Separation

There must have been a page that somehow goes missing in our children's school book. It's the page or lesson about separation. That very page has been either torne by a nursery-age kid or got eaten by a dog before any teacher noticed it.

What if we can't teach our kids how to deal with separation? (Often we can't.) What if your kid (like mine) attends a school where turnover of classmates is as high as the staff attrition rate in a public hospital (and mine, too)?

Somehow our children learn their way of facing separation. And pretty well. Sometimes they cry, sometimes they don't. My daughter's story of separation started with her best girl friend who moved away from their kindergarten to a new primary school. I felt freakish and worried. My wife did, too. It was not until my daughter showed me her picture, showing those two lovely girls living next to each other in heaven, that I stopped praying.

Last week, my daughter said goodbye to another two girl friends on the last day of this school term. Those aren't the kinds of goodbye for the sake of summer holidays; they won't come back next school year. I didn't ask if they cried, and I was afraid to do so. Then I learned that one of her classmates went to meet his buddy who had gone back to Japan. The two of them, I remember well, summon up everything good about childhood friendship: silly songs in the class, after-school soccer games, sharing bath tubs in lazy summers. They haven't seen each other for months and really treasured this reunion. They laughed. A lot. Here is the one tiny problem: the two kids cried by the time they had to say goodbye again. They cried so loud that I seemed to have heard them here.

This brings us to the matter of how children, as they grow up, learn their own way of facing separation. We don't quite know how to teach them. They just know. One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, tells us when her six-year-old son realised that he and his mum weren't going to die at the exact same moment, he cried for a while, and then said that if he'd known this, he wouldn't have agreed to be born.