowing they can manage without you is not so easy.
Life is full of false-starts and obstacles that trip us up and holes that we fall down.
As a parent we can't make sure that the path to our children's future is completely smooth, we won' always be there to pick them up and it's not our job to make their decisions for them.
All we can do is be the safety net that is always there to catch them when they fall and give them the courage to keep on trying.
All we can do is be there when they need us and step back when they don't.

" It's strange," said one of my friends whose son is just finishing his second year at university, " I've only just realised that he has his own life now, that we are no longer the centre of his life, that when he plans his Summer, his holidays, his future, we are not what he thinks about.. It's odd not knowing what he' s doing. But when I think about it, once I left home, I never told my parents anything."
And I think, maybe, more than an empty nest,,a tidy house (in my dreams!), that's what I will find strange.
Up until now it's always felt like Ninesh and I are the roots and our children are the shoots.
It's hard to think of them growing completely separate from us with shoots of their own, hard to imagine completely disentangled lives.
Of course my kids don't tell me everything, probably they mostly tell me nothing, but I know where they are, how they  spend their time, what's important to them.
It's hard to think of them out in the world on their own with friends we've never met, with people who are more important to them than us,dreams we might not understand, living in worlds that are part of a different universe.
It's hard to imagine.
But it's life.
And we have to let them go.
Even if it's not quite far enough away for them.
Because even if they are inhabiting other universes, escape is almost impossible in this modern hyper-connected world.
There's  Facebook and Snapchat and Instant Messenger and Instagram and sos and lol and tybtw
Sometimes I feel almost sorry for today's teenagers. 
Where can they hide?

"Being Facebook "unfriended" by both your children: it's like the 21st century equivalent of empty nest syndrome."
wrote my friend Cath the other day.
And she's right. 
Empty cyber-space is beginning to feel more like an empty nest than an unused bedroom.

But truthfully, I don't think it's knowing that social media is making the world a smaller place or that mobile phones mean that our children are hardly ever out of contactable reach, that's is stopping me from feeling sad.
Life is a big adventure and  standing on it's very edge, our children are just beginning to spread their wings.
I'm excited and happy ( and just a little bit jealous) that they have it all before them.
And our job is not to clip their wings but to help them fly.
And whether they like it or not, a little piece of my heart will always be flying with them! 

So while our kids get ready to pack their bags and flee the nest,  Ninesh and I are off to look at camper vans because I can't help feeling that the future's just about to catch up with us ...and it's always best to be prepared.

Exam Fever

I will be glad when this year's exam epidemic is over.
Glad when every  surface in our house is not covered by an untidy carpet of revision books, coloured paper, broken pens and biscuit wrappers.

Glad when our 15 year old son can stop spending his evenings revisionally reclining on the sofa and return to spending them in the park with friends, playing euphamistic football in the dark. 
Glad when our 17 year old daughter can return to worrying about boys-parties-clothes--bad hair days  (am I really saying this?!) rather than French vocabulary and psychology case studies.
But most of all, I will be glad to stop pretending that exams are the most important things in the world.
Because I really don't believe they are.
I don't believe that they are a fair test of what we know. or a way of making us care about what we learn.

We've all been there, feverishly filling every last minute with exam-cramming, spending sleepless nights worrying about all the things we don't know, trying to remember what we've forgotten, turning our brains into bloated sponges, dripping  with too many temporary facts and too much unnecessary information.
I'm not sure exactly what it is that our exam system tests: memory.....mostly, 
will power,,, perhaps, the ability to make your writing legible under pressure.. maybe.
But with GCSE's in particular, I'm not sure how much students actually learn.
Having to revise for so many different subjects, so close together, (our son is taking 21 exams in the space of 4 weeks) makes it hard to retain anything for longer than the length of the exam.  You don't just leave the hall when you  have finished your exam, you also leave behind everything you have learnt for that subject, otherwise there just won't be enough space in your brain for the next one.
May and June seem to just be " one bloody exam after another."
And what exactly will the students have achieved at the end of it all.
Have they been  inspired with  a love of learning? A thirst for knowledge? The desire to find out more?
Mostly, completely the opposite..

" Son sat English Lit. GCSE today," wrote one of my very good friends on Facebook " told me that he now never has to read another book, So proud" 

And she's not alone, many of us are feeling proud in the same way.
Somehow we are managing to make our kids despise learning rather than love it.
It's not that what they are learning isn't important or interesting, 
 it's just that sitting all day, learning things off-by-heart, never stops being boring and in the end, what you remember is the boredom, not the subject.
How often do books that we love turn into books that we hate because we have analysed every sentence to death?
 Language that once seemed beautiful becomes the stuff of nightmares.
Subjects that we once loved become a series of boring, unspiring facts which in our desperate desire to simply remember them.
" Can you test me on my French sentences," asks our son, before his spoken French exam.
And I test him and he's pretty good, he's learnt them really well.
" There's just one bit," I say, " you got the tense wrong, think about what it means."
He rolls his eyes at me.
" It doesn't matter if I don't know what it means," he says, "  I just have to remember it right." 
That's what our exam system is doing to our kids. 
 Making them learn things "right," so that they can pass exams, not so that they can understand what they mean or gain an insight to their wider significance. 
I understand and remember nothing of the physics or chemistry I crammed for my GCSEs.
 I still believe I am rubbish at maths and although I loved geography, all I can remember about it, is drawing bad pictures of animals in Polar landscapes and that rocks have different layers, although all these years on, I'm not really sure why.
Like rocks, the acquisition of knowledge should be a layering process.
Each layer providing firm foundations for the next.
Learning shouldn't be a lot of temporary,, flimsy structures designed only to last until we have got the required grades.
We need to help children understand that learning things, finding out more about what they see or hear, gives their world a depth and beauty it wouldn't otherwise have.
We want to make them excited about the fact that everything they do is an opportunity to learn something new.
We need to inspire a hunger for knowledge, an interest in the world around them, a belief that finding out more about " things," makes those "things," more interesting, meaningful and useful.
Somehow our education system has lost its direction and as a result, our children have lost their way.
And we need to help them find their way back to a place where they are proud of what they know, eager to learn more because they are inspired by the potential of all they do not know.
I'm not sure how it can be done but I am sure that our exam system is not the way to do it.
Socrates said: 

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” 

 I wish we'd listened because our exam system seems to be all about temporary vessel -filling and very little about permanently flame-lighting.

I turn back to the revision chaos that used to be our living room.
And with all my heart, i hope our kids do well in their exams.
They deserve to, they've worked really hard (if that is what helps you pass).
But most of all I hope they realise that there are things you can't figure out from a revision book, that life is too small to fit between the walls of a classroom, that learning doesn't end with a full stop and handing in an exam paper.
The world is out there waiting for them, full of beauty and pain and unanswered questions.
I hope, that when they have finished their last exam, they will still want to step into it full of awe and wonder and a desire to try and find the answers.