“I am reading this and crying with laughter!!” Prof Tanya Byron.

This is not a book about parenting. There are already 1.3 billion of those, and the main thrust is, ‘don’t be a shit parent; be a good parent.’

Anyway, they raise themselves on YouTube, hair gel and Snapchat. They’re just fine.

Instead, this is a book about us. You and me. The parents. In the Middle Years. When our babies have become teens, and everything goes a bit…tits down.

This is the book I wish someone had written for me (it would have saved me a LOT of work, so thanks a lot guys. Good work, there) to hold my hand, tell me it’s all quite normal, and make me feel a LOT better.

I wrote it because not long ago, deep in the crusty elbow-skin of family midlife, listening to my teenagers’ bedroom doors slamming and watching my sex appeal turn into a Blue Peter crisis fund, I thought…

Excuse me, but…WHAT THE HECK IS THIS??

Who are these moody zit-incubators in my house, Facetiming each other at dinner and staying up later than me? Does snogging still exist? If so, where I can get some please? NOW? Who keeps nicking my flippin’ eye-liner? Why am I saying all the things to my children that I hated my mum saying to me? Why can’t I remember any GCSE maths? Why is nothing quite as I expected it would be at this stage in my life? Why did nobody warn me? And what the bloody hell has happened to the skin above my knees?

Is any of this normal??

Following a comprehensive rummage around this rotting Salad Drawer of Midlife Parenting™ I have discovered that this is entirely normal.

Despite what we were told, our problems don’t go away when our children learn to wipe their own bums and bring girlfriends home; they just become different.
Instead of nappies and sleepless nights we juggle GCSE options and puberty; relationship breakdowns and unfathomable sadness; teenage eye-rolls and 3-hour queues for the bathroom; career catastrophes and a creeping, deepening sense of loss as the little people we’ve been trying to get a break from for fifteen years suddenly start to pull away from us, and we realise we miss them terribly, and…
Jesus, is that CHIN HAIR??

Everybody goes through this. And yet nobody talks about it. It’s all just “Right sweetheart, you’ve done babies and toddlers; you’re on yer own now, love. Off you go. Close the fridge door on your way out.”

IT IS NOT JUST YOU.
 IT IS ALL OF US.

This, my friend, is GOLDEN information. If they could make watches or dental fillings out of it, they would.
Thus, this book is the opposite of a sickly how-to guide to happiness, sexual fulfillment and Steely Buttocks (which, incidentally, is the name of my band.)
I could write that, but I’d have to stab my eyeballs with tweezers.
Instead, it says,

‘Come here. Sit down. You are among friends. I, too, have yesterday’s pants on my bedroom floor. And half a granola bar. And a receipt that I’d rather my husband didn’t see. And I feel confused and sad sometimes. And it’s all OK.’

Part diary through my own Lifeshambles, and part tasty morsels of highly amusing and (possibly) helpful notes about the Middle Years, you should see it as a box of Valium, a night out with friends, and a good shag in an airing cupboard. (Without shelving.)

So come! Let us stagger on together and laugh heartily at all the things nothing but surgery and excessive masturbation can cure.

When we’re done, come and see me in the Home.
Visiting hours are 2-4pm.

Please bring grapes, and porn.
I thank you.