What's it like to be 23 and starting a new life? I'm unpacking a great deal of emotions as my child heads to the US

Can he actually be that old? Was I ever that young? A journey to clean out his student flat has revived many memories

There's an accurate, if snide, thing I've seen online that reads "No parent on Facebook can think their kid has turned any age", and yes, OK, not the "on Facebook" bit, however there is a rote astonishment sometimes passing that I in some cases slip into, pondering my adult children. But, enable me, simply this when, a Facebook moms and dad minute. My senior kid turned 23 last month and we have actually simply been to London to gather his stuff at the end of his degree. En route, I understood I was 23 when I moved there myself.

You can't typically pre-emptively identify parenting "lasts", however when you can, they're odd and melancholy - even when they're not, objectively, things an individual would choose to do once again. This trip included (I hope) my last time standing, hips shrieking from the drive, texting "We're outside" as we awaited our child to awaken (my spouse ended up throwing a ball at his bedroom window). It was absolutely my last time eliminating my shoes amidst the overruning bins of that sticky-floored trainee house, and hovering over the Trainspotting-esque toilet then choosing against drying my hands on any of the towels. It ended with the last journey along the M1 crushed between a restored chair, a duvet and an Ikea bag of pans threatening to decapitate me if we made an emergency situation stop. We were bringing his stuff "home" understanding that it will not be home for him in the same way again: he's transferring to New york city this summertime. Maybe not for ever, but for years, not months.

To compound the Big Feelings, and the sense of the dizzying slippage of time, my hubby and I used the trip to roam round Fitzrovia, where we shared our very first flat back when I was 23. It's different but not unrecognisable: the medical facility has actually been destroyed but Tesco is thriving; the Phones 4U where we bought our very first mobiles is gone; however the bank where we opened Isas when they were invented, pleased with our brand-new maturity, hangs on. Our block had acquired several Airbnb key safes however was otherwise the same. "It'll be baking up there," said my partner, staring up as the late afternoon sun struck the flat black roofing system. I made him duplicate himself, because I have actually ended up being slightly deaf this year, then we recollected about the harsh summer season heat (it's most likely even worse now). We walked around, explaining survivors: the notoriously low-cost pizza place, the small Italian sandwich store, the DIY shop where we stress bought a fan. Then we took a seat for a practical soda, since we were exhausted and I was struck by an ultra site-specific memory of walking through Percy Passage to satisfy him one evening, having just discovered I was pregnant with our now-23-year-old, enjoying the last seconds of incredulous solo pleasure before sharing the news. Then another: shuffling along Goodge Street at dawn in labour, stopping outside Spaghetti House (still there) to ride out a contraction. Both our boys were born in this neighbourhood - it changed my life like no other.

The location still felt familiar; what 23 felt like is more difficult to access. I was a mess, I think: I had been ill and was very self-absorbed; I invested far excessive time fretting about my weight. I invested little, if any, time worrying about the world, though. World-wise, things felt fine - "A brand-new dawn has broken, has it not?" Tony Blair had simply informed us - and if they weren't, it definitely didn't feel like my issue.

There aren't lots of brand-new dawn vibes for my child's generation as they enter adulthood. I'm unsure we've provided much of an opportunity to spend a few egotistical years concentrating on their own dramas, have we? We've gifted them more pushing matters: a collapsing environment, catastrophic economic inequality, a bad tasks market and even the reemerging spectre of fascism and nuclear war (retro!). Plus, it's all inescapably fed into their faces 24/7 - not a function used by a 1997 Phones 4U Motorola.

But I hope, nevertheless, that 23 can still be what it was for me: complicated but loaded with possibility. An experience. The best age to discover yourself in a brand-new city.