My son has left home – and I feel full of complicated joy | Zoe Williams

When kids are small, and their expectations of an event diverge from yours in some important way, you feel terrible about it. You might be taking them to a play, and they thought that meant they’d be allowed to play, but actually it meant they had to sit still while strangers shouted things. You experience their disappointment as much as your own physical pain.

Then when they’re “adults”, your expectations diverge again. They thought you’d drop them at university and immediately leave, while you thought you’d unpack, and meet their flatmates, explore the city, and spin round a supermarket, then have a Nando’s, and maybe read a bedtime story, get chatting to the other parents and maybe all do karaoke? Well, then it’s time to manage your own disappointment, and the only thing to be said for that is that it’s way less bad than managing theirs.

When I went to university, my mum’s boyfriend drove me and there wasn’t room for her in the car, so it was a beautifully symmetrical event: I wanted him to leave and he wanted to leave. Then when she came to see me, I would count down the hours until she had to leave, and I used to love it when other people’s mums came to see them, because often they were nice, but, also, the schadenfreude was intense.

Mothers out of context are appalling. I don’t think there’s a feeling I’ve ever had that I remember with more clarity. Tugging on that memory unspooled the whole Technicolor exhilaration of suddenly having your own context, that your mother is absolutely not in. So there was more joy in being rejected by my son after dropping him off than you’d think, plus I went to KFC with his out-of-context dad on the way home and they gave us some free chicken selects. Don’t know why, maybe because we looked so complicatedly overjoyed.