Today, my eldest child turns 15. Do you remember 15?

I do, so clearly, harshly.

I hope it is kinder to him than it was to me—I hope he flourishes and flies this year instead of suffering. But I know he will suffer, at least a little, no matter what I do or say, no matter how much I try to protect him.

‘Tis that stage, that age. Metamorphosis into adulthood is intense and dramatic—it involves suffering. Perhaps if it doesn’t, the result is arrested development…

I worry… did you ever, by the way, realize mothering, parenting would be 90 per cent worrying? I worry. Of course, I worry. I worry about what life will throw at him and whether I’ve given him sufficient tools to deal with it. I worry… about everything, really.

I worry most about—forgetting. The tool that has helped me the most along this parenting journey is my clear—harsh—memory of what it was like to be six. Then eight, 12, 16. I don’t remember pre-six very well, but I have a younger brother, and I remember him, vividly, from age three.

Remembering myself as a child—remembering my thoughts, feelings, frustrations, joys—has helped me to be a better parent: to see my children as they are at that age, as they must be at that age, and not want them to be… well, you know. Miniature adults, or, worse, two-dimensional limited (idealized) models from a television screen or a Hollywood script.

I hope I don’t suddenly lose that. It seems so many of us do—forget. Forget what it was like, felt like to be a child. A teenager—child no more, not quite adult. I worry—I hope—I can’t forget what I was like at that age just as my son most needs me to remember what the transformation of adolescence does to a human.

Caterpillars and butterflies do it better. Impenetrable chrysalis. External stasis. Inside: complete and total metamorphosis, transformation, reduction of what as a caterpillar into a liquid DNA soup from which the miracle of the butterfly is created.

(I’ve told you before, have I not, my love, that the caterpillar-becoming-a-butterfly is the reason I don’t need to believe in god to know the universe is divine?)

Maybe I will think of adolescence as a butterfly’s chrysalis, a moth’s cocoon—nature’s armour, protecting the magic that happens inside.

Metaphors… help.

In a human, the magic doesn’t happen just inside though. And this is both hard—and wonderful. I do love this: how sometimes, it is the child who walks into the room—then starts to talk and I get a glimpse of the man—then the toddler suddenly surfaces, a regression that comes complete with a two-year-old’s facial expressions and desires. Then the man returns… disappears…

I love it. I fear it. It is necessary, inevitable. I bow before its force.

Happiest of birthdays. First born. First loved. First caterpillar… first butterfly.

Fly.

xoxo

“Jane”