Parenting a young adult child and manoeuvring the latest version of the dependence-independence push-pull paradigm is hard enough, but during a pandemic it’s even harder. It’s the toughest parenting I’ve ever had to perform, and that’s saying something.
I was a first-time mother at 42, too scared to leave hospital after my son’s birth, and who, when his father left a few months later, descended into a sort of parenting paralysis for over a year. Then I started to write about my son and me. Writing helped. But it was my mother’s parenting me, and her grandparenting my son, that helped the most.
My son left home in a blur a week after getting his year 12 results in 2020. In a nifty inversion of the pandemic-fuelled relocation from city to country phenomenon, he fled to the city from our country town 2 hours away. It’s a cliche, but it was a shock. To me and to him. I knew about empty nest syndrome – not a clinical diagnosis apparently but a syndrome – “in which parents experience feelings of sadness and loss when a child leaves home”, but my child’s departure hit me for a six. The Mayo Clinic adds that, “You might also worry about your children’s safety and whether they’ll be able to take care of themselves.”
“Mum! Stop calling and texting me all the time! It’s stressing me out.”
Stressing him out? He’s only ever in touch when there’s a crisis, and those can range from “Is that black hoodie still at your house?” (your house? That hurts), to “Do I have ambulance cover?”
I wake up most mornings awash in images of my son in strife that run like a whirring, spooling Super 8 film in my mind’s eye all day.
I find excuses to contact him, knowing that mostly he’ll either ignore these texts – ones thinly disguised as practical questions but requiring immediate action – or respond monosyllabically like an ex-boyfriend.
For years the ABC Radio National audience listened to my son grow up from toddler to teenager via autobiographical monologues I presented for Life Matters. But then he asked me not to write about him any more because it was “sooo embarrassing”, and so I stopped. After my sister died I wrote a few pieces of grief-fuelled manic-memoir but stopped that too. Now my son has given me permission to write about him again. When I say permission … “I don’t care. We’ve got different surnames anyway. Do I have any black trousers at your place?”
My son deferred his place at uni last year. He and so many other Gen Zs have since spent another year in and out of lockdown and hospitality work, living in share houses, siege-surviving on everything from Uber Eats to drugs delivered straight to your door, thanks very much, via encrypted text messaging. He has just moved into his third share house in 18 months. I help him pack up one place and we borrow the van and move him into his next joint. On a wing and a prayer and a swift scrub of the latest kitchen sink and does he need another mattress? A dining-cum-coffee table? Does he even sleep or dine, let alone drink coffee?
My 89-year-old mother has spent the pandemic at home with my late sister’s 12-year-old son, remote learning (hah!). She has reared my nephew since he was a baby. She is holding on to her grandson, to her own life, to me, to my son, for grim death. Once you lose a child, nothing is ever as bad, but everything is worth holding on to.
I lost my casual academic job at university at the top of the pandemic and now wrestle with a PhD (what for? Who cares? As if) and a new-ish relationship. I never thought I’d do romantic love again. Who would have thought? He and I started just before lockdown #1 and he became my “intimate partner” before we were even that intimate. I just wish I wasn’t so preoccupied with my son all the time.
We used to talk, my son and I. I’d tell him stories at night well into his teens. We’d go for walks and he’d disclose all sorts of things. Sometimes he’d even hold my hand.
Today I watch him lurch from day to day, from child to adult. And I watch him fall over. Once very badly. He nearly died. I nearly died watching him nearly die. His body is six foot three, long and slim and sporting a tattoo of something he tells me I would not understand. His face is beautiful. These days his eyes show me little. He has a goatee thing going on and his hair is Kurt Cobain.
When I was his age, on the cusp of 20, I was in and out of love. I was living in and out of home. I was dropping in and out of university. I worked as a waitress, was always broke, and every shift at every cafe was an open letter to the Me Too movement. I dreamed of becoming a famous actor.
Zoomers like my son have had it uniquely tough during this pandemic-style precariousness. What are my son’s dreams, I wonder?
“Uni starts when? What subjects are you doing?” (Like I don’t know already.)
“I forget. The timetable online is so confusing I gave up.”
“Don’t give up. New people. New things. It’s face-to-face on campus now.”
” Mum, stop! Oh no. Shit.”
“What? What’s wrong!”
“Now my keyboard’s stuffed. Have I still got that old one back at your house?”
