Anyone who’s known me for more than, say, 40 seconds, will probably know my thus-far unrealised dreams include taking Keith Urban to the disco, being a nan, having laser hair removal on my chin, and taking an adult gap year with a bursting money belt and no set route.
Terrific as they are, they’re just the warm-up acts for my giant ambitious goal: living in a share house with the adult children and their partners and dogs and anyone who wants in.
Becoming an empty nester five years ago was simultaneously one of my life’s greatest triumphs and tragedies. I’m starting to think I’ll never be over it. Still feels like a rat is eating my heart.
Back in the mid-1980s, sitting in the backyard of a Carlton share house – smelling jasmine, hearing a screen door slam over the fence, half-cut on Coolibah – I’d yearn for something. Love that didn’t hurt, to know the answers, to be less rackety. Something. I could never quite name it.
That level of yearning gut-punches me now when I see younger gym friends with toddlers clamped to their legs or mums buying school shoes for teenagers. Quick, pass the megaphone: “Treasure the boring bits! I know you’re exhausted and this is annoying, but I’m jealous!”
Bottom line: I want my kids back. I want another go, but with them improved in all ways since they packed their drum kits and cricket stuff and roller derby helmets and burned off to their own share houses.
That they were all out the door by age 20 had felt like a win. Tangible proof they were listening when their dad and I urged them to move out as soon as they could because they’d have the best time ever. Proof we did our job as parents, which pretty much boils down to raising independent humans who are neither idiots nor assholes.
Turns out there was a catch. Because once the first flush of being liberated from all the cooking and laundry was done, I didn’t actually want to march around in the nude that much or have evenings to myself.
What I wanted was their voices, the in-jokes, their ace friends, the community I’d birthed.
So I fell on new figures that show the nest isn’t emptying like it used to. Almost half of Australians aged 18 to 29 now live with their parents, up from 39 per cent in 2001, according to the long-running HILDA survey.
Grim or great? You be the judge. Parents are apparently in the gun for easily seven grand a year per lingering offspring in extra groceries, power, water and toilet paper.
Solution to the money bit: people, charge board. $100 a week. If they can vote, they can pay their way. Mark of respect.
The rest requires more drastic action. Enter my two-stage plan.
Stage one: kids are kicked out slash leave home for their entire 20s. If humanly possible. Forget money. They have forever to make it. This is bigger than that. We need to stop doing their life admin and protecting them from close range.
Keeping them at home during the decade when they should be ignoring the black mould in a share house bathroom to concentrate on how far their hospo earnings will stretch at Dan Murphy’s does them no favours.
Nobody can learn about relationships, proper sex, how to cope in an emergency or 27 cunning ways with mince if Mum and Dad are in the next room asking if anyone has coloureds to be washed.
Stage two: once they’re 30, they can come back. Logan’s Run in reverse. Parents have had their Me Time, kids are now useful.
That’s my dream, getting the compound (inner-city, Euro appliances, multiple decks, I did say it’s a dream), then getting the band back together now they have jobs and true loves and can drive me places and make playlists and be gym and Perudo partners.
In that Carlton backyard, I yearned for something I couldn’t name. Forty years on, I can. I wanted a house full of people I loved. I got one. I just didn’t know I’d have to give it back.
Temporarily, obviously.
Kate Halfpenny is an author and the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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