It’s A Funny Old World: Jane Wenham-Jones
‘You’ll take me for lavish lunches weekly and ply me with sherry,’ I say, ‘or I’ll leave the lot to a cat charity’
When my son was 13, I read a novel by Joanna Trollope called Second Honeymoon, about ‘empty nest syndrome’. The mum in the story was feeling bereft because her youngest child had moved out. ‘What a fuss,’ I thought. ‘Get over it!’
I, after all, had left home at 18, and I fully expected my offspring might want to do so, too.
The week after I had deposited my son at university, that same book was being serialised on Radio 4 – and it made me cry so much, I had to switch it off! But I needn’t have worried. My son is now 25, and, thanks to economic factors, living at home once more.
Many of my friends also have adult kids re-installed. We compare notes on how many shoes they leave all over the hall floor, how they come in late and bang the kitchen cupboards loudly, and can empty a fridge at one sitting.
We are known as the stretched generation – a term I’d never heard before I sat down to pen my latest novel, Mum in the Middle. It’s the tale of Tess, who’s still financing boomerang adult kids at one end, while her elderly mother needs support at the other. When I started writing it, both my own parents were skipping about quite happily, until around the time my son moved back in, when my mother broke her hip. Then an aunt for whom I have Power of Attorney was diagnosed with dementia just before my dad developed problems with his sight. Suddenly, I wasn’t only telling a story, I was living it!
‘Try to highlight the drama and the emotional intensity of mid-life,’ advised my lovely editor Kate, as I was looking into home helps. ‘People in the past would have started to wind down in their 50s. Now life seems to speed up.’
She went on to list some of the issues mid-lifers are grappling with – second marriages, blended families and social media, for starters – while trying to maintain their careers, homes, friendships and sanity!
My earliest memory of my gran was as a silver-haired, old lady who wore a pinny and polished the teapot a lot. I calculate that, at the time, she was several years younger than I am now! Her parents were long gone, and all four of her kids had their own homes. She wasn’t doing online shopping for one relative while fixing a printer for another and clearing the detritus of her son’s 3am sandwich.
It can only get worse. By the time
I’m a granny, the next generation will probably not leave the nest at all, while us oldies will live forever and be leading our kids a merry dance. My son looks queasy at the thought. He’s already aware that, while my own mum makes a virtue of being as undemanding as possible, he’ll have no such luck with me. ‘You’ll take me for lavish lunches weekly and ply me with sherry,’ I say,
‘or I’ll leave the lot to a cat charity.’
I don’t add that I mean to be grumpy and bang my stick a lot; that his wife will loathe me and his kids will be desperate to go to university to miss out on the nights I insist on coming to dinner and getting drunk on gin. ‘We may be the ones stretched now,’ I say instead, ‘but we’ll get our own back.’
Mum in the Middle by Jane Wenham-Jones (£7.99, Harper Impulse, paperback).