It’s a cliché of course, but it doesn’t matter how old your children are, you always worry about them. When they’re six you worry about them forgetting their PE kits and reading books, at sixteen, you worry about GCSEs and them getting their hearts broken and at twenty six it’s will they get a good job and a foot on the property ladder.
Of course, you never understood why your own parents worried, you always knew you were OK. I couldn’t see why my mother was worried if I was quarter of an hour late for tea, (this was pre mobile phone days of course). It usually meant me and my friend had to investigate what we thought was a dead body in a farm outbuilding – and turned out to be a bag of cement.
I didn’t understand why, when getting lifts in boy’s cars to and from country pubs, that my parents worried. This was despite the fact that having ‘one for the road’ was considered normal and seatbelts weren’t compulsory and my best friend was scarred for life after going through the windscreen of an Alfa Romeo.
They just seemed to be making a fuss about nothing when aged 19, after three months of going out with my boyfriend, we announced we wanted to get married and did seven months after that. By our first anniversary we had our first child.
Now, three more children later, and with three grandsons and a grand-daughter on the way, they still worry. Just goes to show however old your children are, they’re still your babies!
My lot 