Teenage soaring

Mia's tortoise, Gaudi, has just crawled into her schoolbag and peed all over her books. 

 

Spot the peeing tortoise

Symbolic, 16 year old Mia feels, of the fact that, although she still has a few GCSEs' scattered over the next few weeks, her uniform-wearing school days are pretty much over.
And her future is glittering just in front of her, an ocean of unknown possibilities.
It's strange because I remember that feeling so clearly.
The feeling that you are standing on the edge of your tomorrow. 
That your wait is over.
That life can, at last, begin.
As a parent, it's not easy watching your children grow up and begin to walk away from you.
With every ounce of your being you want to reel them back in.
You want to hold them close and keep them safe.
You want to pull the thorns from any roses they may come across.
You want to kick away  the rocks and stones that they might stumble over.
You want to catch their pain before their hearts are broken.
That's what you want to do.
But you can't.
Not anymore.
Instead you have to stand in the shadows and watch them blossom and drift away from you.
It's their Spring, with a  perpetual Summer just around the corner, and they are ready to throw away their soggy books and take the world by storm  
Whatever that world may be.
Because it doesn't feel quite like our world anymore.
The world always belongs to the young.
What's hard, is admitting to ourselves that that is no longer us.

" Awks," says Mia if she ever catches Ninesh and I holding hands.
" Embarrassing," says 14 year old Joss, if he ever sees us dancing.

And you want to shout out:
" You're wrong.  We're not awkward or embarrassing. We're cool."
But the truth is, we're not.
At least not to them.
And anyway, who uses the word "cool," these days?!
"Useful," would be a better word to describe us.
We are chauffeurs and food-providers.
We are  hair-appointment makers and bed-linen changers.
We are on-demand-no-questions-asked-listeners and tissue-providing comforters.
We are personal bankers and uncomplaining mobile phone bill payers.
(How else can they phone us in the middle of the night to ask for a lift home?).
These are the terms and conditions that we unwittingly signed up to when we became parents of teenagers.
It 's the price we pay for unconditional love.
And the truth is, it's worth it.
Worth watching them spread their youth-tinged, unruffled wings.
Worth watching them take off and fly towards the stars.
Worth watching them soar far higher than we ever did.
And when they do, when we are merely specks on yesterdays horizon, it will still be worth it. 
They are the guardians of our hopes and the couriers of our dreams and, however old and un-cool we may be, they cannot help but carry a little part of us into their tomorrow.