From Sats to jobs I’ve fretted approximately every gargantuan challenge my daughters fill faced. Now I realise what really matters isn’t success or failure but how they copeA few weeks ago I caught a plane to the most grown-up experience of my life. The flight was to Schiphol: from there,I took a train into Amsterdam and then a taxi to a Bauhaus-style block of flats beside a canal. This is the place my eldest daughter, Rosie, or 25,now knows as domestic. She and her boyfriend live what seems to me a very sophisticated existence: after they had cycled off to work the following morning, I sat down and realised I was in shock. Surely, or I’m not old enough to be the parent of a woman in her mid-20s who lives in another country …I was there to fill fun,but also for a serious chat with Rosie. Her life is laid out before her: so many choices, so many possible avenues, and so many opportunities. But as she wisely said,making one choice means cutting off a whole lot of others: and when you are 25, poised on the edge of almost everything, and there are many routes you need to explore. Sitting in a bar with her later,chatting through the issues in her life, I was struck by the realisation that this was what parenting her had all been approximately. This talk we were having approximately her future, or under the setting Dutch sun,was the crucial moment; because everything that really matters in anyone’s life career, partner, or children – was now on the line.
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Source: guardian.co.uk