She’s Leaving Home…

24th September 2022

Our children grew up in Friary Park. It’s a five minute walk from our home, and it was always our happy place for swings, slides and running around, but when new owners took over the café and introduced shakshuka, hummus and vaguely kosher sausages, it replaced our kitchen as well as our garden in the family ecosystem. We enjoyed years of brunches and kickabouts, a brief and deeply underwhelming geo-caching period, and all our children learned to ride their bikes in lovely Friary Park.

A few years ago while walking Ziggy in the park, it occurred to me that we hadn’t taken any of our children there for quite some time. Rosie and Orli were well past playground larks, but Avi? Surely Avi had some family park-time left in him. But no, he’d been on the cusp for a while, and now, I realised, he was also done. That last time we’d gone to play on the swings together had been, well, the last time, and without warning a phase of our lives was over. We don’t always recognise that we are doing something for the final time, until we look back later through a haze of nostalgia and regret.

Rosie’s our first born. There’s a moment that I vividly recall, when she was a tiny baby and I sat on our feeding chair with her late one night, muslin cloth over my shoulder, bottle in hand. There was probably a whiff of soiled nappy but that plays no part in my perfect memory. Instead, our beautiful baby girl lay in my arms gurgling, helpless and innocent, staring into my eyes. All of parenthood lay ahead for me, all of childhood lay ahead of Rosie. I fixed that image in my head and resolved that I would relish every moment of the adventure that lay before us.

Friends, I did not relish every moment. Some moments went decidedly unrelished. Because it turns out that it’s hard being a parent. In fact the only thing harder than being a parent is being a kid.

My mistake was that I went in with ideas. Big ideas about how it would be between me and my girl. I would be her role model. I would be her educator. I would be her confidant. Together we would stride through life, seeking out teachable moments, and I would help shape her into the best Rosie she could be.

The project got off to a strong start. She parroted back my nuggets of wisdom, laughed at my hilarious quips, and most importantly, she embraced the music that I inflicted upon her. Impeccable taste, the judgement of Solomon, and I was her hero. She was 3 years old.

By the time Rosie was 12 our relationship had moved on a little. It seemed that she had given it some thought in the intervening period and concluded that her dad was a bit of a dick. My opinions were now worthless, my presence an utter embarrassment. Most painful of all, any music that I tried to share with her was automatically dismissed as “old”. I reasoned with my daughter, explained that this week’s new music would itself be old next week, but she was having none of it. And why would she? Her father was clearly a halfwit.

Everything flipped.

From being a reluctant participant on the kids’ party circuit, resisting every two hour session of Mister Marvel and Barbie birthday cakes as a tedious interruption of my weekend, I suddenly found myself banished to the streets, ordered to park around the corner from any pick up, the suggestion that I might pop my head in to say “hello” rejected with horror.

From the Saturday mornings of old, when I would get out my guitar and knock out songs, badly, for us to unselfconsciously sing and dance together, to taking Rosie to a Summertime Ball extravaganza of all her favourite pop stars where the mere act of speaking to her and in doing so identifying ourselves as her parents gave rise to a terrifying adolescent fury.

And through it all, my advice, my recommendations, my very existence were met with rolled eyes then a turned back. “Keep the faith, she might not show it, but she is listening,” insisted Lois, failing miserably to make me feel better. I struggled with it all, finding it difficult to accept that my peer-focused daughter no longer took her lead from her dad.

She was always a grafter though. Studious and meticulous, as the exam stakes got higher, so did Rosie’s work ethic. She locked herself away for hours on end, surrounded by mind maps and revision cards. Lois and I looked on in amazement at this patient rigour from one so young — where the hell did that come from? Alongside the focused study, she found her eye for design, immersing herself in Photoshop and beautiful creations.

And somehow, somewhere along the line, my daughter came back to me. Or perhaps I’ve met her halfway, she certainly encouraged me to take a good hard look at myself along the way. I have not returned to heroic dad status, instead Rosie now humours me and addresses me as “Greg” in a knowing and ever so slightly patronising way. But I’ll take that.

After years of laughing in my face when I suggested we go for a run, she quietly started Couch to 5k, and proposed that I might like to jog with her on occasion. Reader, I wept inside. And she soon figured out that a song’s quality is not determined by its newness. We now communicate through music, swapping recommendations and playlists. A few weeks ago, acknowledging that I’d had some influence on this passion of hers, she literally thanked me for the music. I gave her a little smile in return. As I ran a lap of honour, fist in the air, in my head.

She’s not me, of course, far from it. I see frequent flashes of her mum, but mainly she’s herself, now an exceptional, unique young woman. All the same, there are moments when I see her beavering away on her computer on some slightly obsessive techy creative project. I tell her to calm down, to take a break. She ignores me and continues, lost in the flow. And I whisper to myself, “be still, beating heart, truly that is my girl.”

Rosie is leaving home tomorrow. She got her grades, she got her place, and now she’s off to university to study graphic design. It’s the next step on her chosen path to becoming a designer, but more than that, she’s taking off, like thousands of other kids, severing her dependency on mum and dad as she starts to find her own way in the world. We’re going to drive her up in the morning with a car full of more stuff than could possibly fit into one small halls of residence room, then we are going to drive back to London without her. This is everything we ever wanted for her, but it’s difficult to accept that we’ve reached this moment, and we will miss her so. We learned how to protect her. Then we learned how to support her. Now we have to learn to let go.

So she’s off. She’ll be back of course, but not under the same circumstances. Sometimes we do realise that we are experiencing something for the last time. The five of us, together under one roof as a young family in the most intense, challenging, chaotic, stressful, magical living arrangement imaginable, it is now at an end. And Lois and I, we’ll undoubtedly look back over it with a mixture of regret that it’s over, nostalgia for those amazing days gone by, and absolute gratitude for every goddamn minute in which we have been lucky enough to share our home with Rosie and her two siblings.

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