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6 hours ago
8
My son sent me a picture of his university accommodation, which looked perfectly nice, but there was something off about it. It was a little bit too tidy, of course, and had the slightly dystopian atmosphere of a neutral colour palette, but the main problem was that places look weird without people in them. That’s why architects, when they’re trying to sell a development, always add the magic ingredients: a child with a balloon, a couple pushing a buggy and a gentleman with a bicycle.
So I squinted a bit and tried to imagine my son in that room, which is when it hit me: he’s actually serious about this. He truly intends, in one month’s time, to get all his stuff, put it in bags, take it to another city and live there. I can neither convey nor explain my surprise, which is bottomless. It’s not that I thought he wouldn’t get the grades; I’m not one of those harridan sceptic-parents. I just had “I’m going to university” filed as one of those cute, dumb things kids say, along with “I’m going to space”, “I’m changing my name to Unnamed Being” and “I’m an otter now”.
I was right there for the entire process: the selection of the university, the offer, the maths A-level paper that was so hard there was a petition against it on change.org and someone called it a war crime, and results day – when it became apparent that it wasn’t that hard and The Hague wouldn’t be necessary after all.
If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said my cherished first-born and I were fully in lockstep, but somewhere along the line our expectations must have diverged. He expected all these things that proceeded naturally from one to the other simply to happen, whereas I expected him to remain seven. When I bought him a nest of saucepans and started wanging on about new thinking on the matter of poached eggs, I was basically role-playing a parent proudly anticipating their child’s next chapter. I never in a million years thought he would move those saucepans to some other dwelling altogether, let alone go with them.
I had an early warning of this catastrophic denial the other night, when it got to 1.30am and he wasn’t home. On the one hand, I should have leapt on the opportunity to get used to the fact that he, a grown adult, was in an unknown place doing an unknown thing, as soon he will be every night of his unbearably precious life. On the other, I thought it best to check, so I woke up his sister, his dad, his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s mum. When someone finally furnished me with the information that he must be somewhere nearby because they could see his shoes, I went to sleep thinking: no harm done.
Yet there must have been some tiny amount of harm, because the next day he took steps to ensure that this harmless behaviour never occurred again – he set us all up on a tracking app. It’s a little bit like Snap Maps, except a thousand times more invasive. I can now see not only where he is, but also how fast he is moving. He went Interrailing the day after, which is when it transpired that the app was unable to get its head around the concept of a train. His dad and I keep getting alerts saying: “TJ is moving at 109mph. Tell TJ to slow down.”
I can see the battery life on his phone and how long it’s been since he went for a walk. I can see that it’s raining in Apfelberg and wonder whether he has a cagoule. This would be a great time to get used to the fact that he, a man, can make his own choices about which clothes to wear in what weather, yet the course of action I prefer is to send an umbrella emoji with a question mark, then a bunch more question marks, then call him. I am not incognisant of how annoying this must be, but irritation seems such a small price to pay to maintain the fiction that he, a seven-year-old, is not in another country at all, but probably downstairs, where it is not raining.
They call it an empty nest to underline the fact that this is all unfolding as nature intended. You’re not supposed to keep your offspring as flightless pets; you’re merely granted the blessing of stewarding them towards flight. But what’s missing from this analogy is that birds, by the time their baby hatchlings unaccountably transform into adult birds, are probably glad of the space. I also have another egg still in the nest, but the family ecosystem we’re using as a role model here has nothing in common with ours. I suggest we change tack and operate more like silverbacks, where the young signal their maturation not by leaving, but by vanquishing the old in combat and taking our status and all our … I don’t know, fruit? I would be fine with that.
A friend whose son went to university last year described dropping him off. She was trying to cheer me up, I think, when she launched into the saddest story I’ve ever heard. Once she’d said goodbye, she found herself unable to leave the vicinity, so instead she decided to make friends with the security guard. Every time he showed her something, she had an urgent follow-up question (“Yes, this common room is great. Now, where’s the nearest chemist?”), and he ended up effectively taking her on a tour of the city.
Now that I write this story down, I see that it is not that sad, because that is one seriously nice guy (and the city is also nice, apparently). Really, the only sad bit is when she was crying so much on the way home that she drove into a bus lane.
The night before A-level results come out, parents text each other on the quiet, wishing good luck, and we absolutely mean it in the moment. Everybody ardently wants everybody else’s kid to get to the place they have their heart set on. But none of us, surely, can have thought this all the way through.
