She's Leaving Home

The kids are off to uni. and I should be grateful for the peace and quiet but like many a dad I am suffering in silence.

So it’s only three more weeks until the birds fly. Off to university both and already I can hear the empty echoes around the halls. No more the daily blare of the hairdryer, the squeals about stolen underwear, arguments about the remote control, no more Friday night shrieking, no more the sauntering beauties that head for the door blithely shouting, “I’m staying at Emma’s,” when you, biting back the age old, ‘You’re not going out looking like that,’ have no idea who Emma is and fear she’s a Croydon crack dealer with a drawer-full of Johnnies.

They aren’t twins, though close in years and it’s true one had already flown but it hadn’t seemed so hard – one remained. I’m sure she felt the pressure as much as we did terrorised by being suddenly cast in the role of an only child, and when we turned the twin spotlight blaze of parental eyes on her, whether about either major triumph or minor infraction, she feigned to blanch where before those beams seemed less malevolent spread over the two of them.

Now that they are both to go, the odds for me have changed from three to one to one to one, odds I’d fancy if it weren’t for the downside. And to think that before I used to think the downsides would be upsides. No more hip hop music, no more walking into a cloud of hairspray that might have found use by Saddam against the Kurds, no more mascara stains across the shower floor, no more fake tan, no more wearing my sweaters, no more pleas to be picked up at four in the morning.

Instead there is to come a new regime of responsibility without the pleasure. There will be more bills to pay than ever but we can’t see what we are spending it on. The clamour has died to be replaced by a numbing silence. The visions of glamorous youth that inhabited this place have been replaced by reflections of middle age – a new world of reading glasses, teeth implants, routine and quiet melancholy. It’s like someone’s turned down the lights.

But I’ll survive – other fathers do. Maybe I’ll get an iPod and put some Mike Skinner stuff on it, maybe I’ll get Skype and a web cam and have jerky videophone conversations with them. Maybe we’ll go and visit them both a lot and hang out with them and their friends.

And maybe not, I’d rather fry my eyes. Can you imagine the horror of your parents ‘phoning you on a Sunday morning and insisting you put the web cam on? “Let’s have a look at you darling?” Can you imagine the hell of having your parents turn up every Friday night demanding they take you for a drive in the Lake District and play the latest Lily Allen track? My tunes will always be better but the times have changed and I’m going to have to change with them.

They don’t tell you this when you start going out with a girl and then marry her, no more than they tell you that you’ll shortly be paying £150 a week nursery fees. They don’t tell you that at some point you’ll be reduced to tears in Nottingham or Leicester having carried all their possessions up three flights of stairs and treated them to a cheap Chinese meal before kissing them goodbye in a car park. They don’t say that when you look back in the rear view mirror at their excited and scared little faces it’s like your chest is being pulled out of your mouth and all you want to do is slam on the brakes, reverse back and smother them in your arms and the old world of mummy, daddy, home and babies.

She’s leaving home, bye bye.

They also don’t tell you that over the years, the home visits will become fewer and more distracted as they instinctively pull away. And from now on all we will see is excerpts from lives that we used to observe in seconds and minutes. Apart from paying the bills and hopefully providing a secure retreat, we have become irrelevant, I more than my wife. She at least gets the telephone chats about the lectures, the boyfriends, all the minutiae – something that I and most men I suspect, do not have the capacity for, and the kids know it.

But I’m not going to turn to overt sentimentality and nostalgia – not yet anyway. I’m not going to pull out the box of photos and the old VHS tapes – not until I’m dribbling in a Bournmouth bungalow. For now I’m hardening my resolve to let this all happen without outward signs of misery. I shall treat it in the same way I treat other emotional crises with the simple proven prescription of Guinness and roll ups.

Maybe I’ll just drift into denial – an ersatz world where nothing’s changed. Now that I have complete control over the remote will I start sneakily watching Lost and The OC instead of Rumpole of the Bailey? Now that the phone is free will I start gabbling to the dialling tone about Angelina and Brad? Will I start buying Closer magazine and smuggle it home inside a copy of The Spectator? Will I force myself to like Quorn sausages?

I’ve started observing the family of blue tits in the back garden. They’ve had babies that have just left the nest but then they get to do it every year – and lose them every year. At least I’ve only had to endure losing my chicks once and the last eighteen years has been fun, but my Christ didn’t it go quickly.

Of course everything must change even if doesn’t seem like it will be for the better. Sic transit gloria mundi. I suppose it will be grandchildren next… now there’s a thought.

At least my razors are lasting a little longer.