ROS CARMAN, PSYCHOTHERAPIST

Ros Carman left a job in the City to have her daughter, Verity, and has spent the past 18 years as a housewife in Clapham, south-west London. A few years ago, however, determined to make something of her life once Verity had left home, she retrained as a counsellor at Roehampton University and then completed a postgraduate degree in psychotherapy.

“I realised that you can’t spend your entire life going to coffee mornings and walking the dogs,” she says. “And I never wanted to be that person who gets a secretarial job down the road.”

This weekend she’s going with Verity to look at a number of universities, safe in the knowledge that she now has a thriving psychotherapy practice to keep her busy. “It ties in brilliantly with the fact that she isn’t going to be around any more,” she says. “Thank goodness I’ve done this, otherwise I would be going back to a very empty house.” Returning to academia, with all its deadlines and exams, was not easy, she says, particularly given the emotional demands of counselling. “I had to fight all my demons in order to do it,” she says. “It was intense but it changed my life. I feel I now understand people on a different level.”

During her studies she made an new, more diverse group of friends – unconnected to parenting, whom she is still close to now. “This is what happens when you take a leap of faith,” she says. Being a mother and having had a previous career are the perfect credentials for her new venture, she continues. “If I’d done this in my 20s, I don’t think I’d have had any clients,” she says. “Life experience is key with what I do.”

Verity has supported her new career from the outset. She now works four days a week and has a busier social life than before. She admits, though, that she is still not wholly comfortable with the idea of her daughter leaving home. “I feel prepared, though – it won’t be a shock, she says. “There is benefit in thinking ahead. And it’s good to show your children a good work ethic. Life is about learning – you just have to keep going.”