Careful What You Wish For

Sharing a house with your boyfriend and his mum was just so uncool. But what choice did she have?

- Geraldine Ryan

Marie had been thinking about New Year Resolutions. She was a few months late, but there was a reason for that. At the turn of the year, she’d been a week away from moving in with Leo and life was feeling pretty damn perfect.

Her usual annual resolution — the one about losing seven pounds — had proved totally unnecessary this year. For years, dinner had been a moveable feast in her world. Ever since she left home, in fact, when she’d realised she could eat whenever she wanted. But Leo’s habit of regular meals at regular times had all but put paid to her own more haphazard attitude to food.

She’d practically stopped drinking, too. There was no fun to be had in being the only drinker in a relationship. It wasn’t that Leo disapproved. Just that he’d never really seen the point of it. He liked to be in control of himself, he explained, and alcohol loosened a person’s inhibitions.

Marie had always thought that that was the point, but then she got to remembering some of the wilder nights she’d spent with her girlfriends in the past and — well — maybe there was something to be said for sobriety.

“You’re growing up at last,” Mum said, the last time she’d paid a visit home. “And if you ask me it’s about time.”

She hadn’t said anything back because, frankly, she couldn’t think of anything clever enough. But she’d chewed on it, like she’d chewed on Belinda’s remarks later on that evening when they’d met at The Fat Bull for a drink.

“You’ve changed,” her best friend had said, after she’d listened to Marie waxing lyrical about her new life.

“No, I haven’t,” she replied. “I’ve just grown up a bit.”