making decisions about high school
I must admit that I didn’t consider where our girls would attend high school. In my heart, I knew they would never attend the local school. They hadn’t been booked in anywhere, and nor had a deposit been paid at birth for entry to the city’s elite, private schools.
But, there comes a time when your children outgrow their local school. Or, the local school outgrows the children. What other options do parents have, other than sending them to the local school, and if they are too far away from home, the local hostel provides a great alternative.
Both the farmer and I had gone to private, single-sex, schools in the city. Therefore, it wasn’t a difficult decision to eventually enrol our daughters into the same education system.
For parents now, the costs are simply astronomical! It helped that our first daughter received an Academic Scholarship, thereby reducing the fees by 25%. It was inevitable that the next two daughters attend the same college, for practical reasons if nothing else.
When the girls left home for boarding school
After they left for the city (boarding school), I didn’t change their bedrooms for many years. I thought they would come home again and live with us, like a normal family. I hit the wall when I realised they weren’t coming back. It was up to me to make a new life that didn’t involve their primary care. I was not prepared for that loss, the empty nest, and I don’t believe many women are!
Although their departure was gradual, I feel for all the women whose children leave one at a time, or even worse they all leave at once. It is crippling and still brings a tear to my eyes as I write this down. It isn’t that I had nothing to do. I had a fulltime job, was completing a doctoral degree, working on the farm, and travelling to the city every fortnight. While working hard and keeping myself from falling apart, the fact was that I simply missed my daughters.
The long, sad drive home
I recall driving home on many occasions, crying all the way, wondering why I was leaving them, driving away from my parents who were alive at the time, and my siblings, who were mostly living in the city. That happened for almost 14 years. I missed them terribly. In an attempt to justify why we were doing that, RA reassured me that we were setting them free.
We were guiding them towards a life of independence, allowing them to develop free thought, worldliness, and the confidence to relate to people from all walks of life. That they have now achieved those goals is some comfort to us. The school they attended was perfect for them in so many ways. This meant that we never regretted that decision because it was ultimately the best business decision we have made.
How and why did we let these girls go?
