‘WHY are you crying, mum?” asked eight-year-old Albert as I emerged from the cinema dabbing my eyes.

It had been a busy week and it was raining, so I had taken the younger boys to see Toy Story 3 with one of their friends, hoping I could doze off for an hour or so in the middle of the film.

But I wasn’t prepared for the impact the latest children’s blockbuster movie would have on me. From the opening scene, right through to the final credits, I was gripped.

What I hadn’t realised is that the latest Toy Story film is all about the central character, Andy, leaving home to go to college. About to become a man, he is putting away his childish things, boxing up his old toys and clearing out his room.

My firstborn, William, was five years old when the first film came out and, like the then six-year-old Andy, he had a Buzz Lightyear spaceman and a Woody cowboy doll which he used to play with constantly.

Like Andy, he, too, is about to leave home for university and has been packing up his room over the summer.

They have virtually grown older together.

William even has a younger sibling who, like Andy’s sister, is desperate to move into his room. Andy’s conversations with his sister mirror those between William and his eleven-year-old brother Roscoe: “Can I have your computer?” “No.”

“Your stereo?” “No.”

At one point, Andy’s sister bursts into his bedroom, jumping for joy: “Three more days and the room’s mine!”

I never felt at all emotional when any of the boys started playgroup or school. While some parents stood sobbing into their hankies, I was one of those happily waving their children off, confident they would enjoy it and just glad of a bit of free time for myself.

But this time it is different. This time, William, who starts Queen’s University in Belfast next week, is breaking ties.

When I left home at 18, I didn’t realise at the time just how much I was leaving behind, and for good. While I wasn’t consciously cutting free, bit by bit, that is what happened. It’s what the poet Seamus Heaney calls “the uncoupling from the parents”.

That is what will happen with William too, and it is a positive thing.

But I am going to miss him. His younger brothers are feeling it too. “I don’t want William to leave this family,”

said his visibly upset eight-yearold brother Albert, who adores him, the other day.

I felt like repeating Albert’s words when William announced that he had just realised he wasn’t going to be at home for his birthday for the first time this year. “I’ll really miss you all singing Happy Birthday to me, and the balloons in the kitchen and the cake,” he added.

But I’ve been with you for every birthday from the day you were born, I protested inwardly. But, as Cowgirl toy wisely says in Toystory 3: “Andy’s moving on. It’s time we did the same.”

At least we can try. Although when Andy’s mum goes into his room for the last time before he leaves I had to reach for the tissues.

The posters are off the wall, the shelves are bare. It may only be animation but what follows must be one of the most powerful scenes of any movie, ever.

She gasps and then hugs him: “Oh Andy... it’s just... I wish I could always be with you.”

William’s Buzz Lightyear doll, which had lost an arm and a leg, was thrown out years ago. But I found his old Woody peeking out from under the woodpile in the garage recently.

He’s looking a bit threadbare but I might patch him up and bring him back into the house, just for old times’ sake.

His younger brother, eight-yearold Albert, might even want to play with him.

I FOUND a six-inch tall plastic monkey in the freezer the other day: “Does anyone know why this monkey is in my freezer?” I asked.

Albert, clutching onto his big triceratops dinosaur at the time, looked at me as if I was stupid.

“It’s there because the big dinosaur is allowed to send monkeys to be imprisoned in the freezer, of course.”

FOUR-YEAR-OLD Ellen and her parents came to stay recently.

Out for a walk, she was looking forward to a piece of cake in the cafe at the end, but her mother told her she could only have cake if she ate a healthy lunch first. When we got to the cafe, she knew just what she wanted to order. “I will have one, small green pea please and a piece of cake,” she said.