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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
