This morning we saw Char off on a bus to Marton. We’ve rented out her room for $60 a week to a Japanese exchange student and hope that in a few weeks time we’ll have made back the damage she’s incurred on us in therapy sessions. So, good luck Jenny, she’s in your hands now.

… Yeaah of course I’m kidding. Though, it is true that we saw Char off on a Marton-bound bus. (And don’t worry I’m pretty sure it’s a return ticket. ;)) Breelooked no small amount of confused when the bus pulled away and we started walking back to the car without her big sis. She waved to Char happily enough when Jarrod pointed her out on the bus and lifted her to the window, but she still expected Char would be coming back to the car afterwards. For a few moments following the bus departure she kept looking about, expectantly waiting for her sis to materialise before her. Like us, Bree was missing her already. (The feeling only got worse later in the evening when Bree wanted us to play Char’s ‘blanket game’ and we didn’t know the rules. She got shitty, gathered up the blanket and stomped off down the hall to find her sis. Boy were we in trouble.)

Over the years I’ve said goodbye to Char several times at the airport as she’s winged her way down to Nelson, yet somehow it was kind of harder to see her off on a bus. Not at the time - at the time I just got on with it, but afterwards.  When we returned to a suddenly-so-empty house, Jarrod and I both felt a bit anxious. I guess during the drive home from the airport we’re too busy concentrating on the drive home to worry about anything else, and then by the time we reach our driveway, she’s already touched down.  This time, we arrived home with the awareness that her 10 hour journey had only just begun.

She’s pretty damned brave though, and as Jarrod points out; it’s a fantastic confidence-building skill for her to be able to leg it across the country by herself like this. I seriously couldn’t have done it at her age. She’s good at internalising anxiety, so it’s hard to know if she’s worried sometimes.  Of course she had concerns about how she’d know when she reached Marton, but she didn’t let that worry consume her. Not even after I said, ‘don’t worry, if you find yourself in Palmy, you’ve gone too far.’ To which she replied, ‘And if I end up in Brisbane, I was on the wrong bus!’  Goes to show how much more resiliant and confident she is than me, even if she doesn’t always realise it.

One day it’ll be Bree hopping on that bus in the school holidays to go down south to visit family. And I guess by the time she reaches that age, we really will be renting out Char’s room. She’ll be off doing young adult things like flating in some squatty little central AK hole pissing it up with all her uni mates or something. Oh, what a depressing line of thought. I’m feeling really sad and nostalgic now. Wishing as I’ve wished many times before that I could have a few more years of Char’s childhood back so I can enjoy them all over again; wishing I could keep Bree at this age forever; (yet at the same time looking forward to watching them continue to grow); wondering how the hell we’ll survive without our kids in the house to fill it with life and laughter once they’ve grown up and moved on.

 For all that Char spends a lot of her time holed up in her bedroom doing the antisocial teenage ‘I just want my own space/life so my god why won’t you just back off and let me breathe’ thing, she’s always happy to chase her lil’ sis around the house and make her laugh in a way we can’t (seriously, if either of my big sis’s could have been half as fun and loving as Char is to Bree, I’m sure I would have turned out a far happier person). And she still grants us her presence for at least some fragment of our evenings to fill the house with chatter and share in the various family in-jokes that are sometimes funny/insane enough to print off and stick to the toilet wall. For all I might sometimes hold my head in my hands and complain “she only ever wants to talk about boys!”, I’m glad she at least talks to us about that much.

Gods I’m so good at talking myself into feeling miserable. Char’s only away for less than a week and I’m already feeling like this nest is half empty. Guess I’m just gonna have to go comfort eat now. While the cat’s away and all… chocolate, banoffi, mississippi mud pie, cookies & cream icecream, lollies and pizza..  Hell, I’m going to build my very own gingerbread house. Maye lure the neighbourhood kids inside, fatten them up and eat them too! With one less mouth to feed at the moment, there’s more for me!