Things I’ve learnt this week

 

Warning – melodramatic Mum overload, I won’t be offended if you skip this post!! I don’t want to bore people too much with all of this stuff so I won’t link it anywhere, but if you stumble across it in your reader I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not to read it!

1) Saying goodbye is really hard, no I mean really hard – I’d kept everything tight right up until Tuesday when it was time to head off to the airport. That final hug of farewell at the security gate was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done for my children. Trying to be strong, I’d skipped along for the past few months, merrily saying ‘oh it’s OK, he needs to get it out of his system, it’ll make him a better man’ and all those kind of clichéd phrases. What I probably wanted to say was ‘I don’t want him to go, I’ll miss him, is life so bad here that he has to travel to better it?’ or words to that effect.

 

2) Listening to football on the car radio (5 Live) is almost impossible! As a distraction we put the radio on on the way home from the airport. Neither of us really wanted to talk so it seemed the right thing to do. I just ended up with a worse headache than I would have had otherwise.

3) I can tell you what time it is in Melbourne without even thinking about it!! Oh how I hope that wears off soon, the urge to check my watch and wonder what he’s up to. After finding out that he slept for 14 hours (through the whole day) when he first arrived, I really don’t need to wonder what he’s doing – he is still on UK time body clock-wise.

4) Facebook is fab for that instant in touch moment (OK – I probably didn’t just learn that) to see the window pop up that says ‘Matt sent you a message’ was amazing at 7am yesterday! Really got my day off to a great start. I’m now wondering just how bereft parents felt when their offspring travelled to the other side of the world all those years ago and then had to wait for a letter to arrive – one day without contact almost broke my heart.

5) He’s not as macho as he thinks he is. Another window popped up last night when he should have been asleep. The chat was not so encouraging. He admitted to being lonely, he’s in a multi-bedded room in a youth hostel and he’s been the sole occupant mostly since he arrived. I think he had the vision of arriving to a thronging crowd of Brits who would introduce him to the Aussie life style and set him on his way for the year. After about an hour of chatting with John and Son1 and my cousin (who conveniently has relatives in Melbourne) he seemed to be a lot happier. I’m sure once he sorts out his sleep he’ll be fine – he’ll never meet anybody if he’s asleep while the rest of the town is awake and vice-verse!

6) I’m actually a lot stronger than I thought at the beginning of the week. Yes, my heart was broken chatting with him last night but I managed to find the resolve to encourage him to stick it out. I think my sensible head came into play rather than my emotional head. Hopefully things will settle for him or at least he will give it time before turning round and heading home, seems such a waste of an opportunity not to at least give it a shot.

(disclaimer – this is so not me!!)

If you’ve got this far thank you for reading and indulging my wittering!