Full-nest Syndrome

They're gone. I wander in and out of empty, echoing rooms. Sometimes I take a chair with me, sit in the space and listen to the silence.

We have four grown-up children, ranging in age from twenty-one to thirty-two. Their various leave-takings have been spread over ten years, but the pattern has been that, as soon as we closed the door on one child, another would open it, asking for sanctuary. They were refugees from ill-fated love affairs or financial crises, or both (in fact, usually both). No reasonable parent can refuse their children shelter from the storm, though it's true that they often bring bad weather with them: clouds of depression and fogs of misunderstanding can settle over the house.

The sun shines very rarely when there's a grown-up child skulking upstairs, recovering from a broken heart. You can't exactly sit him on your knee and promise that, if he's a good boy, you'll let him put the jam in the jam tarts. Neither can you order him to shave, wash his horrible hair or go to bed at a reasonable time. His broken heart will not heal any faster by loose talk about Fishes In The Sea and since we're on the subject of advice, never, ever criticize the heartbreaker. I once cracked (under great provocation, m'lud), and shouted, ‘I hope she falls under a lorry!’ Uncharitable, I know, and also very stupid, as the heartbroken and the heartbreaker were passionately reunited within a week and he moved out, leaving six cereal bowls under the bed and the lingering smell of misery, which defies all air fresheners.

Other people have pointed out that the lingering smell of misery is a laughable, pretentious idea, and that the most likely cause of the pong in the vacated room is that a small rodent has died and is decomposing beneath the floorboards. I prefer my misery theory: the thought of pulling up all those floorboards…

People ask me, ‘What's it like now the kids have gone?’ I reply, ‘It's like being on holiday.’ Though to be more accurate, it's like being on honeymoon. We can smooch on the sofa as much as we like now without springing apart guiltily at the sound of a grown-up child's footsteps outside the door.

Other women suffer from empty-nest syndrome and turn towards car maintenance classes or amateur dramatic societies to fill the void in their lives. I now realize that it was the opposite with me. I suffered badly from full-nest syndrome. I found the responsibilities of being a parent overwhelming at times.

I was a tense mother. My first child was premature and lived in an incubator for the first month of his life. He was cared for round the clock by highly trained doctors and nurses, whereas I was an untrained, daft-as-a-brush nineteen-year-old. The closest I'd been to a baby was looking at the illustrations in Doctor Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

Incidentally, I have never understood why poor Doctor Spock was, and still is, so vilified. Only the other day I heard one of his detractors on the radio blaming Spock's liberalism for today's hooligans, litter louts and vandals.

My memories of Spock's writings are quite different. I will never forget his stern advice on how to stop a toddler getting out of its cot several times a night. He counselled the child's sleep-deprived parents to throw a badminton net over the cot, tie it securely at each corner and to close their ears to the child's screams. Such harsh pragmatism could have come straight from the Ann Widdecombe Book of Kiddie Care.

When the baby came out of hospital he weighed only five pounds. It was handy that he was so small, because he had to be smuggled in and out of the flat. The landlord didn't allow babies to live on his property. When not going in or out of the front door with the baby secreted inside my coat, I was crouched over the carrycot, taking his pulse and checking that he hadn't stopped breathing. I now know that this is normal behaviour for most parents (the checking, not the smuggling), but then, at nineteen, I was convinced that I'd fail to keep this fragile kid alive. Each morning I would approach his cot with dread, then I'd see his eyes open, or an arm wave, and I'd consider it a miracle and I'd feel, temporarily, like a proper mother.

Somehow I managed to keep him and three others alive. Today they're hale and occasionally hearty, and they each have their own postcode. More importantly, they now have other people who love and care for them. Perhaps now I can safely put that badminton net away.