Thank you for all the responses. It helps to vent out and read all of your replies.
I have booked an appointment with a therapist but she won't be available until Jan 3rd. Might as well. My eldest will be leaving on Jan 1st and I'm bracing myself for more heartache.
I have 3 kids and I love them all dearly, but my eldest have always been special to me. There's 5 years gap between her and my second child, so for the first 5 years of her life, she was lavished with all the love and care that she needed. I literally totted her everywhere I went. I took a month maternity leave and went straight back to work with her along (we had a nursery for staff children). So yeah, we were pretty much inseparable.
She's a bright and beautiful girl, but when puberty hit, she started to become rebellious. Nothing really major, just talking back, breaking her curfew, getting some piercings and dying her hair unnatural colour behind my back which I wouldn't have minded if she had told me anyway. I am not a strict parent but I do have a few house rules which she wasn't happy about and tried to break every now and then. She became detached, started spending more and more time in her room, picking fights with her siblings, was mostly sulky, angry or restless and I caught her smoking cigarettes 'a few times which she knew I was against. Neither I not her were on good term with her father, so maybe that exacerbated the problem too. We had frequent rows and by the time she was in senior high, she was soooo ready to leave the house. To be perfectly honest, I was getting weary too of the frequent arguments at home, so when she received the full scholarship abroad and left home, I was more relief than sad until everything hit home a few months later. I guess there is element of guilt here on my part. I regret that we had so many arguments and I wonder if I was doing something wrong which ended up pushing her away. She was accepted in other universities here but she chose to travel overseas which I suspected to get away from home.
She is still here until Jan 1st and her room is of course a total mess again which was something that used to aggravate me a lot when she was still living at home. This time round though, the messiness of her room oddly brings me a little sense of comfort.
I just miss my little girl so much. We were as close as thieves and I don't know what went wrong with us. Was it puberty, my sour relationship with my husband or bad parenting? I wish I can figure it out so I can fix it, if it's not too little too late....