Small blue dot

On raising free-range kids, with GPS’s help

My daughter turned thirteen this year. Which means she is now old enough to go out on her own. Whether it’s school supervised excursions (the bus drops her back at school at 7pm), or hanging out with friends at the mall.

I am the parent-Uber, pulling up to the mall entrance, and watching her disappear into the crowd, without a backward glance. Then, my wife and I also enter this mall, and just ‘casually’ shop around, being careful not to run into my daughter, because that would be embarrassing for her, in front of her friends, and embarrassing for me, since I said I would be going back home.

This means my transformation into my own parents has hastened. But I have tools my mother did not have, chief among them being the location of my daughter’s phone, which she believes I have turned on for ‘the day’, but which is actually on ‘indefinitely’.
I tell her to be careful crossing the street, not to get into any trouble, not to lose her money, and definitely not the phone. But more than the worrying, I am happy. For so long, she has seen the world through us, going where we went, eating what we ate, following the decisions we took. Her map was our map. Now, her world is slowly diverging from ours, text by text, inside joke by inside joke. And I am happy that it is so, for that is how it has always been.
I am sad too. For I know what this is: the beginning of her moving away. The only thing I can do is to close my eyes, be mindful of it all, and recognise the value of every moment that I have with her, before they, too, are gone, till all I will have left are memories in an empty nest.

But most of all, I am thankful. I am thankful for this precise bittersweet emotion, of proudly watching my child slowly fluttering her wings, waiting to fly, knowing that she will meet headwinds along the way, but that she will find her way still, riding the slipstreams, and make her own nest somewhere, and then track locations of her own. Because love, it turns out, is a blue dot on a map through space and time.

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