This year, it’s Christmas round at mine | Eva Wiseman

For the first time in my life, this year I am hosting Christmas. I know – this is usually something a person does when they are half my age, when they have recently moved out of home and have a boxfresh roasting tin and are keen to impress their adulthood on a parent or aunt. Not when they are, like me, a rattled 40-odd-year-old who should surely have already shifted long ago into the maternal role befitting of her gait and shoe style.

But no, until now, I have gladly remained a child, slipping gratefully into the familiar well in my parents’ sofa, beside the cat, beside the radiator. “Can I help?” I whisper without guts or commitment towards the kitchen, occasionally heaving myself up to shush some sprouts around a pan or dangle a toy above a baby, the telly on, the sandwiches coming, ideally a little Poirot with my tea.

I’d long envied friends who had a real journey home for Christmas, on their glamorous “trains” or busy “motorways”, dragging wheelie cases through the office at 5pm with a greedy sigh, when my trip home consisted only of a handful of tube stops with a pause to pick up milk.

Since having kids and moving house, my journey home has got shorter still, so now there are no tube stops at all, just a five-minute walk past my old school where my daughter now goes, with a pause to pick up milk. It always feels special, though, heightened, this Christmas lunch over every other family lunch, and part of that specialness lies in the feeling that I am five again, or 10, and a familiar routine slides into place with comfort and gluttony at its centre.

But this year Christmas will happen at my house, a place where my partner and I remain shocked to be woken every morning by the sound of hungry pets and inquisitive children and where we must once again remind each other of our age, our responsibilities and the life choices we appear to have made.

It’s a cliché now to complain about being a grownup, about the trials of being a 42-year-old teenager, and the truth, for me at least, is not exactly that I feel younger and less capable the older I get, but that I am more able to express and so lock into that dizzy experience of youth.

In the same way that poets don’t necessarily feel love or grief or weather more deeply than the rest of us, but are instead skilled at articulating it in such a way that allows readers to understand those feelings more profoundly, as I get older I feel increasingly able to appreciate the dense, textured truths of being young and free. And in doing so, the madness of its counterpart.

It will never not be a shock to me that I am charged with the task of deciding, for example, if there’s pudding, or if my baby needs to go to hospital, or if the bins need taking out, or how much to tell a child about war, or any number of daily adult tasks and responsibilities. Which is one reason the idea of hosting Christmas feels particularly bananas.

We have ordered a big bit of wood to extend the table, and ordered all our guests to lower their expectations, and I have vague plans for something festive involving crisps. Perhaps this will be a grand festival of reinvention – perhaps it will just be another Sunday afternoon.

I have no doubt food will be eaten and a walk will be had, but what I’m less certain of is who, by 3 or 4pm, I will be. In my house, I am the mum. In my mum’s house, I am the child. When my mum comes to my house (which she does regularly and often without warning), I have become extremely good at ignoring the small part of my brain that explodes in a series of minor identity crises.

But I fear that the ceremony of such an event as Christmas, hosting four parents and a grandparent among the children and chocolates, might cause the kinds of internal explosions that are harder to ignore.

I sometimes wonder what are the occasions that force you to grow up. There are the awful ones, the fast-track VIP lane of deaths and pains, and heartbreaks and sickness, and a girl approaching you in the playground with an important message about your thighs.

But, beyond synthetic celebrations like a wedding, less discussed are the positive ones – the times in our lives when we are propelled joyfully towards adulthood. Could next weekend be one of those times? Could this be the day I finally learn to relax into the prickly reality of life as a grownup child?

I have a hunch. I have a hunch it will take more than an afternoon of meat and cake to grow me up. To drag me from cared for to carer. But who knows – it’s got to happen one day. Hasn’t it?

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