There’s No Pleasing Some Mothers

 

I cried yesterday.  Like a baby – tears and snot and everything.

I haven’t cried for four years, then yesterday – blub city.

My baby left home.  For good.  For real.  For ever.  

I hope – I don’t want to be one of those mothers stuck with a forty-year-old layabout who won’t get a job and expects me to cook and clean and iron for him. I’ve done my time; I kept him fed and watered and clothed and alive.  I’m not doing it again.

Four years ago, we took Tory Boy to university and as I said goodbye, I shocked us all – including me – by bursting into tears.  I cried half the way home.  At the traffic lights just outside the campus, I looked behind to see a row of cars with a bawling mother in each front passenger seat.  Guess I’m normal, after all.

I did my crying then for my baby leaving home, becoming a man, yadda-yadda-yadda.  I didn’t expect it to happen again.  All this week I’ve been chivvying Tory Boy along, to get his room packed up.  He took a small case yesterday and the rest will be sent on once he has a permanent home (it may be the YMCA for a couple of weeks until he gets settled).  Although he will always have a home with us etc., etc.,  if he needs it, I’m not keeping shrines to my children when they move out – I want storage space and office space and a spare bedroom.

I love my kids but I’m a pragmatist.  They know that, which is why Tory Boy – Tory Man – Assistant Producer Boy-Man-?? What?  What?  What should I call him? – which is why he knew I meant it when I said I would be permanently furious if I had to pack up his stuff for him.  I want the child out.  I want him to feel as if he’s moved out.  He’s a man now, with a job and a life and he doesn’t need a bolt hole any more.

Which is why I burst into tears and sobbed on his shoulder when I said my goodbye.

Mothers!  Can’t live with them; can’t please them by moving out.