How selfhood begins

I've just spent two weeks in South Africa visiting my daughter and her husband. It was our first whole family holiday in a few years. We were flying with our twenty-year-old son. The flight from London to Jo'burg was delayed at Heathrow airport because someone forgot to tell the flight crew that the clocks had gone forward!

We pushed towards the check-in gate with three hundred other frustrated fellow travellers. Most people had boarded and it was our turn next. I knew the minute I saw his facial expression that the man at the desk was unhappy with my son's passport. Although it was valid until the end of this month, he needed an extra 30 days to get into S Africa.

My tears were useless and we had to wait another half hour while they unloaded his bag. We then said our goodbyes and sheepishly entered the cabin trying not to make eye contact with any of the now weary and angry passengers.

As I watched my disappointed child walk away I thought how difficult it is to bear another's hurt, especially when you love them. How many other times there have been when I've watched him facing up to life on his own! It's called growing up and it's hard for mother and son both. C Day Lewis says it much better than I, but before that I have to add that big son managed to get a new passport and join us in the sun two days later. All good! This poem makes me cry.

Walking Away by C Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day -
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show -
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.