Let the angst now begin....

The Boy has his first girlfriend. It seems only last week I was taking him to his first day at school and now he's all grown up. 6'2, handsome as hell, just wiped me out at Tommy Hilfiger in Bath but he looks so damn fabulous in anything he puts on that I couldn't say no. Clearly, of course, he gets that from me. It's often been said that I'm something of a clothes horse..... or was it a clothes line full of badly hung clothes? I forget now.

So, despite my desperate efforts to scare him away from any predatory female, which, in the eyes of an overprotective lioness looking out for her cub, is anyone between the ages of 9 and 90, Cupid's arrow has managed to penetrate the force field I have carefully constructed around him and he is in luuuurrrvve.

Being a responsible parent, I've talked to him (much to his excruciating embarassment) about.. you know.... S E X and being true to himself. He assures me he is not ready for that sort of relationship yet and has promised, when (or IF if I have my way!)  the time comes he will be sensible. So imagine my horror when, on opening my laptop last night, which I had let him use for his geography homework, one of the 'recently opened tabs' was 'early signs of pregnancy'. SHIT!

I thought back over the last few days. He'd been a bit quiet, hadn't wanted to go to rugby training on Sunday and had been 'sick' on Monday morning. In my mind we were already a Sun headline. I was the errant parent, to blame for raising a feckless child, he was, well, not quite the country's youngest father, but certainly way too young. I pictured him being interviewed on the telly, tattooed, unshaven, baseball cap on backwards and saying 'laaak' for 'like' and everything would be 'amayzun'. Quite how he'd made the quantum leap from well spoken, tattoo-hating, Tommy Hilfiger wearing young man to a chav of the first order... well, I didn't quite know but that's how I imagined it. I would be a grandmother in my 40s and my parents would never be able to show their face in church again!

The Boy was already in bed asleep so I spent a turbulent night fearing the worst. My dreams were full of a disillusioned child changing nappies instead of changing the world. It was all I could do not to drag him out of bed at 6am to  interrogate

gently discuss my fears. Instead I had to wait until after breakfast, after we'd had the usual stressful search for the missing geography homework and 'where the hell is my school tie? I left it on the bedroom/bathroom/lounge floor so it should still be there' and for a moment when The Girl was otherwise engaged. Finally just before we left the house I got my chance.

Sitting him down, I put on my best 'caring parent' expression and told him what I'd found. Did he have anything he wanted to discuss with me?  He looked at me as if I was a halfwit, sighed deeply and said those three words every parent in this situation longs to hear "Biology homework, Mum". I flung my arms around him, thanking god. "Get off me Mum, you're mad. And just so you know, I'm not stupid either".

Phew!  I fair skipped out of the house to take them to school, forgetting  I was still in my pyjamas. I'm starting to understand why my parents seemed to go prematurely grey with three children going through adolescence at the same time. I don't think I'm ready for all this.