Earlier this year, I surfaced from sleep to a strange noise, a loud, human singing reverberating through our bedroom ceiling, then a low, almost animal groaning. My husband and I looked at each other. ‘I think Hatty’s in labour,’ he said.
The rest of the day proceeded in the usual way, getting breakfast for our children, dropping them off at school, meetings, emails, booking in the car for an MOT, but these activities were interspersed with opening the door to midwives, making cups of tea for Hatty, and finding towels to drape around the birth pool that had appeared in our living room. Towards evening, our eighth housemate appeared in a rush of fluids. Two ambulance-loads of paramedics stood around like a flock of green and yellow London parakeets, blessedly unrequired. At one point, there were nine medical professionals, seven housemates, two grandparents of the new arrival and a cat in our terraced London house. It didn’t even feel that full, I thought later, as I poured bleach on bloodstained towels and binned a discarded catheter that had been overlooked in a corner.
I am 42, and I did not expect to end up here. Like most of my peers, I was handed a vision of a home worth striving for with far, far fewer people in it and, to begin with, I followed that script. A middle-class 1980s child, I did well at school, moved away from my home county dormitory town for university, and never went back. London, jobs at the BBC, running a think tank all followed. I lived with good friends, and juggled seeing others between our clashing personal schedules. Then people began to pair up and procreate. I met someone, followed suit, and we clawed our way onto the very bottom of the housing ladder. It was a lovely life. A bit relentless, perhaps, a bit lonely around the edges, too, as the schedules got ever harder to tessellate, the work and care burdens heavier. But we had done it. Our little dyad, with dependants, was standing on its own feet, even if something felt decidedly unstable underneath.
More space, more privacy, more control – all are sold as natural, unquestioned goods to be sought in the unconscious script that most of us carry. For the nuclear family, they are tokens of success and maturity, whereas forgoing these ‘goods’ and living with people you are neither shagging nor parenting has an association with low-status, studenty seasons. Not for proper grownups. My husband and I began to feel the strengthening drag of this story. I sometimes saw it in my mind’s eye as a tide, washing young adults from their family homes into temporarily intertwined clusters (largely in cities), then out again, to the suburbs and beyond, in pairs or alone, in search of a garden, a bigger kitchen, storage space for the mountains of stuff we inevitably accumulate. Swept away from each other, everyone further and further apart.
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