ON AGING AND LEAVING

ON AGING AND LEAVING. 

Memories are everything.  It is the most precious asset that graces the journey in humanity.  It is almost all the fabric that is our life and we journey wearing them like clothes. 

I cherish memories so much and as much as I can try to do memorable things with people I get into close contact with.  With my mum I've got thousands, with my friend a house full, with my siblings individually a well full and a hand full, with associates aud Lang syne. Memories I enjoyed, it always feels good to lie down and hum "Precious Moments" and have your mind replay these beautiful cherished moments.  Years and distant apart from these memories, relieving them can evoke the exact feeling you had whilst experiencing them. The deja vu taste better than ice-cream that tiny moment of being lost in a single blissful memorable thought.  It leaves me smiling like fish. 

It is memories we take along with us as we journey and age, and even when we are wrinkled our lips can wear a crack of smile when we remembered our lover, loved one, favorite friend, an unforgettable experience, and a breathtaking orgasmic sex in the most craziest of places.  For the last, we may laugh at our adventure or hiss and shake our head if we now deem them foolishness whether we laugh or shake our heads, the smile of a memorable past brightens our mood.

Memories are mostly made with people we spend the most of our times with, especially family members.  And there are times we just want to relieve the craziest of memories with our family members when we are grown, why we grieve so much and cannot get over the death of a family member, why their absence feels our life with a new sense of loneliness, we cannot deny how much we miss them even though we do not say so. 

Whilst going through the personal blog of someone I admire, reading an instructive piece of how memories can be attached to little insignificant things and make them overwhelming significant because of the memories they hold, I did stumble on a paragraph where she wrote, "Many years have come and gone, the girls have grown and both girls had long left home to live on their own." and I felt tears gathering.  A sentence that I feel spoke volume from the blog author's heart,  it got to me strongly. I stopped for a moment and considered loneliness, all of the shades of it.

You know, memories with children are the longest, the bravest, and the most adventurous of all, leaving you with diverse emotions bursting forth as you relieve them, when they were born, tiny and helpless; their first muttering, when they began crawling, took their first step, say their first word and brought home their first trouble (Laugh). How you know them deeply and can point to the fierce and the calm.   You watch them grow until they get better in making and taking decision, you watch them grow and of course you grow together and then one beautiful morning like all other mornings, they are leaving your house and you don't know how to feel about it because you don't know what to feel. 

In some nations of the world, kids leave the house at eighteen. It had always thrilled me, the idea of turning eighteen and then gathering your things and leaving your parents, but today I thought of it differently.  The idea of watching your kids leave.  I couldn't help but mutter, eighteen is too small.  And I recognized that I was being biased because I found myself also saying 23 is still too small. They being small isn't in the sense of their mental, physical or as it were financial growth, it is the number of years spent together. A tiny moment of time travel seeing my kid leave and I be like, No, that's a very short time.  It almost moved me to tears.  And in real sense I thought of parents who had gone through this, how do they deal with it.  I'm now reviewing all what I've thought and said about 'over protective' parents, parents who insist their kids attends higher institution that's close to the house and refuse them living in a hostel but go to school daily from the house.  It could be this thing that's the drive behind that attitude and I can understand them better to a level at least now.  Watching your boy/girl just leave like that is moving.  Yeah even though they are grown. 

For a moment I was grateful Nigeria as well as other black African countries have the option of having their kids stay with them for as long as they can. This warms my heart for a moment, and I was jolted out of that warmth when I remembered I have no plan raising or retiring with any of my family in Nigeria and they may not want to come to any African nation I may decide to spend old age in.

In seconds, I've suggested plenty things as back up plan, then I realized that just like I have a mind of my own, my kids will too, some will not want to live in golden castles that is close to their parents. Some others, their careers, pursuit and curiosity can take them far away from you leaving you with just memories of them.  Some things we cannot control.  Even though I'm currently at, adopting another younger kid when mine are all grown and must have left, I thought of asking you what you will do.

As a parent.

As an older parent who had experienced this, what was it like for you?

As an aspiring parent do you think of this too? If yes, what are you planning to do?

I hope you find time to share your thoughts.

Chines Zoe!