Cameron is turning 21 this year and it feels like we are both growing up.

This photo was taken 15 years ago. I was so young, the kids were so young. I was knee deep in a pretty crappy divorce navigating living at home again while trying to keep these two kiddos as stable as possible. 

I had no idea what I was doing but did it anyway because there was no other choice. 

The bond you have with your first born child is different to the rest of your children. There is something about the child who made you a mom. You don’t love them more than the other children, just differently.

In so many ways him and I grew up together. As he was learning and making mistakes as a child, I was learning and making mistakes as a parent. Without meaning to he helped me figure out a lot about being a mother.

The first child is, in many ways, the proof of concept. They are proof you can actually be a parent, that you can keep them fed, clothed, educated and functioning in society. 

The first born reaches all the milestones first and we are now fast approaching another first milestone and it is a symbolic one. 

Turning 21 isn’t very different from turning 18, he is an adult already and doesn’t need my permission to do anything. But turning 21 makes it all so official. He is now an proper, real grown up adult. 

And I have been a parent for almost 21 years! It is crazy to think about but I am finally starting to feel like I know what I am doing. It has taken almost 21 years but I finally feel confident in my ability as a mother but more importantly I feel comfortable. 

Being a mother never came naturally to me. I wasn’t handed my baby and suddenly filled with “maternalness”. It took a long long time for it to feel natural and instinctual. But as they got older, it became so much easier. When we could talk and discuss things, when they started having their own opinions and their own voice, that is when I started to feel more comfortable. In hindsight I suppose it is when I started to grow up as well. 

And now as we start a new season again, I feel like it is not only his coming of age but mine too. 

Unlike so many parents I have loved my kids teenager years, I have loved watching them find their own path and become their own, unique people, separate to me but still connected. 

As I approach my 21st year as a parent, this poem, once again, so perfectly sums up what it is like to be a parent. 

“It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.” Cecil Day-Lewis