Suzanne Harrington: When the womb raiders become space invaders
Suzanne Harrington: While once all you needed to leave home was a rucksack and a crap job, these days the only way to rent your own place is to become a sex worker who sells drugs on the side.
Early parenting books are all about the bit when children are first expelled from the mothership.
How to keep them alive without losing your mind in a milk-stained dressing gown, and learning the need to pack a rock band tour bus full of baby equipment every time you need to leave the house.
Then, just as you’re getting the hang of that stage, you’re onto the next one — how to train them to rein in their natural psychopathic tendencies by saying, please and thank you, grandma, and not pulling the wings off flies.
Getting them used to the idea of going to a place where they have to sit still all day wearing identical clothes and being micromanaged by a random stranger — and presenting this as normal. Holding off on telling them how all of this culminates in tidal waves of exams, on which their futures allegedly depend.
The books on teens tend to be more varied, because this is when the standard child model diverges into all kinds of sub-categories: the overachiever; the underachiever; the food disordered; the gender confused; the social media addict; the drug experimenter; the booze puker; the self-harmer; the punch thrower; the 24/7 gamer; the bad-friends magnet; the no-friends repellent. All categories are capable of vivid cross-pollination.
There’s a book for all of them, guiding you through laughable ideas like boundaries and clear communication and expectations, as your teen grunts, slams doors, eats everything not nailed down, refuses all forms of communication except digital, and then blocks you.
Never mind, humour the parenting books. It’s just hormones, and it will pass — meanwhile try not to have them taken into care.
And it does pass, and they do eventually regain some humanity. But this is where the parenting books stop — when the hideous teen morphs into a legal adult and acquires things like a driving licence, a sexual partner, and perhaps even some cookbooks.
Traditionally, this is the time when the former occupant of your uterus relocates elsewhere, and you pretend you’re sad but really you’re looking forward to walking around naked talking to yourself out loud, in a lovely tidy house.
Except in this late-capitalist hellscape where we are currently stuck, the empty tidy house fantasy remains just that — a fantasy. Those young adults are going nowhere.
While once all you needed to leave home was a rucksack and a crap job, these days the only way to rent your own place is to become a sex worker who sells drugs on the side. Squatting is no longer a thing, even if Gen Z were any good at slumming it (they’re not).
So here you are, all still living together, as you, the keen-to-retire parent, try vainly to impart the idea that you are now housemates, rather than parent-children.
You repeat this incessantly, as you pick up towels from the floor, load and unload the dishwasher, and empty bins.
But they don’t hear you. They’re too busy cooking gigantic hangover breakfasts in your kitchen.
Where’s the parenting book for that?
