Eighteen summers ago, my partner and I came home from hospital with a newborn. All three of us were exhausted. Only our daughter (with her perfect fingernails: nature looks after the first manicure, and it’s matchless) was sleeping. Her parents were wide awake and wired – rattled, like any new parents, by the prospect of the unknown.
As we carried this tiny human into the house for the first time, I remember feeling sharply as though our whole world had been picked up and put down somewhere else: that we knew where everything was, but didn’t know where we were.
Last weekend, that same young person left home for university. And the emotional dislocation is back.
I have absolutely no idea what feelings to expect, either immediately, when she isn’t just a head-round-the-door away, or as the days tick on and the absence of one quarter of the family becomes the New Normal.
Will we cry? Of course we’ll cry. We’re middle-aged. We cry at everything. Will we worry? Of course we’ll worry. We’re parents. But how will we worry? Will it be the worry we’ve always worried or will it be a new variant? Omicron worry?
Parenthood is one long goodbye. The child leaves the womb; she leaves the cot at the foot of the bed; she comes off the draught, then says farewell to the bottle. She runs off in a park or a zoo (both, actually) for the first time; she starts nursery; she’s too heavy to carry up the stairs after a long car journey.
She starts walking to school alone. She starts choosing what she wears and how she looks. She starts doing her own thing at the weekend. She stays out and gets back after you’ve gone to bed. Bye. See ya. Bye. And you get used to the farewell carousel. But this is palpably different.
The strangenesses are many. Adding an address under her name in our contacts where there had never been one before, because why would there be? We all live in the same place and always have.
I go through the shopping list I’ve carried in my head for years – organised aisle by aisle, because I treat the weekly shop like a military over-the-top – and see that about a quarter of it is now crossed out. But will I remember these deletions in the heat of battle? Or will I come home, file something in the fridge, and look at it three weeks later, wondering why it’s untouched and going out of date?
I try to rehearse ways of thinking about this New Normal. She’s just upstairs in her room, like she always was, except that instead of being on the floor above, she’s now several hundred miles upstairs. She’ll be back at Christmas. Christmas? It’s 29C outside and I’m wearing shorts. Quality Street isn’t even legal at this time of year.
What about her younger brother? How will he manage the sister-shaped hole in his world? Will he be getting a psychological invoice for this at some point? A therapist told me, some years ago, that sibling relationships are an absurdly under-excavated seam. The two of them have always looked after each other. Can they do that on FaceTime?
We’re a three-person household now. That hasn’t been the case since he was born. It’s as if we’re reversing out of parenthood the way we came in: from no child in the house to one, peaking at two, then back to one again and, in a few years’ time, all the way back to none. We’ll still be parents, of course, just parents of kids – sorry, what? – with different addresses. (Yes, while we’re here: sod you, the English language, for never bothering to find a word for adult offspring. You must have known that the word “child” was going to grow up one day. Tsk.)
The day after dropping our daughter off at her student accommodation we distracted ourselves by wandering around an anthropological museum, and I found myself confronted with a showcase full of spent birds’ nests. Even my sense of humour thought this was a bit on the nose. Besides, ours is not an empty nest. It’s just one fledgling lighter.
I think about the next time we’ll see each other: more time apart will have elapsed than ever, so we’ll notice how each other has aged and changed – and we’ll notice noticing.
And the first of the Omicron worries arrives. Is there something we missed when we had an 18-year chance to do it – and is it too late now? Here we are again. Life picked up and put down somewhere else. The second act. Here’s hoping it isn’t a letdown after the first.
Jason Hazeley is a comedy writer who is partly responsible for TV untellectual Philomena Cunk