My eldest’s decision on whether or not to delay university for a year was a roller coaster. At one point, late in the process, he decided he definitely would go to school this year. My husband told me this casually late at night and like Macbeth, he doth murder sleep. The next day, out for coffee with colleagues, I mentioned his decision and burst into tears.
The picture that kept coming to mind was the last scene in the first film of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The strange and ragged company have come together and shared a variety of adventures and dangers – but it is at this point they say “the fellowship is breaking up.” That was the prompt to tears – the breaking up of our fellowship. As in the LOTR, this break up was important and healthy but also felt very hard.
In the month that followed, too, I found myself giving my son instructions on things I might never have taught him – here’s how you iron a shirt, for instance.
When he decided to take that extra year before leaving home, we saw it as an extra chance to make sure that our kid was prepared and released well into the wild, and that we were ready to let him go.
*
I decided one day to watch again that tear-inducing scene from The Lord of the Rings, and when I did, I realized that I had remembered it wrong.
Frodo has set off in a little boat toward Mordor. Sam has caught up to him, nearly drowning himself in his dogged determination to follow. Then, the elf Legolas, the dwarf Gimli and the human Aragorn arrive at the shore.
“Hurry,” Legolas urges. “Frodo and Sam have reached the eastern shore.” But Aragorn does not move. Legolas looks at him and sees something in his eyes. “You mean not to follow…” Aragorn says, “Frodo’s fate is no longer in our hands.” Gimli is devastated. “Then it has all been in vain. The fellowship has failed.”
That’s the line I got wrong: it is not simply that the fellowship has broken but that it has failed.
Or has it? As I watched the next part, I choked up again, but with the kind of tears I experience when I watch the Olympics – from the glory of purpose and effort and striving. Aragorn says, “Not if we hold true to each other. We will not abandon Merry and Pippin to torment and death. Not while we have strength left. Leave all that can be spared behind. We travel light. Let’s hunt some orc.”
It reminded me of a conversation I had with a woman last winter. She is a doctor and is blunt in her appraisals because, as she says, “I deal in life and death.” She said she is tired of sappy mothers who mourn and wail when their oldest leaves the nest because it tells the other children that they don’t matter, precisely at the moment when they have a newfound opportunity to be the oldest or to have a new role within the family, to test out a bit of independence while they are still living at home.
We have a young family friend who has always luxuriated in tears when she watches movies. At first we thought we should turn the movie off but over time, we realized that she truly enjoys the experience of emoting during a movie.
The same might well have been true for me. Sure, I was sad that my kid was proposing to leave home. Fair enough. No one – not even the doctor – would begrudge me that. But like our young soggy friend, my recollection of the LOTR story was indulgent, a kind of wallowing in the loss, a pulling off the bandaid over and over to see if the bleeding had stopped, only to set it going again.
What the film showed me was very different. There was still work to be done. In my case, there were two other children still at home. But even once those two are fully fledged, there is still work to be done. Once our kids leave home, the reality is that they have reached the eastern shore and their fate is no longer in our hands. Our job is to relinquish that role and to focus on the work we have ahead of us.
There’s also one last scene in the movie where Frodo and Sam stand on top of a mountain looking at the ugly road they have to travel ahead of them. “I hope the others find a safer route,” says Frodo, all big eyes. “I suppose we’ll never see them again.” In his lovely comforting homeliness, Sam says, “We may yet, Mr Frodo. We may yet.”
And they do. Each one plays his or her part in the hard task of defeating the evil that has fallen upon the land, and then they come together in great deep celebration and the fellowship is reunited.
If instead Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas had been helicopter parents, they would have texted Frodo and Sam, would have perhaps allowed the hobbits to turn back when the task was too hard, and most certainly would have done everything in their power to remove Gollum—and that would have resulted in the real failure of the fellowship. We’ve all heard that ripping open a cocoon often kills the butterfly inside, the creature that needs to beat its own way out of the chrysalis in order to strengthen its wings for flight. It’s not that different. It’s also important for me to realize that I too have work to do. And we only accomplish the goal of our fellowship if we do it.
I also went back to Tolkien’s original book. There, more than in the movie, Aragorn is less certain of what to do when Gimli gives him the choice of following Frodo or rescuing Merry and Pippin.
‘Let me think!’ said Aragorn. ‘And now may I make a right choice and change the evil fate of this unhappy day!’ He stood silent for a moment. ‘I will follow the Orcs,’ he said at last. ‘I would have guided Frodo to Mordor and gone with him to the end; but if I seek him now in the wilderness, I must abandon the captives to torment and death. My heart speaks clearly at last: the fate of the Bearer is in my hands no longer. The Company has played its part. Yet we that remain cannot forsake our companions while we have strength left. Come! We will go now. Leave all that can be spared behind! We will press on by day and dark!’
I have endured hours of labour for these children of mine, sleepless nights, a loss of professional identity and more. Likely Aragorn, I would have guided my child through the rest of his life and gone with him to the end. But like Aragorn, that is not my task and the sooner I accept the task that is mine to do, and leave his fate in his own hands, the better we will all be.
Susan Fish 