Zoe Williams, a Guardian columnist, has been taken aback by her own severe denial as her son prepares to leave for university. Despite being involved throughout the process, she never truly believed he would go through with it.
The Moment of Realization
Williams's son sent her a picture of his university accommodation, which looked perfectly nice but had a slightly dystopian atmosphere of a neutral color palette. The main problem was that places look weird without people in them. Squinting to imagine her son in that room, it hit her: he's actually serious about this. He truly intends, in one month's time, to get all his stuff, put it in bags, take it to another city, and live there.
She can neither convey nor explain her bottomless surprise. It's not that she thought he wouldn't get the grades; she just had "I'm going to university" filed as one of those cute, dumb things kids say, along with "I'm going to space" and "I'm an otter now."
Diverging Expectations
Williams was right there for the entire process: the selection of the university, the offer, the maths A-level paper that was so hard there was a petition against it on change.org and someone called it a war crime, and results day – when it became apparent that it wasn't that hard and The Hague wouldn't be necessary after all.
If asked yesterday, she'd have said her cherished first-born and she were fully in lockstep, but somewhere along the line their expectations diverged. He expected all these things that proceeded naturally from one to the other simply to happen, whereas she expected him to remain seven. When she bought him a nest of saucepans and started wanging on about new thinking on poached eggs, she was basically role-playing a parent proudly anticipating their child's next chapter. She never in a million years thought he would move those saucepans to some other dwelling altogether, let alone go with them.
Tracking App Antics
Williams had an early warning of this catastrophic denial when it got to 1.30am and he wasn't home. She woke up his sister, his dad, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's mum. When someone finally furnished her with the information that he must be somewhere nearby because they could see his shoes, she went to sleep thinking: no harm done.
Yet there must have been some tiny amount of harm, because the next day he took steps to ensure that this harmless behavior never occurred again – he set them all up on a tracking app. It's a little bit like Snap Maps, except a thousand times more invasive. She can now see not only where he is, but also how fast he is moving. He went Interrailing the day after, which is when it transpired that the app was unable to get its head around the concept of a train. His dad and she keep getting alerts saying: "TJ is moving at 109mph. Tell TJ to slow down."
She can see the battery life on his phone and how long it's been since he went for a walk. She can see that it's raining in Apfelberg and wonder whether he has a cagoule. The course of action she prefers is to send an umbrella emoji with a question mark, then a bunch more question marks, then call him. She is not incognisant of how annoying this must be, but irritation seems such a small price to pay to maintain the fiction that he, a seven-year-old, is not in another country at all, but probably downstairs, where it is not raining.
Empty Nest Analogy
They call it an empty nest to underline the fact that this is all unfolding as nature intended. You're not supposed to keep your offspring as flightless pets; you're merely granted the blessing of stewarding them towards flight. But what's missing from this analogy is that birds, by the time their baby hatchlings unaccountably transform into adult birds, are probably glad of the space. Williams also has another egg still in the nest, but the family ecosystem we're using as a role model here has nothing in common with ours. She suggests they change tack and operate more like silverbacks, where the young signal their maturation not by leaving, but by vanquishing the old in combat and taking their status and all their … fruit? She would be fine with that.
A friend whose son went to university last year described dropping him off. She was trying to cheer Williams up, she thinks, when she launched into the saddest story she's ever heard. Once she'd said goodbye, she found herself unable to leave the vicinity, so instead she decided to make friends with the security guard. Every time he showed her something, she had an urgent follow-up question ("Yes, this common room is great. Now, where's the nearest chemist?"), and he ended up effectively taking her on a tour of the city.
Now that Williams writes this story down, she sees that it is not that sad, because that is one seriously nice guy (and the city is also nice, apparently). Really, the only sad bit is when she was crying so much on the way home that she drove into a bus lane.
The night before A-level results come out, parents text each other on the quiet, wishing good luck, and they absolutely mean it in the moment. Everybody ardently wants everybody else's kid to get to the place they have their heart set on. But none of us, surely, can have thought this all the way through.
