What if love is possible also from a distance?

Summer 2013. Malmö, Sweden

She is walking towards me at the metro station.
Beside her walks her father.
She is pulling her new black suitcase, and she is really starting the journey towards her own independent life.
My heart almost stops beating when I see her.
Love is pumping and I can see her, newborn, when she took her first steps… and then the 19 years I have been her mother is streaming by inside my head.
The motherly love that almost busts my heart - and that at the same time is amazing. Because it proves that I am able to love.

During the last 28 years one of my most important roles has been being a Mother. I have been close to my children, while they have stepped through their childhoods.

I have loved, supported, I have been angry, proud, sad, surprised, mesmerized, huffish, tired, happy, exultant … but most of the time I have just had the courage to BE together with them.
My children has taken me in to being .
Particularly when they were small, life with them was really in the moment. I realize now that they have been my way into meditation, even if I didn’t understand that at the time.

Now I stand at the metro station and waves my daughter off. She is the youngest of three. She is on her way spending a month in England, before she begins to study in Uppsala, 600 km from Malmö.

I am so proud being her and her older siblings mother. My heart swells just by the thought of them. I get reminded of the worry I felt while pregnant with my second child. Should there be a place in my heart for the new child? My heart space was already filled with the eldest.

Then I gave birth to number two, and my heart expanded, created a new chamber for her… and then another chamber was magically created when the last one was born. My children showed me that I have a capacity to love, more or less without reservations.

I have known that this day will come.
The day when I have fulfilled my duty as a mother.
I mean, the moment where I would no longer be their caregiver.
And I know that even if my role change, the love will always be there.

My children knows I am their leading supporter.
Intermittently I have been standing, waving with the flags from a far distance, at times they have been filled with their own lives, at times they have questioned my career choices, my blogging, my visibility in Social medias, and intermittently they are a bit closer to me.

I am standing there on the shore, and the children has pushed out,
bound for their own lives,
bound to create their communities,
their experiences,
their lives.

I am standing, like many mothers and fathers before me, on the shore waving.
I am waving proudly, and when they have turned towards the future my tears start to stream.
I am standing on the beach hulking.

It’s like I, in this moment, is naked again
undressed my children
and I am supposed to live without them as my protection,
without them as my meditation,
without them as my veil.

It’s in this moment I realize that it’s really my time now.
It’s time for me to make space for me to be 100% Charlotte.
Nothing can mask me any more.
I have no-one to blame.
There is no longer a responsibility to anyone else - now it’s time for me and my life.
It’s evident that I make the decisions.

My feelings are mixed.
I can sense a wind of freedom.
But in this moment, when the last boat is pushed out, I feel the grief in me, I feel how I already miss them.

When I make a deep inhalation I can feel the smell of their bodies when they were babies, their wise looks, the sound of their feet in the stairs.

It’s a strange feeling.
It’s like I am almost able to smile, almost laugh, while the tears are flooding. I am so deeply grateful for being their mother, even if my role as a mother goes into a new phase.

So I let myself be the crying mother for a while.
A crying, loving and proud mother.
A mother who hopes that they sometimes turn around in the boat, and waves at me on the shore.