Our Hamish is a fairly understated kind of guy, but even so, he looked a little surprised to see his mother in a wheel chair when he emerged from airport customs after nine months away.
It’s been a big week at our place. Eleven pm Thursday night saw us at the airport farewelling our youngest, 18-year-old Fi, travelling on her own for the first time, off to the UK for a month. To say she was excited would have been an understatement. I was too – waving her off on a trip that she has worked for herself, imagining her with her brother and grandfather, discovering London, Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow.
Seven hours, and not a lot of sleep later we were back again to pick up 21-year-old Hamish. It’s a strange thing, having much-loved adult offspring spreading their wings and heading off. There is very little sadness in it for me. I am proud and grateful and excited. Skype and email and cheap phone calls mean that I barely feel out of touch.
When they come back, however, there is a quiet, blissful sense of remembered completeness. It’s as though there was a vital part of me missing that I’d become perfectly accustomed to doing without, but when it comes back and slots itself in, I feel whole again.
There’s the lovely feeling of time and space when they are back and I am on a day off, followed by a weekend, so we can have a second cup of tea and talk a bit and let them put a wash on and have a nap and then let the stories dribble slowly out over the day and evening. Eventually there will be photos to see, and more stories will emerge.
Will it all seem drab and parochial after months on the spectacular Isle of Mull and weeks picking oranges and olives in the South of Spain? Probably. That’s fine. That’s part of the function of home – to be there to come back to after the adventuring: safe and predictable and always welcoming. There’s usually an element of relief at no longer living out of a back pack, not to mention the delights of rediscovering your CD stash and catching up with mates.
As for the wheelchair, it was a bit of a fraud. I sprained my knee painfully and dramatically early in the week and have been on crutches since. My husband, with characteristic thoughtfulness, resourcefulness and cheek, disappeared while I was wearily leaning on said crutches at the international arrivals lounge and reappeared five minutes later with a commodious wheelchair.
(The relief! I have never appreciated how tiring crutches are. Not since I was pregnant have I felt so incoherent with weariness at the end of each day from the combination of hauling myself around using muscles I didn’t know I had - aching tummy muscles were unexpected - doing everything at a snail’s pace, and having to ask endlessly patient family and colleagues to help with things as basic as carrying my mug of tea from the kitchen to my desk.)
From the wheelchair I had a clear, child’s eye view of those recently refurbished but so familiar sliding doors disgorging tantalising dribbles of people. First the pilots and flight attendants in their snappy gear and their world-weary seen-it-all gaze and then real people, exhausted and emotional, being met by laughing, weeping families, and a new baby being handed over the barrier to a Nonna, wordless with joy.
I got so caught up in the dramas of everybody else’s arrivals (especially from the comfort of my chair) that I almost forgot why we were there and that I needed to have my eyes peeled for the emergence of our son, who looks quite different from when we waved him off early this year.
He emerged quietly and it was a few seconds before we realised it was him. There he was - short haired and bearded, his jumper the only utterly familiar thing about him, and all his belongings for nine months in one modest backpack.
He’s home. We returned the wheelchair and I hobbled slowly and happily back to the car. And was woken in the wee hours by a call from Fi saying she had met safely up with the London contingent of the family. ‘I’ve had no sleep, I watched ten movies, and I’m heading for the tube,’ she said airily. ‘Now you can go back to sleep.’