I am a member of the stretched generation – a term I’d never heard before I sat down to pen my latest novel: Mum in the Middle. This is the tale of Tess who is still financing boomerang adult kids on one hand while her elderly mother starts to need support on the other.
Mum in the Middle
When I started writing the book, both my own long-divorced parents were whizzing about quite happily and my son had a job abroad. But as with previous novels, life soon began imitating art. Just as my son moved back home, trailing his washing behind him, my mother broke her hip. Then my father developed problems with his sight and began showing signs of memory loss at the same time as his partner was taken into a home. Next, my aunt Shelagh - an author herself who spoke fluent Greek, did the Times crossword daily, and still swam, walked miles and went to dance classes in her seventies – was diagnosed with a devastating form of dementia. I was given Lasting Power of Attorney which was the start of a steep learning curve. I no longer had to do any research into the dementia strand in my novel. I was living it!
“Try to highlight the drama and emotional intensity of mid-life,” advised my lovely editor Kate at Harper Collins, as I was tussling with banks, looking into home-helps and arguing with my sister over the best way to persuade our father to replace his thirty-year old curtains. “People in the past would have started to wind down as they reached their fifties, now everything seems to speed up.”
You can say that again.
I have been reminded of my earliest memory of my grandmother - a tiny, silver-haired old lady who wore a pinny and polished the teapot a lot. I calculate now that at the time, she was several years younger than I am! Her parents were long gone and all of her four children had their own homes. She wasn’t doing the online shopping for one relative before fixing the printer of another after clearing the detritus from a three a.m. monster sandwich and discovering we are out of milk. Again.
Many of my friends are also juggling increasingly-dependent parents as well as having adult kids re-installed. We compare notes on how the latter leave shoes – so many shoes! – all over the hall floor, come in late and bang the kitchen cupboards and can empty a fridge at one sitting.
Economic factors mean it can only get worse. By the time I am a granny, the next generation will probably not leave the nest at all. While us oldies will live for ever and be leading our kids a merry dance. I share this vision with my son who looks queasy. While my own mother makes a point of making as few demands as she possibly can, my son thinks I’m joking when I tell him he will have no such luck with me. “You’ll take me for a lavish lunch weekly, and ply me with sherry,” I advise on a regular basis, “or I’ll leave everything to the cats’ home. I’ll also want flowers.”
I do not add that I intend be querulous and bang my stick a great deal. That his wife will loathe me and his offspring will be desperate to get to university to avoid the nights I insist on coming to dinner and then get drunk on gin.
We may be the ones stretched now, but I’ll get my own back later…
Mum in the Middle by Jane Wenham-Jones is published by HarperImpulse in paperback at £7.99
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