When is the child’s bedroom no longer just theirs forever?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There is an age-old parental conundrum as to when you should clear out and do up your grown-up children’s empty nests. It’s a dilemma that inevitably raises its head every Christmas in particular, when they return to temporarily resume the life they once left behind.

Even though for the other fifty or fifty-one weeks of the year they live in flats or shared houses or foreign countries – occasionally even in a place they own, if they managed to get a job with Google or won the Lotto – holidays home stick them back with their posters and school sports trophies in their childhood bed.

And that setting is also the trigger for them to return to their former role; grown adults who take full care of themselves in every aspect of life morph back into slouching teenagers who couldn’t find the sink with their dirty plates even if you gave them a map.

Bad as it is for them to have to go to sleep under posters of Eric Cantona or Ed Sheeran – or framed drawings they did as five-year-old kids of their family as a collection of stick insects – how much worse is it if they’ve brought someone home for Christmas?

The other half whose previous weekend away with your adult child was in a boutique hotel is now sleeping in a time capsule that screams Leaving Cert from the early part of this century.

And because most family homes have, at most, one en-suite, a nocturnal visit to the loo – an inevitability after meeting the other half’s old mates for a pig’s trough of pints – means scuttling like mice across the landing, sneaking around like a thief in the night.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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