"...and When I Was 18 (fill in the blank)"

Nothing screams paranoid self-reflection like one’s own child becoming an adult. 

My daughter – the only one I’ve got I might add – turns 18 today.

Exhale…

I remember when I was eighteen. The sad truth: I probably remember more about THAT year than I do LAST year. So I really do get the excitement that today brings. (Actually, sometimes I really don’t. When we turned 18 we were heading straight to bars. You know, the bars we’d somehow been getting into since 16. What exactly is this generation looking forward to so much?  Buying scratch tickets?)

Anyway…

Much to her perpetual disappointment, I’ve written about her often throughout the years. I’ve still got a lot to tell but I have to safely wait for the day when she, too, finds those stories amusing. 

And not enraging.

(Due time, due time.)

She’s so much like me, it’s scary.

And she’s so vastly different from me, I sometimes wonder if she beams up to her mother ship each night after shutting her door.

I’m excited that she’ll be going off to school in the fall and I’m thrilled that she is restless to begin the next chapter of her life.

But as her birthday’s approached -- not gonna lie --  I’ve become a bit melancholy.  I know it’s her last one here under my roof, in her messy bedroom, amidst her brothers’ bedlam, with her family.  With me.  And if I think about it too long I get pouty.

She won’t be here for her birthday anymore.  She’ll be in college for (at least) the next four of them.  And after that I have no doubt she’ll be far, far away from the messy bedroom of her adolescence and off to spectacular Elsewheres.

She certainly won’t be celebrating any birthdays while living in my basement.  She’s not that kid.  (Her brothers?  Hmmm, let’s plan to catch up down the road, shall we?)  No, in the blink of an eye she’ll be embarking on her passion for helping others.  She’ll be finding ways to purify drinking water in impoverished areas.  She’ll be hauling recyclables.  She’ll be building schools or saving animals or planting trees or any other act of immeasurable integrity that – again – keeps me curious as to how she’s really mine.

Perhaps as we both become accustomed to living our daily lives apart, we’ll start to learn more about each other in absentia.

Maybe she’ll learn that – without an endless supply of clean linens at her disposal – picking wet towels off the floor was pretty solid advice after all.

And maybe I’ll learn that – try as she did to conceal it – she’s got a soft spot for her ol’ mom and might just miss the watchful eye and protective aura every once in a while.

Fingers crossed.

So the birthday’s a biggie.

To announce it in true style, we shall go next weekend to take an enormous bite out of the Big Apple.

We’ll leave behind youth sports and homework and housework…

and bring our tissues to “Phantom of the Opera”…

and share laughter and calories with great friends…

and spend lots and lots of money we really don’t have…

and make some fresh-start, new-page, start-of-a-new-chapter, bonafide-grown-up memories.

And then put all the photos on Instagram and Facebook.  Maybe tweet some shout-outs to the suckas we left behind.  It’ll be the bomb. It’s sure to be so memorable I bet she’ll talk about it for days with her new roommates next fall.

Then those roomies will probably want to come visit at Thanksgiving…

And maybe we’ll all do it again at Christmastime…

(am I getting a little ahead of myself?)

Happiest of Birthdays, Carson Kelly.  You are an unmatched light in my life.

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