Moving back in with mum: the doomerang generation
Thought teens made for tricky lodgers? Grown-up children are far worse, discovers Maureen Paton
All my friend Christina wants her 40-year old son to do is to find himself a nice woman and leave home – again. For good this time, she says, and also for his own good; as after moving out nearly two decades ago, Sam has broken up with his girlfriend of nine years and moved back in with his mum. As you do, if you’re part of the growing doomerang trend.
Back these middle-aged cuckoos hurtle to the familial nest like doom-laden boomerangs, trailing wreckage from collapsed relationships and treating their mothers in particular as shoulders to cry on – especially if they are living alone after widowhood or divorce.
Suddenly, she’s expected to do all the washing and cooking again, as if the intervening years away from her now-grown child never happened. Meanwhile, he lives there rent-free and indulges himself with megamoans about his ex to his mother, “the only woman who has ever really appreciated him”. Impossible property prices have accelerated the trend. How can you fail to offer shelter to your child in his hour of need when he can hardly afford to rent, let alone buy, while he’s paying maintenance to his ex?
Doomerang kids are indeed usually men, mainly because ex-wives tend to be granted custody of the marital home until their children reach maturity. Moving back in with mama is the obvious and cheapest solution – yet woe betide her if she dares to have a life of her own, not to mention a new man. The ruthless returner will cramp her style and scupper any romances, scaring off her admirers in order to establish his position as the Alpha Male of the household – not to mention protecting his inheritance from an upstart rival should mater suddenly pop her clogs in that lovely big house which has increased a millionfold in value over the decades.
Christina and Sam are the real-life equivalent of new BBC sitcom Hold The Sunset, in which John Cleese’s courtship of Alison Steadman’s Baby-boomer widow is rudely interrupted by the sudden return of her selfish fortysomething son, who has left his wife and children.
“After my husband’s death eight years ago, I thought there would be a certain continuity in having Sam live with me again,” says Christina. “But although he’s company up to a point, it’s not always on my terms. He nags me about not being tidy enough – by which he means I don’t make enough room for his stuff – and if I dare to bring my new boyfriend home
‘How can you fail to give shelter to your child in his hour of need?’
sometimes, he hates it and sees it as an invasion of ‘his’ space.
“Yet he wouldn’t think twice about bringing back a new date to stay the night without asking me; he feels he is the man of the house now.” Sam and her boyfriend, Tom, lock horns at the slightest disagreement – so badly, in fact, that Christina now meets her beau secretly in order to avoid her son’s disapproval, leaving her feeling like the miscreant daughter while Sam behaves like the forbidding father.
When Diana’s son Adam camped out in her small two-bedroom flat for nine months after splitting from his wife, she saw it as “an intrusion. I had a very organised life of my own and then this hulking great chap came back into it 22 years after he first left home at 18. “Although I love him dearly, I didn’t want to make it too easy for him; I hoped that maybe he would go back to his wife, who I got on reasonably well with. I felt caught in the middle because I didn’t want to affect my relationship with my grandchildren.
“But when he said a hostel would be his only alternative because newly single men without children in tow weren’t exactly a priority for emergency housing, I couldn’t bear to throw him out.” Yet if you allow your son to embrace his second childhood by meeting his every whim, any future partner – assuming he ever meets another one – won’t thank you for it.
Karen, who has reluctantly allowed her son Robert to move back in after his last relationship foundered, worries that his development will have been stunted forever. She admits she’s her own worst enemy, trying to treat her son like a friend instead of establishing firm boundaries.
The trouble with this generation, now the favourite scapegoats of modern society, is that they have made it far too easy for their middle-aged children to return home with impunity – even the once off-limits notion of sex under your parents’ roof has become commonplace. So, Baby-boomers, hang your heads in shame. It’s all your fault. Again.
All names have been changed. Hold The Sunset is on BBC One tonight at 7.30pm