Today, I bought one packet less of the fresh bagels on my way back from the Portobello Sunday morning run/crawl, because this morning, we are one person down. Last night, when I once again rolled up the window blind in our middle bathroom, letting in the light and undoing the paranoid blind-unrolling habit each of the boys cling to (in case someone from another higher-up flat manages to manoeuvre themselves into some kind of impossible viewing position from their upper windows that overlook our lightwell, purely, they say, to spy on them while they pee), Barnaby’s precariously-placed electric toothbrush did not come crashing down onto the bathroom tiles like it has been doing every night for years. This is because the toothbrush, and his razor, and his shaving cream have all been relocated to a university hall in Nottingham. As has he.

The changes are small, though also massive and human-sized. He doesn’t like cheese, so every weekday meal for the last 18-ish years has been an exercise in avoiding cheese. Imagine – six kids but no cheesy pasta, no quick’n’easy pizza, no thrown-together jacket potato with grated cheese on top. No lasagne. No cheesy omelettes or cheese on toast. No parmesan chucked in for flavour, no feta for the sharp salty tang. No mozzarella for the pleasing stretch, no pasta bakes, no macaroni, no mascarpone-enhanced tomato sauces. But now? Now there’s a whole new world opened up to me, though it doesn’t exactly feel like opportunity – it feels like a loss.

There’s no one to empty the dishwasher, traditionally Barnaby’s job. There’s nothing really left of him here. One extra seat at the dinner table (which is good, because I’ve been perching on a step-ladder for years). There’s an extra sort-of-bedroom opened up in the old coal store, but that’s been taken swiftly by kid no. 2, because nature obviously abhors a vacuum, and which means there’s a vacancy for Remi opened up in the big old dorm room where the others sleep. Remi, right now, is helping Mark dismantle his cot as he prepares to move out as well.

So far, we are ok. This emptying out of our home and of my mothering load isn’t the opposite of the initial filling up. Before Barnaby, there were two. Barnaby’s arrival was over a long weekend – it was sore and shocking and bloody and unfathomable. Then there were three, and the life we once had was blown up spectacularly, delightfully, sleeplessly. It reshaped eventually, bits of us and him settling into something else entirely – a new build, one that we loved so much that we kept at it. Blowup after blowup, reconfiguring what life and tolerances and expectations and Christmas present budgets and car sizes and sleep-ins and space looked like. As we grew, all this made a kind of a sense, a chaotic, messy, noisy, overwhelming, joyful, impossible sense.

The other side of this is much tidier. Where once there was a cot is now dust, a virgin rectangle of untrodden carpet, and the ghost of all that bruised and wounded newness and hope. Where once there was my son, my first son, big and beautiful and clever and mistaken and prickly and loving and wonderful, is now a little more space in the flat, some discarded books, a few photographs on the fridge. It’s a slimming down, a quietening. I am that little old woman in ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’, but with kids, not farm animals. I am losing people as I reclaim some room, but I don’t exactly like it.

I didn’t cry when we said goodbye yesterday because he was happy and excited, and he has a whole life to begin living that isn’t with us anymore. That is good and right. And just as it took a weekend for him to arrive all those years ago, it took just a weekend for him to leave us. Just a few days. I tried to throw in some last minute advice to eat apples and get enough sleep, to know your limits when experimenting, to be kind, to look for bargains and to wear a helmet when on his bike so he doesn’t fall off and get brain damage and live as a pirate until the rest of his days. But he knows all that, because he’s many steps ahead of me. He’s been honing best practice for years, thinking about things, watching and learning and trying stuff out, all while I thought he couldn’t care less. He wants to have his turn now. He’s ready. And so are we, for better or worse.

It’s been quite the month

A few weeks ago we got told we would have to move out of our flat because the landlords want to renovate and let the flat out for higher rent. This is news we have known would come one day, but after 15 years, you kind of push the thought of impending UTTER DESTRUCTION OF OUR LIVES under the Turkish rug. I was at first numb, then sleepless, then tearful, then panicky. It seems rents are high out there in the real world, and flats are small, and it is entirely possible that no one will be delighted at the prospect of renting to a big family with a fat dog, and that even if they were, it would be very far away from our friends and schools and neighbourhood and support systems and doctors and haunts and things that make a life really sing. So we asked if there were any way we could stay, at least until we could figure out what to do, and it seems that they will consider that. We have no idea under what conditions, but we are hoping something will work.

Then there was a sniff, a hint, a teeny tiny possibility of a role shift at work. These are nothing new for me – I am spookily prone to role shifts, as I am bouts of psoriatic arthritis and coldsores. These things linger, benign, undetectable, me foolishly thinking that I have grown out of them, but they come at me periodically to strike me down and render me weak and sore, powerless and sad. Embarrassed. I thought that it was a case of here we go again, and floated the idea to our nanny and the kids just so they could readjust their expectations in case the shift came. Change is always horrible, but right now, with the threat of having to move, and a kid needing to be supported at university, and the tax problem still hanging around in the form of repayments until next year, and the cost of living meaning that literally stepping out of this flat causes HSBC to send a flurry of panicky notifications to my phone, was just too much. White-knuckled panic, bloodshot eyeballs, big ol’ existential discussions of what it means to live and to thrive and whether we just need to shut up shop and scuttle home to New Zealand – all this for a few days.

But LO! It seems I got the wrong end of the stick – decisions made by people above my pay grade were made and I get to stay in my role – in fact, I get to stay with a few more most excellent role changes that equal challenge and opportunity and chances to stretch like that long-desired-for mozzarella. This, on the same day that a doctor at Chelsea and Westminster told me that my psoriatic arthritis has probably ‘burned itself out’ and that I am not needing any long-term plan for rheumatoid arthritis as they had thought. The stiff neck that I sport like an unoiled Tin Man is just a mystery they are happy to put down to an anomaly which may get better by doing physio exercises diligently. That news felt good, but also odd – someone telling you your long term thing that you’ve begrudgingly learned to live with is actually…not a thing at all. Those years of blowup knee joints where movement feels like shard of broken glass replacing cartilage and bone, where getting up and around on mornings in the midst of flareups sees me hobble and grasp for support until the joints warm up and calm down…what even were they?

Lastly

Mark and I started our pottery classes. It turns out that Mark is good with his hands, I am impatient and prone to internal tantrums when I think I am not the best in show. I think the universe is trying to tell me something, and that I desperately need some HRT.

Anyway. Here’s some photos from the last few days:

Go well, my son. Thank you for everything.