Mummy darling?

My son is 21 and was buying a car. When he came to pick it up and was driving me home he casually mentioned that he hadn’t driven since passing his test nearly 2 years before! This did nothing to quell the butterflies that were doing somersaults in my stomach at the time, though I tried not to show it (though I’m not sure how successful I was, you’d have to ask him). When he left to drive back to his house I made him promise to call me as soon as he got there. It was the longest hour of my life: I had a whole feature film of images of him crashing on the way home, writing off the car and worse. It’s so hard to accept that he’s a grown-up, even though he has a grown-up job, pays his bills every month and, of course, drives a car. I didn’t have him until I was in my mid-50s and still think of him as a baby, as I do with his three sisters. It’s hard being in your 50s and having so-called grown up children; it doesn’t seem natural that something you gave birth to can drive a car. Logically I know that of course it’s possible, especially as I was an “elderly” mother but they never stop being kids to me. It’s all very paradoxical: I’ve brought them up to be independent, self-sufficient, able to deal with things in life and yet there is a huge part inside of me that stills wants to protect them from life, that worries about them when they are out of my sight (which is most of the time now) and wants to make the world all right for them.

And yet conversely I want them to sort out their own problems, I don’t want to have to worry about them, I don’t want them to tell me about all their issues but just come to me when it’s all over with an anecdote, with them as the hero/heroine and a happy ever after ending. I want them to be settled and able to deal with the normal ebbs and flows of life. They do say that you only ever grow up when your parents die but that’s probably a bit too much to ask of me to help them to mature.