My son is turning 18 – and I am inexplicably sad | Zoe Williams

He is now an adult, so I have no right to dictate the state of his hair or his choice of diet. But I hadn’t expected this to be such an emotional wrench

Not counting the many thousands of words I spent complaining about being pregnant, I wrote my first column about my son, T, 18 years ago today, when he was three hours old. Someone said, “Is there some kind of union you could join? Because I’m sure you’re entitled to at least one whole day of maternity leave,” and I was baffled. As far as I was concerned, they should have held the front page – this wasn’t work, this was a dispatch from the frontline of a brave new world.

Anyway, some time passed, and T could suddenly talk, and then some further time passed, and he was his own person, out there in the world, and then I blinked, and he was as tall as a tree. People always say to you, “Treasure this time, it goes by in a flash,” right at the moment you have an armful of toddler, puree in your hair and a mouth full of wet wipes because you ran out of hands – which in retrospect was fortunate, because it meant you couldn’t say the thing you would otherwise have said.