My son’s back home – and my mothering skills have gone out of the window | Emma Beddington

Like many graduates, he has been forced to return to the nest. How will he cope with my pigeon chat and dodgy dregs for dinner? My graduate son has been back home for five months now. In this economy, he might be stuck here a while longer, meaning we’ve shifted from the extended holiday phase to a new normal.

I feel like the William Munny of mothering – a creaky gunslinger dragged out of retirement for one last job , like Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven. Having Seen Things and survived, I had settled into a dourly ascetic afterlife of silent staring and infrequent laundry, measuring out my life in coffee spoons of cholesterol-friendly flaxseed. How rusty am I at mothering? Will I go down in a hail of bullets? Well, I can still wash, dry and fold multiple loads a week and ensure an uninterrupted supply of milk. It’s muscle memory, instinctive as breathing. I’ve lost other skills, though, like deciding…