Our good friends, Rachael and Tim and their bubba Super Sebastian, are moving to Indonesia in two sleeps. Boo! Hiss! It is so very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day-ness of life – sleep, eat, feed baby, sleep, eat – that it is easy to think that a friend’s departure won’t make that much of an impression. There is, after all, the washing to consider. The mail to post. The husband to tend to.

But driving over to my friends’ place, for the second last time, I found myself quite accountably jittery. I get jerky when I have something important on my mind, and so it was that I drove, twitching my thumb across the radio stations, slowing down and speeding up, looking at parks and thinking inconsequential thoughts. I have not lost the habit of subterfuge.

The thing is, I am sad that they are leaving. It will be the end of a chapter, as every leavetaking is. I have done so many good-byes myself, and got used to having only a handful of friends in Sydney. Rach and Tim’s time in Sydney had always been bonus time, destined as they were to move on at the end of a year. So I hadn’t really seen this one coming. Yet here I am, out of sorts. I visited them last night just to sit on their couch and watch tv whilst they settled their bubba. I got extra cuddles with Sebastian, secretly glad he was not settling, because I got to hold his baby head close and whisper to him that he was still my favourite boy. It is no good, thinking of the future, when I next see him and he won’t know me. That is the way of babies. I grieve every day some minor, major change in my own baby, knowing as I do that our days are numbered.

I have never been good at good-byes. I can’t keep my misery guts to myself. I hold on too hard, I try to imagine what things will be like and they always make me sad.

I know I will see them again and it will be great, wonderful. A new chapter. But tonight let me write this. It is my way of saying I’ll miss you.