There is an awkward stage around 9 to 13 years when you mourn your free evenings, and lack of time alone with your other half because your child wants to join in but like everything else you get used to it and then they start needing alone time in their rooms by themselves. I remember it well! It is a massive change at first. We never sent them upstairs and I can’t imagine doing this tbh!
Then there’s the period 14-16 where they wear black and live in their rooms like a creature from the deep, occasionally deigning to descend and eat with you or grunt a conversation or they are in a strop because you have taken away their favourite shirt to wash which they have worn for two weeks straight. You only occasionally venture in to their rooms to air it out and collect all the mugs and smelly socks festering on the horizontal surfaces.
Then when they are older teens 17-19 there’s the period where they are barely at home and your evenings are spent chauffeuring them to friends houses, or back and forth to railway stations, or sports venues, or on weekend camping trips or picking them up from parties in the early hours or picking up their friend Jake at 2am whose gotten in to some unspecified difficulty having drunk too much and lost their phone or their key and you deliver them safely to their parent’s house. Or you are driving them to uni and back.
[I’m at this stage again atm^^] and the world is divided in to the parents who do wait up and do chauffeuring after midnight, and those who don’t! Either is fine but you are very popular with teens if you do and what is more you become invisible sitting in the car like a chauffeur and the music is on and they have tipsy conversations with one another and forget you are there so you learn quite a bit more about their lives than you bargained for!
And finally, you reach that nerve-wracking stage in their late teens or early 20s when they pass their driving test and you are wracked with anxiety and you can’t really enjoy your evening, or sleep, until you hear their key in the lock or you receive a text and know they have reached their destination safely. That’s when you develop grey rings under your eyes.
Finally, finally, you are sitting in your living room by yourself and look at your other half and if you are lucky you will still have something to say to one another, and the house will seem quiet and it’s blissful on the one hand because there’s calm and order, but it’s very strange and quiet on the other, and the leftovers in the fridge don’t automatically disappear overnight, and it stays like that until they bounce back, sometimes with a gf or bf, of for holidays or in between new periods of study or new jobs and you have adjusted to living alone again as a couple (if you are a couple) and they are fully launched.
Rinse and repeat depending on the size of your family.
Then follows a period of relative calm.
Then brace yourself to start all over again but on a part time basis with the grandchildren which, by all accounts, is both blissful and knackering at the same time 😂
Disclaimer: ages are approximate