There were boxes. Bikes. A suspicious lack of storage. And that strange, slightly performative cheerfulness that everyone adopts when they’re pretending this is all completely fine.

I was genuinely happy for him. Proud, even. This is what we’re meant to want? Independent child. First flat. Keys in hand. Life unfolding.

And then we left.

I got into the car and cried.

Not sobbed, not wailed — just cried quietly, like someone whose heart had expanded a little too quickly and needed a moment to catch up. It surprised me, which is ridiculous, because of course it didn’t. Of course this was always going to happen.

It felt like he’d stepped through an invisible curtain — into adulthood, into the rest of his life. And I was standing on the other side of it, waving bravely, hoping he couldn’t see me blinking back tears like a woman in a mildly emotional advert for broadband.

All day, memories kept ambushing me. Him as a baby. Him as a small child. His hand in mine. His voice when he was little. Not in a dramatic montage way — more like my brain had decided to open every drawer at once and tip the contents onto the floor.

Apparently this is what happens when your child moves out. You get flashbacks. No one warned me.

It all felt slightly odd — I didn’t feel sad. Not exactly. And I didn’t feel happy either. I felt both. Fully. At the same time.

Joy and grief sat side by side. Pride and loss. Expansion and ache.

And this, I realised, is something yoga has been quietly training me for these last few years.

Yoga doesn’t actually teach us how to feel better. (If it did, I’d be able to do a handstand by now without thinking about snacks.) What it teaches us — slowly, repeatedly, often inconveniently — is how to stay when more than one thing is true.

To feel the stretch and the strength.
To breathe through effort without needing it to stop.
To notice discomfort without immediately panicking or distracting ourselves with thoughts like “I wonder what’s for lunch.”

It’s easy to talk about this on the mat. It’s much harder when your child is standing in their own kitchen, making plans you’re no longer part of.

But the practice is the same.

Not clinging. Not pushing away. Just staying present for the moment as it is — beautiful, painful, ordinary, extraordinary.

What struck me most was how quietly this transition happened. No fanfare. No ceremony. Just a key, a door, and a life opening in front of him.

And maybe that’s how most real change happens. Not with big declarations or dramatic turning points, but with these small, poignant thresholds we don’t fully understand until we’re already standing in them.

Yoga has taught me that we don’t have to resolve moments like this. We don’t have to make sense of them or wrap them up neatly with a lesson and a bow.

We just have to be big enough to hold them.

Big enough to feel proud and bereft.
Big enough to let go without withdrawing love.
Big enough to trust that this — too — is exactly how it’s meant to be.

So if you’re standing at your own invisible curtain right now — a child leaving, a role shifting, a chapter ending — know this:

You’re not doing it wrong if your heart feels full and cracked open at the same time.

That’s not weakness.

That’s practice.