School’s out — and I’m completely heartbroken

Receive free Life & Arts updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Life & Arts news every morning.

In a brilliant take on the late novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died this month, the writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton describes The Road as being the best parenting book of all time. 

It’s an unlikely angle and one that might at first seem facetious. The Road, McCarthy’s odyssey about a father and son walking across a post-apocalyptic landscape in the wake of an unspecified disaster, is more generally celebrated for its spare prose and vivid expression than as a viable alternative to nap-training manifestos and toddler-taming manuals.

But for Jezer-Morton, who was caught up in the infrastructural collapse of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the novel’s brilliance (and its most valuable lessons) is found in its immortal “relevance”. As she writes: “It eschews the typical narrative terrain about heroic American ingenuity in the face of adversity and, instead, focuses almost exclusively on the emotional work of being loving and brave while fearing for your life.”

I have never been caught up in an infrastructural collapse, and read The Road while lying on a comfortable bed. But, as with Jezer-Morton, it stirred in me an almost primal fear. As I reached the book’s conclusion, I put it down, crept into my then five-year-old daughter’s bedroom, picked up her sleeping body and put her in my bed. McCarthy’s novel of dystopian survival had been so terrifying, the only comfort I could think of was to hear my daughter breathe.

Every day I’m grateful for that privilege. The most fundamental hope for any parent is to see their children thrive. As parents we are all on the metaphorical road, trudging towards some distant “safe place” in which we can dispense with all the worry associated with taking care of other human beings. And if we’re lucky we will never reach it, because the very act of worry is an indicator that — right now — everything is basically OK. One hopes the hazards on our road will be small, innocuous dangers especially when for so many others, escaping warzones or natural disasters, the road can be a fact of daily life. 

Parenting is all about positivity and hope and reassurance; things at which I am generally quite bad because I’m British and over-cautious, but which I try and conjure because I know that, as a parent, it’s pretty much my only job. And so I throw around my worldly wisdoms and hope she doesn’t do anything too stupid — such as hitchhiking without a mobile phone, which I myself did when I was 17. I want my daughter to be resourceful and independent, to know she will be able to fend for herself. And although I would still happily sleep with her next to me, the time is fast approaching that she must face the road alone. 

The hope for any parent is to see their children thrive. As parents we are all on the metaphorical road

Last weekend, we reached our own crossroads, a school prom, and the final hurrah for an education that has now reached its 12-year end. My daughter got her hair curled, put on a slip (which apparently passed as a prom dress) and went off to a night of revelry punctuated with live songs. 

People have long warned me of empty nest syndrome and all the attendant feelings that might hit with her impending adulthood. But I have been slammed by that dreadful, crushing cliché that the end of all this childhood has been too hideously brusque: I’m sad the old routine has been suddenly uprooted, I feel quite abject about the inky pencil case and the crumpled nylon blazer now abandoned by the stairs. How could it be possible that she can be a full-sized person when, if I close my eyes, I can still feel her pudgy infant body when I bounced her in my arms?

Early summer is a cavalcade of markers. I find each as melancholy as the next. Walking around Washington DC a few weeks ago, in glorious sunshine, every public space had been repurposed to stage commencement ceremonies: the city was humming with cars being packed with the detritus of student living and teens in mortar boards. I found myself spontaneously crying on every corner. I couldn’t work out why the sight of so many young, fresh, accomplished people made me feel so depressed. Was I envious for the road that now awaited these young folk with no direction? Or was I feeling a more existential doom about the crappy world that will belong to them? 

Having reached the age at which I can observe at least two younger generations, I join the chorus of old folk who feel increasingly agitated by the news. So much debt and inflation, AI omnipotence, smouldering skylines, mass extinction warnings and an ever boiling planet. Sometimes it feels like Cormac McCarthy’s vision of the future has become a bit too real. 

But only a total psycho would drag that to the dinner table. My job is not to catastrophise, but to maintain what Jezer-Morton calls “an emotional baseline of determined love”. And so I took a billion pictures of my little prom queen, popped the champagne and sent her off to start on her own path.

Email Jo at [email protected]

Follow @ftweekend on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first