The Untethering.
My child flies away, carrying my old backpack and her new dreams.
When my daughter was born, fast and fabulous, she was placed unclothed next to me to gain heat, and I stared into her eyes. They were already ancient, the eyes of her future as an old woman, and I felt the closest I can think of to having a blessing come from her, saying:
‘When the time comes, you can go, now that you have brought me here.’
There I was. There she was, and there she goes.
The prospect of one’s teenagers travelling, at least for this relinquishing parent, holds both hope and weight, both uplift and drag. There is an ache, and a necessary release. It’s a bit like the untethering of birth. Away with you! Bon voyage.
It’s mid-year, when many young adults head off on their first big independent travel adventure, chasing a European summer, freedom of movement and the world beyond their restricted lives. Many, like my daughter and her friends, have taken a gap year, deferring their studies after years of Covid-lockdowns.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics notes that regarding short-term trips, mainly taken for holidays and visiting friends and relatives, ‘the number of resident returns in 2022 remained lower than pre-COVID but increased steadily across the year.’ She and her friends will be a part of the increasing number of travellers as the world spins its way beyond the initial stages of the pandemic.
Her power adaptors are packed, the travel cubes are filled with summer clothes, there is a small bag of skin care. It will all be put into my old Mountain Designs backpack, the same blue fabric bag which took me around Europe in my early 20s.
The time flips as I pull the backpack open. It smells old. It’s been in an outdoor shed for years, and it reeks of dirt and far-off, wet days.
I advise her to wash it in the bath and dry it on a sunny day. I imagine the filthy stain of accumulated dirt leaching into the warm bathwater, as the backpack yields up its Parisian streets, its Italian trains and its London B & Bs.
It sits, unwashed, until the day before her leaving, when I drag it onto an old chimney pot in the front yard, and start to wipe it out with soap. I need a strong coffee before I start. My heart is racing. She’s almost off.
I wipe the interior, where the fabric is faded, and push the suds into the blue cloth. I wipe inside the internal pocket, a place for documents, knowing she will place her plastic sleeve in there, holding copies of her ID. I scrub at the connecting covers, check the clasps and double-check the large over-shoulder strap.
Inside the backpack I see my surname, written in black texta, in block letters. It’s her surname too. I have written my name and phone number twice, in different parts of the pack, just to make sure, in case someone didn’t look hard enough to work out who I was, or to find out where my things belonged.
We often go away to work out who we are, even if we don’t quite know where we are going, or where we quite belong.
It smells better for the wipe-down, but I want it to feel fresh. I hate to imagine her pulling on clothes that smell of eau de back-shed. And besides, it’s my filth which has permeated the pack! I reach for my Covid-era disinfectant for the final cleanse and it feels apt: it’s made from the botanicals used for gin, and smells of flowers and rainforests. Yes, eau de gin is far preferable on one’s skin and clothes than eau de back shed.
As I put the old bag out into the sunlight, I see the clear plastic travel tag from the 1980s, with my full name and variations of my old addresses and phone numbers. It’s like one of those maternity hospital wrist bands, where the baby is identified by the mother’s name: Baby Sublet. I realise with a start that my girl needs her own new tag, yet she suggests we simply remove my name, and slide hers in. The untethering isn’t so complicated really; it just makes sense.
When she flies off, she will take the bag with my name in it, and her name on it too. With her, she takes her self, her dreams, her kind heart, her curious eyes. She will be one of many young people travelling again, reclaiming their space after their confinement, finding themselves through going away.
Bon voyage. Away with you. Don’t worry if the backpack gets dirty. You will always be with me. The time for this moment has come.
