Eva’s gone to have her baby: I’m emerging at the other end of the process. My boys are nearly 18 and 16, pretty much cooked.
It’s a slow then all-at-once thing, this parenting business. The days felt interminable for years (there was a single afternoon in 2004 when they both had chickenpox that definitely took five years off my life; and time seemed to take on a hallucinatory, elastic quality as my elder son examined every knob and twiddly bit of every train in the London Transport Museum every week for a year), now suddenly there’s no time left.
I’m feeling the same panicked incredulity I remember when we were inexplicably allowed to bring the eldest home from hospital with absolutely no child-wrangling experience. What, that’s it? My boy turns 18 and I have to just let him go and be a person all by himself? Shouldn’t the authorities stop this madness?
Part of the panic is about how little I can still do in the short time I have left. What can I teach them before they leave? They can load a dishwasher (poorly), feed themselves (pretty well); they seem kind. That’s the basics covered. When you’re sending two more privileged white men out into the world, that seems like the least you can do. There are still surprises: I realised recently they don’t know how to post a letter (they thought the postman collected it from your house). A tin without a ring pull and the concept of “tin opener” leaves one utterly bewildered – it’s not a skill I thought he’d particularly need: life moves fast. But they’ll learn practical things I’ve forgotten in the time-honoured manner – by making an absolute dog’s breakfast of them a few times.
What about the deeper stuff? The temptation to grasp them by the shoulder and deliver pearls of hard-won wisdom, like a pound shop Kipling, is almost overwhelming at times. Sometimes I get as far as the grasping, but faced with their bemused expressions, the only life advice that comes to mind is that offered by Bertie Wooster’s Uncle Henry in PG Wodehouse’s Carry on, Jeeves: “If you stand outside Romano’s in the Strand, you can see the clock on the wall of the Law Courts down in Fleet Street… You can win a lot of money betting on it with fellows who haven’t found it out.” I accept this is of limited use and may indeed no longer be true (note to self: check this out).
Part of the problem is that their father and I snuck in under the lowering garage door of an era where everything was still on a broadly hopeful trajectory. We studied without mountains of debt, found jobs easily, managed to buy a flat and chose, happily, to have them at a time of relative optimism.
It’s strange watching them enter a world that has confounded our assumptions of progress: what could I possibly know about what lies ahead for them? The elder was supposed to be finishing A-Levels and going travelling: now he’s facing months fighting for bandwidth and breathing space in a tiny house with his tedious #WFH parents.
I don’t, though, want to fall into shrugging helplessness, hoping their generation will sort everything out, somehow. Your mother grasping your shoulder then saying, “We’re so sorry about everything” probably isn’t the cheeriest vibe either, even though I am, I really am. So instead I’ve been trying to think what facts of life (no, not that kind, too late for that) might be helpful whatever their world looks like.
The only thing I’m sure I’ve learned from my myriad mistakes in 45 years is that life doesn’t tend to have the neat narrative arc of a book or film. People would like it to: we’re programmed to want tidy, satisfying stories. But a life is sprawling, inconclusive, confusing; punctuated by heady instants of joy and patches of sadness. There’s a lot of grey in between and right now, there’s whatever this is: exceptional, awful, hopefully once in a lifetime.
When you know that, I think you’re better equipped to ride out the bad and really live the good. When it comes down to it, your parents don’t – or shouldn’t – care about the narrative arc, but I think it often feels as if they (we) do. I actually think that even the well-intentioned “We just want you to be happy” can be quite unhelpful: who the hell knows how to do that?
That’s all I’ve got, but the problem is I don’t know how to pass it on. When’s the right moment to tell my soon-to-be-gone son this? When I’m asking about next year’s gang awry plans with the subtlety of a wounded hippo? Shouting perimenopausally about the recycling? Or when we’re slumped in front of the telly in relative peace? I’m anxious not to make things weird, especially now: I just want to hold on to these moments, rest a hand on his giant knee, furtively look for echoes of his baby self in his all-grown-up face.
So instead, as he wanders through the kitchen, I slip him a pointless tenner and whisper the only other truly useful thing I know: “You can wash almost anything at 30C.”
