7 Tortured Takes: Birthday Edition

Can you believe it’s Friday? Which means for me it’s all birthday all day.

One
That’s right, my oldest child, as I’ve already said, is going to be 16…no wait, is 16. Oh heck.

Two
Seriously, I am in favor of children growing up and leaving home and getting on with their lives. I don’t mourn when a child grows up from a baby to a toddler and a toddler to the bright fun of early childhood, and then into the wiser and more circumspect early teen years. Growing up and getting on with it is a propitious, desirable mystery. The alternative—not growing up—would be a distressing sadness.

Three
So I don’t know why this one is surprising me so much. Maybe because 16 sits in my mind as a more lamentably monumental year than 18 or 21. It was the year I spent 6 months in the States in a public school. The culture shock was like trying to survive on Mars for a year while the main ship slingshots back to rescue you and you have to ducktape your little capsule back together and careen off the planet into nothingness hoping that you’ll be rescued mid-space. Too hyperbolic? Perhaps. There were lovely people who loved me and stress can be a good thing in some circumstances. But I also had a titanic headache for the whole six months. It took hold as I stepped off onto the gray dingy carpet of JFK, and it flew away when my feet were finally restored to Bamako’s crumbling tarmac and the consoling wave of intense heat smacked me straight between the eyes.

Four
“But this birthday is about you, not me,” I clamored, shoving the couch up against the window because the best way to cope in times of stress is to rearrange the living room.

“I just want you to be happy. Unless you don’t want to be happy. If you don’t want to be happy that’s totally fine. Do you want to be happy? What do you want?”

“I am happy,” she said, laughing. Because she is always laughing. But in a good way, not in the tortured cackle of her mother.

Five
I am and always have been of the parenting philosophy that It’s Your Life, Kid, How Should I Know What You Should Do. From infancy, the great chasm between what I think and who I am, and what the delicate porcelain rose-fingered charm, in Elphine’s case, or squalling red hulk of a baby, in Eglantine’s case, would think was interesting or desirable was always at the center of my vision. I gave birth and the thing that amazed me most was that she is not me. She is another person. Not an alien, which I what I nervously considered for nine uncomfortable months, not some strange appendage to me and who I am, but a person entire in herself. It was a curiously comfortable realization, a fitting kind of knowledge that has only increased as the days have gone by.

Six
But they tangle their lives around you, of course. What they think and want and who they are is your only, for a long time, consideration. Where you end and where the child begins can get lost in the haze and the hassle of ordinary life and decision making. You can’t know the mind and heart of another person, even your child, but you can make reasonable guesses, until you wake up one day and remember that you should stop and ask, not barrel ahead as you’ve you always done.

Seven
“I think I’ll go rearrange my room,” she said, watching me huff and agonize.

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