My little boy has been replaced by a ‘teenager’

PERHAPS this bizarre phenomenon has also happened in your household. See if any of this sounds familiar — if it does, it would be a great comfort to me. Not as schadenfreude, of course, but more as a reassurance that we are not, you know, freaks.

You see, recently, my 11-year-old son went into his room, and while in there some kind of abduction took place. The boy who re-emerged from my son’s room, while wearing his clothes, was someone else. This new boy wears sunglasses at the breakfast table (“Why? Because I’m a badass, Mother”), has had his room designated an EU biohazard due to Lynx misuse, and no longer speaks in sentences, but in a strange hybrid of grunts, text-speak and rap shout-outs.

I wonder, I say out loud, what happened to the kid who used to live in that room — the one who used to come to football matches, and whom I used to follow around clothes shops, proffering my debit card as required? The cheery, huggy kid who liked people? This new kid looks at me over the top of his sunglasses and mouths the words ‘Jog on, oldie’.

That the original kid has been stolen and replaced by a doppelganger becomes indisputable when I make the mistake of suggesting an outing. Not, as you might think from his reaction, to be followed by dinner at the local macrobiotic, but to his favourite junk-food joint for a dirty burger and then Jurassic World. In 3 flipping D. With popcorn. “No!” he shouts in alarm. “No! I can’t been seen out with you. It would be instant social death.” I sympathise with him that I hadn’t realised all his friends were poor, motherless orphans, but the sarcasm goes over his head. He is, after all, only 11. Then he informs me that he can’t make the cinema, anyway, because he is going to a party, but not to worry, he’ll stick to Red Bull and leave the vodka for the older kids. We have a screaming match at this juncture. Because just as the interloper who stole my kid is in the thick of early onset adolescence, so, too, am I in the midst of early onset menopause, even though, like him, I’m still miles too young. Basically, he’s been stealing my hormones. So for every hot flush I get — every 20 minutes, each one feeling like spontaneous combustion — he gets a testosterone surge.

You’d think, would you not, that periods, pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding would have been enough of a laugh without Mother Nature throwing in the menopause as the punch line. But add to this menopause, in all its sweaty vagueness, the mood swings of a kid drowning in his own testosterone and you have the perfect hormone storm.

The other child, who is sailing through adolescence as though protected by an invisible deflector shield, has been longingly watching property programmes on the telly. It’s as if she wants to move out.