When Daughters Fly and Piglets Cry: On Letting Go and Finding Peace.

Today I watched a mother pig grieve her babies, Gran, and remembered when I had to learn the same lesson about letting go.

Dear Gran,

It's been a chaotic day on Cala Baeng. The mountain air is thick with the sound of distress - high-pitched squealing that cuts through the morning quiet like a blade. Today we removed nine piglets from one of our big sows, Mama Juita. Juita means 'lovely' in Indonesian, and she truly is the sweetest pig we have.

The piglets are seven weeks old now and need to be fully weaned. But tell that to their hearts.

They're pressed against the fence of their new pen, tiny snouts pushing through the gaps, crying for their mother. Juita paces her enclosure, snorting and calling back to them, her massive body restless with worry. Every few minutes, she lets out a deep, mournful sound that seems to come from her very soul.

Watching her today, I was transported back eight years to the silence that filled my house after the girls left home. That hollow ache of a mother whose job has suddenly, irrevocably changed.

You remember that time, don't you, Gran? How I wasn't okay for months.

The Silence After They Leave.

We've moved to a new plot of land, about fifteen minutes from the village. It's bigger and the pigs can finally roam free, just as we'd always planned. The view stretches across valley after valley, green mountains rolling toward the horizon like a promise of peace.

It's hard sometimes, living here. The locals speak Manggarai, not Indonesian, and despite my best efforts, I still mix up words and stumble through conversations. But I'm settled again, Gran, with where I am in life.

My eldest has built a wonderful life in Australia with her little family. My youngest has joined her there now and is using her scuba diving skills for an awesome cause, providing Scuba Therapy and adaptive scuba training for people with special needs or disabilities. I'm so proud of them both; they're exactly where they're meant to be.

And I'm here, in the mountains, learning new skills and building something of my own.

But watching those piglets cry for their mother brought it all back - how I struggled when the girls first left. How I didn't know what to do with the silence.

Do you remember, Gran? I stayed late at work, finding any excuse to avoid going back to the quiet house.

Their laughter used to fill every corner, even when they weren't there. The memory of it lingered in the walls. Without it, everything felt hollow.

I became a holiday planner. Remember all those postcards we sent you from exotic places? I paid for flights, bribed them with beach trips and family adventures. I knew they couldn't afford to travel with me and their friends, so I made it easy.

I just wanted us together. I wanted to keep making memories, keep pretending that nothing fundamental had changed.

And we did make beautiful memories. Some of the best of our lives. I took hundreds of photos, categorized and named them all, just so I could find them in moments of homesickness and remember how it felt to be complete.

Grief in the Present Tense.

What I was grieving wasn't just the house we'd shared, but the life we'd lived. The messy, noisy, perfectly imperfect rhythm of motherhood and daughterhood that had defined me for twenty years.

The years of shared breakfasts and school drop-offs and arguments over clothes and missed buses. I missed them, yes. But I also missed us. I missed the woman I was when they needed me every day.

You understood that grief, didn't you, Gran? You'd been through it with your own children, watched them scatter across the world to build their own lives. When I called you crying about the empty house, you'd listen without trying to fix it, just holding space for the ache.

It's been eight years since I left the UK to live in Indonesia. I know now we will never live under the same roof again. We don't spend every Christmas together. The house they grew up in is just a story we tell now.

But here's what I've learned, Gran: acceptance doesn't arrive like a lightning bolt. It creeps in quietly, the way mist does over these mountains at sunrise. You barely notice it until it's all around you, softening the edges of everything.

Mountains and New Kinds of Family.

My partner's family has become my Indonesian family. We may not be able to have deep conversations - we all get frustrated with my halting Manggarai, and goodness knows what I sound like with my British accent trying to navigate tonal languages. But we share something deeper than words: these mountains, this land, this daily rhythm of caring for animals and each other.

It's chaotic and hilarious and full of love. We sing karaoke in three languages. We eat rice with our hands, sitting cross-legged on bamboo mats in our wooden house. The ‘mama tua’ grandmother here has adopted me as thoroughly as you ever did, scolding me when I work too hard and making sure I eat enough.

I've found a new kind of togetherness, one that doesn't replace what I've lost but has made space beside it. Like adding another room to a house, the original rooms are still there, still loved, but now there's more space for life to unfold.

The Lesson in Letting Go.

These days, Christmas might be a WhatsApp call that comes through while I'm feeding the pigs. It might be a photo of my grandson's first steps, sent from the other side of the world. And that's okay. We're still us, just stretched a little further across the map.

We carry each other in different ways now. My eldest sends me messages for work advice and worries about my health from afar. My youngest shares photos of her underwater Diveraid work, and I can see the joy in her eyes that started on that beach in Cebu all those years ago.

And I realised something simple but profound, Gran: I haven't lost my daughters. I've just stopped needing to hold them so tightly.

You taught me that, in your gentle way. How you celebrated every adventure I took, even when it meant being further from you. How you supported my move to Indonesia without making me feel guilty for the distance it created.

As I write this, I can still hear Mama Juita calling for her babies. But her cries are quieter now, more resigned. In a few days, she'll be fine. She'll stop pacing the fence and return to her peaceful routine of mud baths and afternoon naps. She'll even resist if we try to reunite them - the natural order of things asserting itself.

That's the wisdom animals carry that we humans struggle with: they grieve fully, then they move on. They don't torment themselves with what-ifs or spend years trying to recreate what's already passed.

Sitting here on our mountain, listening to the evening chorus of frogs and distant pig snorts, I feel a deep gratitude for this unlikely teacher - an Indonesian sow, who reminded me that letting go isn't about loving less. It's about loving differently.

Acceptance doesn't mean giving up, Gran. It means making peace with where you are, who you've become, and what life looks like now. It means trusting that the bond remains even when the physical closeness fades. It means choosing joy in the present without mourning every moment you miss.

It means watching your daughters fly and celebrating the strength of their wings, even when it takes them far from home.

From the quiet of the mountains, walking beside you.