Are boomerang kids like me making our parents depressed?
It was early evening, and I was explaining to my mum that my life had just turned upside down when something at the end of the -garden caught her eye. "B------s!" she shouted, running through the kitchen while I followed, worriedly. At the back door she reached for my brother's confiscated old air rifle and hitched her dress over her knee before cocking the gun and firing. I watched, stupefied, thinking that my parents, now in their 60s, might have gone mad since I moved away.
"Squirrels," she said, when she saw my face. "They try to eat the blackbirds' fat balls. Anyway, you were saying?"
What I'd been saying was that I needed to move back home. It was March 2016, I'd just turned 27 and had had a catastrophic break-up with a long-term boyfriend, finding myself (long story short) without a job, flat or very much else.
Without savings there was only one option: to boomerang home, and luckily my parents poured prosecco and told me I could stay as long as I needed. Not long afterwards my younger brother, Charlie, turned up, too, having just been fired from his job.
Dealing with one boomerang child is something; two, another matter altogether. Neither of us had lived at home in Bath since we'd left for university six years earlier, but now here we were.
Charlie and I had both grown up in the years since we left home - giving up our newfound freedoms was hard when we'd lived without parental scrutiny for five years. They hated the drinking habits we'd picked up at uni, often imparting lectures on alcohol abuse if we touched booze during the day.
But neither Charlie nor I had anticipated how much our parents' lives had changed, too. They now had weekly cinema dates, went to neighbours' houses for "Moscow mules" and kept talking about various new friends. They ran to a busier timetable. "What about us?" we thought, like two fat chicks returning to the nest and expecting to find the twigs intact.
You have a tendency to drift back into teenage habits - raiding the fridge and lying on the sofa eating crisps
It's not all about us, of course. In the UK around 3.4 million millennials still live with their parents, according to the Office of National Statistics, and more and more studies have highlighted the impact boomerang children have on their parents' health. The most recent, by the London School of Economics in March, found that they were more likely to be miserable than "empty nesters" because their re-discovered independence was interrupted.
My own parents' social lives didn't appear to have suffered since our return, judging by the regular trips to the Ivy Brasserie (without Charlie and me), but perhaps I hadn't given much thought to how grown-up children can cause tension in homes they move back to. So I asked my parents how they felt about it.
"You have a tendency to drift back into teenage habits when you're home," my dad admitted. "Raiding the fridge, lying on the sofa eating crisps and watching telly in the middle of the day. As a parent you do feel a great sense of helping out by offering an economic refuge, but of course two boomerangs makes the ship creak."
Here's another complication, and one which is rarely discussed. What happens if one parent is happier to have the children back than the other? My mum is naturally more sociable, so likes the house being full of people. My dad, not so much.
"When you become a mum your kids are part of you, so there is a bit of you that never wants them to be away from you," she said. "My favourite time in the world is when you're both here. But the dynamic does change when there's two of you, you talk so much to each other, we step back and it feels like you're speaking another language."
Having two boomerangers under your roof can't be easy, but does it make you feel like you've failed as a parent, I asked. "Oh no," my dad said. "I would just worry that it gave you a sense of failure, a feeling that something hadn't worked out."
That gave me something to think about. Because however much we -appreciate being able to come home, boomerang children, like me, would still rather not do so, and parents know that. The older we get, the more embarrassing we find it because the expectation is that we will have everything sorted by 30, latest.
BOOMERANG BASICS
It took me around three months to find and start a new job in London, and I moved back to the capital later that year. But Charlie stayed - and stayed. He found a job with a market research company and paid off his debts. For a year, he didn't pay my parents rent, but now pays ￡250 a month, "which about covers his milk bill," my dad said. "It would be ￡450 a month if it covered the amount of chicken he ate, too."
He has spent the money he has saved on rent travelling more than the wing of a plane. Or "jet-setting around the world like Leonardo DiCaprio, meeting exotic women," as Charlie put it. In the last year he's been to Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Boston and New York, twice. "These are the holidays of our dreams!" my dad said, irritated that he can't afford to do the same.
But then, last week Charlie had a call from a company in London, offering him a job in food PR. Everyone agreed it was a good fit. By July, he'll have flown the nest again, too. And do you know what? I think even my dad will miss him.