18, Legal and Ready to Fly

Last Saturday our daughter turned 18 which, I suppose, means that she is now officially an adult.

She can now legally buy alcohol - which she did at 10 0'clock in the morning - because she could and wearing her "birthday bitch," crown.

Mia, on her way to the shop

She can buy cigarettes - which she never will because she spends most of her time at parties going round putting out other people's cigarettes.

She can legally watch all the "18-rated," films she wants, which she has probably been doing since she was 15

She can also now legally:  vote, drive a bus, buy a house,  buy fireworks, learn to fly a plane and bungee jump.

All of which meant that, on Saturday morning, ... she looked and acted exactly the same as she had looked and acted on Friday night.

"How does it feel to have another adult in your house?" texted one of my friends.

" Like one adult too many," I texted back.

But that's not really true.

Because to me, Mia will probably never quite be grown-up.

She will always be our daughter, I will always be the mum who worries too much, Ninesh will always be the dad who helps her sort out her finances, her computer, her passport, the nuts-and-bolts that hold her life together.

Being an " adult," is not going to mean that Mia suddenly starts doing her own washing  (in my dreams) cooking  her own dinner, paying her own bills...not while she's living under our roof.
Day to day, having an 18 year old daughter will make very little difference to our lives.
But perhaps what it does do, is bring the future closer. 
 Like a blank canvas, permanently hanging on our wall, we have always been aware of our children''s future, of the day they will walk out of the door and into a tomorrow that doesn't involve us.
 But I've never really thought about it seriously.
It's something you can always put off  because it's so far away.. But one day soon, Mia, and not long after that, her 16 year old brother Joss, will lift their blank canvases off our wall, carry them away and start to fill them with colours all their own.
And that;is a very strange feeling.
It's strange to imagine them living a life detached from ours, doing things we will never know about with friends we might never meet in places we have never been ( although I'm probably naive in believing that doesn't already happen).
The thought that they might be hurt or upset or confused without my knowing, without me being there to comfort them  is almost too painful to think about.
I wonder if, as parents, we are ever quite prepared for the day our children spread their wings and with only the merest of backward glances, fly into their unfamiliar future their wings glimmering with the hope and excitiement of unknown possibilities..
" I"m still dreaming of that day," says one of our neighbours whose three sons, now in their late 20's are all still living at home in their small 3-bedroomed house.
I think about this.
Of course there's a little part of me that would be very happy to imagine Mia and Joss forever curled up on our sofa on their phones and laptops while watching TV.
There's a lIttle part of me that would be relieved to hold them close forever.
But the world is too big and mostly-beautiful, too full of wonders and of what-will-happen-next for my love to hold them back.
So when they are ready to carry the blank canvas of their future away with them, I will lift it carefully off our wall and hand it to them.
And perhaps they won't notice the tiny corner I have torn from it and how I keep it buried in my heart.

Mia and Joss 

The strange coincidence of birthdays

There are some dates that become unexpectedly important to you in your life.
November 14th is one of those dates for me.
To begin with, it's the birthday of my husband, Ninesh- a-goes-without-saying-important date.

Happy Birthday Ninesh

But that's just the beginning.
Because co-incidentally it's the birthday of two other people who have become very special to us.
It' s the birthday of the eldest daughter of one of my best friends. 
But what makes her " not just a daughter," is the fact that she's adopted.
She and her younger sister, not born on November arrived in the arms of my friend and her husband more than 10 years ago 
The wait had been a long, hard and frustrating one.
Sometimes my friend  would come round and talk about it: the raised hopes, the shattered dreams, the heartache, the constant expectation, the impersonal  beaurocratic, box-ticking nightmare of the adoption service.
There would be days when she would float through the door, hopeful, smiling
" They think they've found a match," she would say, " nothing's certain yet but...." and her eyes would stare dreamily into the rose-tinted, child-filled future.
But there were other days, days when she would sit on our sofa, huddled over a cup of tea, trying to be brave, trying not to show that her heart had been broken again,.. the match hadn't worked out or the birth parents were being given another chance or the children were being offered to someone else first...
" It's alright," she'd say, trying to smile, " I guess.. they weren't the ones.

And then there was the day the wait was over.
There was a ring on the bell
" I've got something I want to show you,"  she said, sitting down at the table while I put the kettle on.
I watched as she pulled two photos out of her bag.
" Holiday shots?" I asked.
" No," she said, shaking her head and handing me the photos.
I took them and stared at the two girls smiling out at me.
"I wanted to show you my...our....," I watched her hesitate, like she wasn't sure if she had the right to say the words, " I wanted you to see our... daughters." 
There she sat, my friend who was already a mother long before she had children, my friend whose aching emptiness had at last been filled, my friend showing me photos of two of the luckiest girls in the world.
It's always easy to try and read too much into things, to try and put a positive spin on what is essentially bad, to explain away every cloud by finding its silver lining.
And of course I would never wish upon anyone the agony, emotional anguish and sadness of not being able to give birth to your own children. 
But when I see my friend and her husband with their two girls now, it's impossible not to think that it was meant to be.
Not to think that somehow in this crazy, unpredictable universe of ours, they were meant to find each other and be a family. 
And somehow, sitting there in our kitchen, photos in hand, that day, I wasn't surprised when I found out her eldest daughter and Ninesh shared a birthday.
It seemed right somehow, like an invisible thread bonding her new family with ours. 
And in the end, it's the thousands of invisible threads  connecting us all that make us who we are and catch us when we fall.
A shared birthday is just the start and it's hard to explain why it's special.
Because birthdays are strange, they are like coloured bookmarks in the pages of our lives, a subconscious marking of the beginning and ending  of chapters, a chance to celebrate what we have achieved and how far we have come or an opportunity to make a promise  that next year will be better. 
Or, of course, they are simply an excuse for a party.
But the best thing about birthdays ( and the older you get, the fewer good things there are ) is the people who remember.  There are people you only speak on your or their birthdays, people who are part of your past, from a different page of your life but whose warmly, familiar voices immediately make you smile and float you back into the kind of friendships that can only be created by time.
But time is something one of our friends never had.
In another one of those quirky birthday co-incidences, it turned out that one of the friends we met in Chichester was also born on the same day as Ninesh, just a few years later...
I met her at the Children's Centre where I worked and very quickly, unusually quickly for us, our families became friends.  Although their children were younger than ours, we spent a lot of time together, walking, talking, chatting, laughing.
It was while we were camping together for the weekend that we discovered that she, Ceylan, and Ninesh shared a birthday. But as soon as I found out, just like with my friend's adopted daughter, I wasn't surprised. It just seemed like another thing that connected us, another coincidence that added to the sense of "meant-to-be-ness," of our friendship.
Laughing, Ninesh and she, both of them quietly passionate, thoughtful, caring and kind people, planned the shared birthday parties of their future.
And under that starry sky, it wasn't the flames of the barbecue we were huddled around that kept us warm, but the certainty that our friendship was a lasting one.
I'm glad I didn't know then that Ceylan only had two more birthdays left to share with Ninesh.
Glad that, for at least one of those birthdays, she and Ninesh did celebrate together.
Glad that, because the 14th of November is Ninesh's birthday too, we will never forget to remember.

Ceylan, trying ( unsuccessfully ) to unicycle through the campsite on our son's unicycle

In a room of 23 people, there is a 50/50 chance that 2 people will share the same birthday. 
In a life full of twists and turns and crossing paths, I'm not sure what the odds are.
But it doesn't really matter.
All I know is that the 14th of November has become a very special day for me because it is the birthday of so many people I care about. 

So here's to love and laughter and silver linings, to star-filled memories and smiling photos and most of all, here's to very, very happy birthdays.