THERE is an American TV sitcom about a family called the Goldbergs which my older boys told me I must see: “The mother is just like you,” they said.

I watched it with 13-year-old Albert: “They’re right,” he squirmed with embarrassment as we witnessed Beverly Goldberg plead for a hug from her youngest son, who is about the same age as him and desperate to escape his overbearing mother’s maternal clutches.

She calls Adam her ‘delicious snuggle monster’ and his school photograph, framed on the wall, is three times bigger than those of his older teenage brother and sister. “There was a mix-up at the photographers, they printed it too big. What could I do?” she explains to the others.

When Beverly, who confesses she ‘puts the mother in smother’,  attended Adam’s lower school graduation, she couldn’t resist leaping out of her chair as he walked onto the stage with his classmates, pointing to him as she screamed: “You are the cutest.”

In this particular episode, Adam is trying to wriggle out of a trip to the cinema with his mother as he pursues a date with a girlfriend instead. Beverly finds it hard to cope with the rejection.

She insists she doesn’t have a favourite among her children. But the older two grew up and stopped loving her years ago, she explains to Adam. “But you – I thought you were going to be different,” she wails.

I know just where Beverly is coming from. I don’t have favourites either. And I have had to endure all my children, one by one, reaching the age where they inevitably push me away as they become more independent.

They too were once my adoring little snuggle monsters, with me fixed firmly at the centre of their worlds, until they woke one day and found everything I said and did a total embarrassment and refused be seen out in public with me again.

Constantly making impossible demands and testing the boundaries of parental love, they were suddenly in little doubt that whatever went wrong in their lives must be down to me.

I realise this is perfectly normal. Psychologists say nothing can stop teenagers chopping that invisible umbilical cord and when they reject us and everything we stand for it means they are confident of our maternal loyalty.

It would be worrying if they treated us as they did when they were four.

But Albert is my last one, my baby, just as Adam is Beverly’s. And maybe I have tried to cling on just a little too long.

This is the boy who, as a toddler, used to insist he was going to marry me. He once even announced, in all seriousness, and to the great hilarity of his older brothers, that Snow White in the pantomime we had just been to was ‘not as beautiful as Mum.’

His siblings, of course, thought I resembled the wicked witch. But the scales hadn’t fallen from Albert’s eyes at that point.

When he came into our bed for cuddles, as they all once did when they were small, I would tell him, only half jokingly: “Don’t you dare grow any bigger.”

The cuddles in bed stopped years ago. But I still complain I don’t want him growing any bigger. I used to be the second tallest person in our house. Soon, I’ll be the shortest.

I realised, just last week, that Albert is now the same height as me: “I’m warning you, no taller,” I said. But I don’t think he finds it funny any more.

The boy who used to hang on my every word now finds most things I say objectionable or offensive.

When I picked him up from tennis lessons the other day and innocently enquired what group he had been put into, he looked at me in disgust: “Why would you want to know that? You are so weird.”

I know, just like Beverley, I have little option but to step back and watch as he grows bigger, towers above me, pulls away and ventures out into the big, wide world on his own.

But when he got a new mobile phone last week and gave me his new number, I couldn’t  resist sending him an adoring, mother to son text message: “You are the cutest,” I wrote, thinking he’d get the Goldbergs reference and find it amusing.

I got an instant reply: “Look, Albert has sent me two smiley face emojis,” I said, delighted, as I showed it to his older brother Roscoe.

“Your eyesight is terrible Mum,” said Roscoe. “Look closer. Those expressions are frowny and exasperated.”

I think it’s time to back off now.