It’s baby steps for me as the first fledgling decides to fly the nest
The Small Girl has moved out. I know that she is a Young Adult now – the eldest of the three young adults elbowing for space in my house – but when your first fledgling leaves the nest, she is all of a sudden a baby again, however briefly.
It’s a funny thing, leaving home in 2020. We have become so used to soaring house prices and sky-high rents that we’ve come to expect our young people to remain in their parents’ homes until they are a frankly ridiculous age, even as we, the parents, give out yards about them and begin most arguments with the words “when I was your age I…,” with optional endings including “was married,” “had a child,” “had YoU,” (a particularly powerful zinger, that last one.)
She is 23 now, the same age I was when I left home which, until a few years back, was considered to be High Time. But because so many young people – especially in dublin – now enter their fourth decade with their Mammies still car r ying the birthday cake to the table, it was assumed in some quarters that something was amiss. When I texted one of my sisters that her niece was moving out, she asked if there was anything she could do. I thought she was offering the boot of her car, but it turned out she had arbitration in mind. A friend assumed the move was just the latest tragedy to hit me this year, and another, who knows The Small Girl’s sometimes spikey form, suggested I give her the weekend to calm down. “Why is she going?,” more wanted to know. And because “she’s 23” is no longer a plausible explanation for leaving a house in dublin for another one, I offered the more accurate one: “because she can.”
She’d actually wanted to go to London, and maybe she still will, but for now, the grand music career is confined by cursed Covid to a more modest and local route. And with rents in dublin hilariously out of her reach, it seemed she was doomed to spend successive lockdowns in the solitary confinement of her childhood bedroom, booming out her homemade music from early morning till late at night, with only occasional forays downstairs to protest that she doesn’t eat meat while making a chicken sandwich and to give out to The Boy and me for playing music too loud.
But then she heard about a room on the North Strand, and within a couple of weeks, the planets aligned in a way that reminded me so much of how I left home that I couldn’t but power up my “when I was your age” stories all over again. When I was her age, then, an actor friend touring a play needed somebody to pay the rent on his city centre flat for three months. No lease, no deposit, no strings attached. If I could make it in a Baggot Street mews for three months, I could quite possibly make it anywhere, I reasoned, and so I dipped my toes into independent living and, deciding the temperature suited me, never went back. Now, The Small Girl explained, an arty friend knew somebody with a small room in an arty house and it was probably a shortterm thing but she could definitely have it for a few months and if it didn’t work out, then there would be no financial harm done. And as dublin rents go, it was a steal.
It was all a bit messy at the start – she was literally supposed to move out the day my brother died – and when she did go a few days late, I wasn’t ready to face anything, least of all the North Strand. But with my baby about to be cut off from my five kilometre compass, I cycled over to her new home the day before this lockdown to inspect her, her house and the bonus bike she has inherited as part of the package.
And they’re all great. The Girl is happy and healthy and taking daily walks around Fairview Park to keep her sane. The house is small and clever and a bit boho – much like its latest tenant – and the bonus bike has a basket on the front, obviously. It all feels fine, and more importantly, it feels like time.
I miss her, of course, and I lament the timing which was not of her making. And I know there’s every chance she’ll be home soon, when the PUP well runs dry or London opens up to musicians again. But for now, she’s there, properly grown-up, free at last. And without even a whisper of chicken in the house, finally, inevitably, going vegan.