Once upon a time, when my son was small, he would hang onto my leg whenever I was about to leave the house, screaming, ‘Don’t go, Mummy. Mummy, don’t go.’ But now he is 16? I can almost feel his hand between my shoulder blades, pushing me
out of the door, with a: ‘Go, go, go, and take as much time as you
like. No rush.’ I do not know why he no longer craves my company, although I will say it’s not because I have become middle-aged and boring. Just the other day, for example, I only spent the whole morning researching a replacement vacuum cleaner online. If I were seriously middle-aged and boring, I would, surely, have spent the whole day.
So – and this is the question, really – now he is a teenager, with a busy social life that sometimes involves engineering me out of the way but otherwise involves him going ‘out’ to ‘somewhere’ with ‘people’ (What people? ‘Just people’), can we still holiday together? And what sort of trip would do it for us both? That does not end in filicide or matricide. (I’d put my money on filicide. There is only so much a mother can take.)
I consider our options. Beach holiday? No, disastrous. We’d look weird; he’d get bored. A rented villa? Get a grip. Or let’s put it this way: why stay at home and let his wet towels dropped everywhere get on my nerves when I could spend a lot of money taking him elsewhere to do exactly the same? I then think: New York. So I put it to him: ‘How about a few days in New York?’ And you know what? He actually looked interested. Seriously, I haven’t seen him look as interested since I intimated that if he walked our dog more often there might be money in it. ‘Really, New York?’ he said. I was minded then to joke: ‘Only kidding. I’ve already arranged a three-week driving tour of all the museums and ancient sites of Eastern Europe and, boy, is that car going to get hot.’ But I didn’t. Just as I’m neither middle-aged nor boring, I am also not cruel. Maybe I would be cruel, if I had the time, but what with the hours I have to put into researching household appliances, I really don’t.
New York, New York, so good they named it twice although, come to think of it, if it were that good, wouldn’t they have named it thrice? Whatever, New York is cool. Even I know that. And my son’s seen it at the movies and on TV, particularly Friends, which plays in the UK on some kind of endless yet random loop, so that Chandler is thin one day and fat the next. And if he’s seen it on TV – the cityscape, the yellow cabs, the NYPD – it is properly cool, as anything seen on TV is. It may even be that, for a teenager, unless it’s on TV, it’s actually not worth bothering with.
