What's it like to be 23 and starting a new life? I'm unpacking a lot of emotions as my son heads to the US
There's an accurate, if snide, thing I've seen online that reads 'No parent on Facebook can believe their child has turned any age', and yes, OK, not the 'on Facebook' bit, but there is a rote astonishment at time passing that I sometimes slip into, contemplating my adult sons. But, allow me, just this once, a Facebook parent moment. My elder son turned 23 last month and we've just been to London to collect his stuff at the end of his degree. On the way, I realised I was 23 when I moved there myself.
You can't often pre-emptively pinpoint parenting 'lasts', but when you can, they're strange and melancholy – even when they're not, objectively, things a person would choose to do again. This trip involved (I hope) my last time standing, hips screaming from the drive, texting 'We're outside' as we waited for our son to wake up (my husband ended up throwing a ball at his bedroom window). It was definitely my last time removing my shoes amid the overflowing bins of that sticky-floored student house, and hovering over the Trainspotting-esque toilet then deciding against drying my hands on any of the towels. It ended with the last trip along the M1 squished between a salvaged chair, a duvet and an Ikea bag of pans threatening to decapitate me if we made an emergency stop. We were bringing his stuff 'home' knowing that it won't be home for him in the same way again: he's moving to New York this summer. Maybe not for ever, but for years, not months.
To compound the Big Feelings, and the sense of the dizzying slippage of time, my husband and I used the trip to wander round Fitzrovia, where we shared our first flat back when I was 23. It's different but not unrecognisable: the hospital has been demolished but Tesco is thriving; the Phones 4U where we bought our first mobiles is gone; but the bank where we opened Isas when they were invented, proud of our new maturity, hangs on. Our block had acquired several Airbnb key safes but was otherwise unchanged. 'It'll be baking up there,' said my husband, staring up as the late afternoon sun struck the flat black roof. I made him repeat himself, because I have become slightly deaf this year, then we reminisced about the brutal summer heat (it's probably even worse now). We walked around, pointing out survivors: the famously cheap pizza place, the tiny Italian sandwich shop, the DIY store where we panic bought a fan. Then we sat down for a sensible soft drink, because we were tired and I was struck by an ultra site-specific memory of walking through Percy Passage to meet him one evening, having just discovered I was pregnant with our now-23-year-old, enjoying the last seconds of incredulous solo joy before sharing the news. Then another: shuffling along Goodge Street at dawn in labour, stopping outside Spaghetti House (still there) to ride out a contraction. Both our sons were born in this neighbourhood – it changed my life like no other.
The place still felt familiar; what 23 felt like is harder to access. I was a mess, I think: I had been ill and was extremely self-absorbed; I spent far too much time worrying about my weight. I spent little, if any, time worrying about the world, though. World-wise, things felt fine – 'A new dawn has broken, has it not?' Tony Blair had just told us – and if they weren't, it certainly didn't feel like my problem.
There aren't many new dawn vibes for my son's generation as they enter adulthood. I'm not sure we've given them much of a chance to spend a few self-absorbed years focusing on their own dramas, have we? We've gifted them more pressing matters: a collapsing climate, catastrophic economic inequality, a crappy jobs market and even the reemerging spectre of fascism and nuclear war (retro!). Plus, it's all inescapably fed into their faces 24/7 – not a feature offered by a 1997 Phones 4U Motorola.
But I hope, even so, that 23 can still be what it was for me: confusing but full of possibility. An adventure. The perfect age to find yourself in a new city.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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