Not counting the many thousands of words I spent complaining about being pregnant, I wrote my first column about my son, T, 18 years ago today, when he was three hours old. Someone said, “Is there some kind of union you could join? Because I’m sure you’re entitled to at least one whole day of maternity leave,” and I was baffled. As far as I was concerned, they should have held the front page – this wasn’t work, this was a dispatch from the frontline of a brave new world.
Anyway, some time passed, and T could suddenly talk, and then some further time passed, and he was his own person, out there in the world, and then I blinked, and he was as tall as a tree. People always say to you, “Treasure this time, it goes by in a flash,” right at the moment you have an armful of toddler, puree in your hair and a mouth full of wet wipes because you ran out of hands – which in retrospect was fortunate, because it meant you couldn’t say the thing you would otherwise have said.
But I’m not kidding around – this time passed in a flash. I can’t really recall how I spent it, except it can’t all have been staring out of a window, because I was constantly in a rush. And now here we are, and he’s a grown-ass adult, and nothing has changed in so far as he is still him and I am still me, except everything has changed.
Technically, it’s now ethical for me to write about him again. Years 2012 through 2025, it wasn’t really OK, since he could read it but he couldn’t meaningfully consent. Even though I knew that, it didn’t stop me, so I guess this next phase will be my apology years.
There are a lot of things I now have to butt out of: it’s none of my business whether he’s vegetarian or how often he washes his hair or what his phone manner is like. And, truthfully, 18 is a completely arbitrary watershed. There are mothers who will see themselves into their graves telling you you’ve had too many potatoes (like mine, for instance), and mothers who, very early on, leave the boundary-setting to a favourite teacher plus CBeebies, then sit back and hope for the best.
But let’s say you’re setting the age at which an adult human can say “This is none of your business”: 18 is that age. I don’t know why this is so devastating to me; his manners are lovely and I don’t care how clean his hair is. He isn’t even going to university for another year at the earliest. I walk around the house, fighting back tears, muttering “Nothing has changed”, like Theresa May.
If I had any respect at all for his adult autonomy, this would be the moment I would stop trying to make friends-by-proxy with the parents of his friends. The mum-alliance was a matter of life or death when they were tiny, because how else would you make common cause and blame some Third Other for giving everyone nits? Over time, it transpired that these were very beautiful, unexpected, late-life bonds, but now … now it would just be weird.
Of course appalling misdeeds of mine will come up when he gets a therapist, in the fullness of time, but surely by now, those can’t be helped. So my final adaptation, now, is to not just acknowledge the adulthood, but make an effort to actually believe it. No more grabbing his arm when we’re out and about, going: “Look, a horse! T, it’s an air ambulance!” Trust that, whoever’s lost their keys, it’s more likely to be me than him. Accept that just because I made it, it is his hair to do what he wants with.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
