Dear LPG,

One of the fears of being a pensioner in this day and age is being on your own I suppose.  Even if you are happily married we all know that life can change from one day to another leaving us alone and it is a state that more and more people find themselves in these days.   I read an article online which prompted me to get thinking.

I remember a time when my children got to their twenties and how hard it was to let them go. To stop watching over them and worrying about them when they don’t come home at night.  Especially for mothers I think that it is even harder than the part of the process where they are naughty at school and choose, what you consider to be the wrong person to fall in love with, but you can’t live their lives for them.

I was a mother in the mid-1980s and back in those days there were also more women finding themselves separated or divorced, and ending up alone with the children and it would have been really easy for many parents, especially the single ones to skip the part of the parenting process where you do what birds do and push the chicks out of the nest to learn to fly on their own. 

It is true that some can’t wait to find out what independence has in store for them, some explore a bit and then find their way back home having decided that life is better with mum and dad, while there are those who never want to leave. 

Speaking as a pensioner who used to be a hands-on one, I think we parents, mums especially, find it really hard to chuck them out and it is even harder for the single mums because children often become the centre of their world.  There is also the added financial pressure these days that the youngsters have when it comes to paying for education and housing which makes it even more practical for them to stay.     

I was quite cruel and once my son left and decided to come home as a result of a four-year failed relationship, I would not let him. I remember talking my brother into taking him in as a lodger.  He was about twenty-five and hated that at the time but I insisted, telling him that he could bring his washing, come for meals and stay over from time to time as long as he ‘lived’ somewhere else.    One day, not so long ago, we were talking and he told me that he now understood why I did that.  He is now married, and there are grandchildren, but I know many pensioners whose sons or daughters never left home and who are now worrying about what will happen to their fifty-year-old children when they are gone.

I have a friend who finds herself in this position and, at the age of 66, she is torn between trying to throw her son out into the big bad world while facing the prospect of becoming a ‘live alone’ statistic, or continuing to depend on him a little more each day while she is very aware that his living with her could well leave him becoming her carer at the expense of moving on with his own life.

I know that there are many shades of parent-child living arrangements, but I think that one thing we younger pensioner-parents can do for those children who are approaching middle age having never flown the nest is push them out there, even for a little while and prepare to be as independent of them as we can while we are still young enough, and we also need to broach this subject with our children, the parents of our grandchildren who are now in their early twenties.

GM, Brockley

GM shares the article that prompted her thoughts today…

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