Seventeen, four days ago, Pisces baby not quite all grown up. They all say it happens so fast and they all say she got not quite all grown up so quick but they’re all wrong, they couldn’t be more wrong – it’s taken forever to get here, an absolute age, an entire lifetime of 17 long years. The immensity of it is amazing. I have felt that way ever since she turned one. A whole year seemed to move like some weird, slow continuum of time and space; every day was full of life, full of love, full of her. “You fill up my senses like a night in a forest,” John Denver sang. It wasn’t much like that apart from the screams but I appreciate the sentiment, the overpoweringness of someone you never get over the shock of seeing and being able to say: “This is my daughter.”
Seventeen, in her last year at school, making plans to go to university at Victoria or maybe Yale, to train in law or maybe psychiatry. You reach an age when you run out of options and your only dreams are nightmares, where there is nothing unknown except the experience of death – gosh I have a sunny attitude towards old age. But she is an open book yet to start, an ocean without view of land. Everything is possible, the future is hers to shape. God it’s heartbreaking to watch. I saw my neighbour the other day after he got back from Christchurch to settle in his daughter at a halls of residence for her first year at Canterbury. You could tell he was moving in too much silence. “She’s leaving home,” Paul McCartney sang, and added, cruelly: “Bye bye.” Childhood is a departure lounge where all the flights are delayed. At 17, though, the boarding announcements are beginning to squawk in that undecipherable static of all airport PA systems. Victoria, Yale; law, psychiatry; bye bye.
Seventeen, and the slamming of doors, the terrible wounding things said without warning, the silent seething storms which are worse and more bitter than the terrible things said out loud – all of this is my behaviour. She’s generally a pretty calm customer. Adolescence hasn’t conformed to what it says on the packet. We had a photo of her on the fridge when we lived together as a family; it was taken when she was a few weeks old. She was in bed or a cot with the blanket pulled up, and she was looking to the side with a small, content smile. It was a portrait of poise. Strange how she has always had that nature. If everything was nurture, she’d be smashing mirrors and – this is the worst of my habits, the darkest of my moods - talking like a robot, disconnected from human emotion. Kids go their own way. “Your children are not your children,” wrote the worst poet in the history of the world, Kahlil Gibran. “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” Badly put but I get it.
Seventeen, with her mother’s beauty and brains, a total sweetheart, kind, thoughtful, good fun, hard working, mature … Every parent regards their child as a saint, reveres them as special. “Look at the stars,” Coldplay sang, “how they shine for you.” But ever since she was at creche, and began her long childhood career of playdates, I have been fascinated by her friends, found them so many of them adorable and charming and…special. I sometimes wonder if hers is a golden generation. Parents in the 1960s were generally conservative, and drove their kids mad; too many of them were the complete opposite ie crazed by sex, drugs and bad ideas in the 1970s and 80s, and drove their kids mad; 90s parents were the mad children of the 60s, 70s and 80s, and drove their own kids to counselling. Since 9/11, parents have just been grateful not to raise terrorists, and happily driven their kids anywhere they want to go. I accept that all of this may well lack sociological accuracy but I genuinely suspect 17-year-old New Zealanders right now are the sanest, most well-balanced New Zealand 17-year-olds ever.
