Children leaving home

Dealing with kids leaving home. This is an issue that is going to be something that I’ll be dealing with probably until I’m dead. I made it through the first time when my eldest son left home although I could have dealt with it better. I’m trying to deal with things rationally and coolly this time around. It helps that I have a wife this time to talk about all of this with. The first time things were complicated by divorces and career issues; this time it’s a bit different – if for no other reason than that I’m almost twenty years older and a lot slower.

Mercedes is a first year student at SMA Lab in Singaraja. An Indonesian teacher friend here told me the other day that it was an outstanding school. Mercedes seems to like it from what she says on the handphone. She wants to be a doctor so she’s taking an extra biology class as an elective. I asked her the other day if she was making friends (knowing how important that is to kids around the world, but perhaps even more so for Indonesians who are constantly perplexed by the amount of time that I spend alone (more on that for another post). She said yes she was making friends including a few girls that she knew when she was in elementary school in Bali four years ago. Being perhaps an overly protective dad, I asked her if they were all girls, and she asked if it was ok is she had friends who were boys, but not boyfriends. Hmm, ok Dad how do you deal with that? I thought for a moment and replied that yes it was ok. But (ah, the Dad but), keep focused on your studies.

So she’s pretty much on her own. She lives in our townhouse in Singaraja. The house adjoins what we call the Beach House, and she has an aunt and uncle and three little rugrats living there, and she has another aunt and uncle just 50 meters away down the street. Still, it’s a big jump for an Indonesian kid from a fairly tightknit family. The sensitive one as my oldest sister would say.

So this year I’ll be living in three houses on two different islands – keeping an eye on the end of my teaching career and my family here in Sumbawa, and keeping an eye on my high school daughter in our houses in Bali as she starts off her higher ed career in Indonesia. Higher ed because graduation from high school is still not the norm in Indonesia – mandatory schooling here ends at the end of junior high (and many tragically don’t make it that far due to economics).

Next year, we’ll all be back in Bali; I’ll be able to keep an eye on the kids and help with their homework, and Su will be able to start her new business to keep her occupied once she no longer has to run a big house, a garden, and a crop of kids and animals.

Oh, animals. That’s been one of the questions about how I’m going to deal with moving to Bali. The townhouse is just that – it has about the same space as a small New York townhouse which means no ducks, chickens, geese, goats, and dogs. The plan (another one of those plans) is to get a baby python here and raise it (I’m assuming that it will respond to raising like my old boa constrictor did when I lived in Berkeley, California) and keep it in the small courtyard that we have in Bali.