I’ve got empty nest syndrome – and my son’s only four
MY SON, Billy, started school last month. In the run-up to the big day, I f el t s uch sadness and yearning that it was all I could do to stem the flood of tears. Billy is my second child, my only son, and I did not want his baby days to end. It did not help that he only turned four this summer, that he is tiny and was feeling clingy and jittery.
‘I don’t want to go to big school,’ he said in a small voice as I wrestled him into his too-big sweatshirt. ‘I want to stay here with you.’
I didn’t want him to leave me either. But, of course, I put on a convincing display of cheerfulness. ‘Everyone feels nervous on their first day. You’ve got butterflies,’ I reasoned. ‘I had them on my first day in my job.’
‘ Well, that’s because you’re on TV,’ retorted Darcey, my seven- year- old daughter. Darcey has always been robustly self-sufficient. She was desperate to start school; practically bursting with excitement on her first day, and my solace when I left her there was Billy, who was then just a month old.
This time I would have no milky bundle in my arms, and would have to return to an empty house.
As we walked to school, Billy’s tiny hand grasping mine more tightly than usual, he did his best to chase away his fears. ‘Fly away butterflies! I’m going to be brave,’ he announced.
In that moment, I felt it was an act of inhumanity bordering on cruelty to prise him from my side and force him to take hi s first, f al t er i ng s t eps t owards independence.
But the law in England decrees that little boys of four, no matter how timorous, are ready to leave their mothers for six hours a day, five days a week. And their mums — however sad — should pat them on the heads and send them packing.
But I didn’t feel any braver than Billy. When I got home, I closed the door behind me and sobbed.
Many mums dispatch the youngest of their brood to school with a sigh of relief.
Last month, mother-of-four Shona Sibary admitted in this paper that she was delighted to shrug off her maternal responsibilities during the day.
In fact, she practically punched the air as her youngest, Dolly — who, like Billy had just turned four and was the youngest in the class — toddled off to school.
‘Hurrah! That’s the last one out of my hair,’ crowed Shona as she raced home to enjoy a day devoted to herself and her work, entirely unfettered by the irksome presence of her little girl.
I know some of my friends feel similarly. One, who worked through both her children’s infancy, and paid the ruinously high costs of a private nursery, is delighted now she can enjoy what she terms ‘guiltfree’ childcare.
As her children have reached the age when schooling is obligatory she feels able to go to work with a clear conscience. No more mother’s guilt about not being at home full time.
Moreover, both her children, like mine, attend state school, so that guilt-free childcare costs nothing.
BUT I see no reason to celebrate. On the contrary, I feel saddened by the weight of my child-free hours. Most mums feel a sharp pang of regret when the last of their teenagers departs for university.
However, the same sense of loss has hit me 14 years early. I’m a premature empty-nester. When Billy started at ‘ big school’, I mourned the rite of passage that marked his transition from infant to child.
I have asked myself why my reaction is so extreme. After all, I cannot expect — and indeed would not want — him to be tied permanently to my apron strings.
But there are many reasons why I feel bereft. For a start, I’ve been accustomed to having the best of both worlds: an enviable job, as presenter of ITV’s Daybreak, plus precious one- on- one hours with Billy, while Darcey was at school.
Granted, I was often exhausted. My working day starts when my alarm clock goes off at 2.30am, but most days I’d finish work around lunchtime, pick up Billy f rom nursery and we’d enjoy our cosy afternoon rituals together.
Off we’d go to our favourite little café to share a plate of scrambled egg before heading to the park to play on the swings.
Darcey had enjoyed my undivided attention before her little brother was born; now it was Billy’s turn to be mummy’s boy.
So I had the stimulation of work, plus the joy of motherhood. I’ve been incredibly lucky. But the truth is that I’ve always desperately wanted a third child.
I realise I’d be almost stupefied with exhaustion if I had one. I know, too, that our lives would be thrown into chaos — as they were when Darcey came along; a happy surprise soon after my husband Derek, 46, and I married in 2005.
I’d returned to work when she was 11 weeks old, still breast-feeding and my brain so addled with tiredness that I could barely speak. Then Billy arrived four years later — a placid, biddable little chap — and even as I was leaving the maternity unit, my craving for a third baby was kicking in.
But although I did nothing to prevent another pregnancy — indeed, I positively encouraged it — nothing happened. I cast around desperately for explanations. Then, of course, the obvious truth dawned: I was just too old.
But the unfulfilled yearning persisted. Actually, I felt bereft. And now I’m 46, and realise that my chances of becoming a mum again are minuscule, if not non-existent, I feel no less so. But reluctantly I am acclimatising, and even more unwillingly I am relinquishing the ties that bind me so closely to Billy.
The other day he came home from school and announced that he wanted some hair gel. He is no longer happy to sport the evacuees t yl e s hort- back- and- s i des I prescribed for him. He wants a rockstar look like his classmates.
HIS favourite colour used to be pink (which also happens to be mine). Now he tells us it is blue. He has declared, too, that he wants to be called William, as befits his new status as a boy at big school.
All these signals of his burgeoning self-assertion should, of course, delight me. But I cannot help feeling nostalgia for the days when his favourite occupation was snuggling on the sofa watching a Power Rangers box set with me.
Derek, a psychotherapist, says I am entitled to mourn this passing chapter in our lives, but even he is mildly exasperated that I still refuse to discard Billy’s pushchair. ‘ He might need it one day,’ I plead. ‘He might get tired.’ Yet as I watch my son whizzing ahead of us on his scooter, even I have to concede that the likelihood is vanishingly small.
A few months ago, Billy was crying when he had his pre-school inoculations. ‘You have to have them because you’re nearly four and you might pick up bugs when you go to big school,’ I explained, while stroking his hand.
‘I don’t want to be four, I want to be three,’ he wailed. ‘And I want to stay at nursery because there are no bugs there.’
It has taken a very short time for him to decide otherwise: he has adapted quickly to the routines and responsibilities of school.
He knows where to hang his coat; he has his own place on the storytime mat, and when I arrive early at home time and creep over to his classroom window to watch him covertly, the look of intense concentration on his little face proves he is ready for the rigour of learning. So the problem is mine.
What have I done with the empty hours when I would have been with him? I have, with tears coursing down my face, cleaned out the cupboards, ruthlessly discarding the long outgrown baby toys and clothes.
I wavered over a pair of tiny, pale blue Italian shoes that a friend gave Billy when he was two. I stalled, too, over his favourite Teletubbies. But finally, reluctantly, I consigned them to the charity box.
I’ve thought, too, about the impact my new-found freedom will have on my relationship with my husband.
For virtually our entire marriage, Derek and I have been engaged in a deft relay race. As I arrived home from work, he’d exit through the front door, passing a child to me while simultaneously wiping baby sick from his lapel.
Now that we’ll have more time to ourselves, will we tire of each other’s company? Will there be awkward silences to fill?
We know each other only as parents — there was no protracted courtship during which we enjoyed a life together as a couple — and the prospect of there being just the two of us takes us into new territory.
I know I should be thinking of the home- cooked meals I can now prepare; of the lithe figure I can retrieve during countless gym sessions; of the new foreign language I could learn or the idle lunches I can linger over with girlfriends.
But gosh, what I really want is the unalloyed joy of pushing a little boy on a swing and hearing him shout: ‘Higher, Mummy, higher!’