I Moved Back In With Mum...And Brought My Kids Too!

Francesca Segal shares the ups and downs of being a boomerang baby at 37

- Francesca Segal

Is there a statute of limitations on maternal self-sacrifice? I ask because on my 38th birthday this summer I will wake up in my childhood bedroom. and I now keep my underwear in a red toy chest with my name on it.

Let me stop you reaching, as you were, for your tiny violin, to explain that my husband Gabe is here too, sharing my double mattress on the floor, and our two-year-old twins have been parked across the landing in my sister’s old room. I don’t know what one calls boomerang children when they move back in with their partner, multiple offspring and a chest freezer, but that violin should really be for my mother. At 70, 20 years after I left home, you could forgive her for thinking she was off the hook.

After our own house suffered a plague of moths, creeping black mould and, finally, spectacular khaki mushrooms that flourished in a single night while we slept, opening all around our window frames like the ears of the BFG, Gabe and I evacuated our bedroom to camp on my study floor. Then we had an electrical fire. I returned from a meeting to a traumatised nanny and a Greek chorus of toddlers pointing at the ceiling rose, declaring, ‘Black smoke, Mama.’ It seemed time to renovate. 

Going home