Leavings and Partings

When I started this blog I didn't even have a digital camera, and Maddy was six. Here's a photo of us from 2005, age 11, taken on an old Nokia phone, the earliest photo I can find of us together on this computer.


Here's guest-blogger Maddy in 2007 in Budapest, directing Hellboy 2, to the bewilderment of Guillermos Del Toro and Navarro.

She took this last week on her phone, when we went on a short father-daughter road-trip. She's seventeen going on eighteen.

In two hours she drives off across the country to go to college.

I'm so happy for her, so completely proud, but, at the same time, the joy is suffused with melancholy: I feel like an era is over, in a way that I didn't when Mike and Holly went to college. That was that.  I've co-raised three remarkable children and now have an empty house. (If you exclude the dogs, houseguests and all the people wandering around.)

And I've been waiting for so long for a time when I could go anywhere and do anything (as long as the anything is writing stuff people are waiting for), and now it's here and I have absolutely no idea what to do with it. (With perfect timing, Amanda starts rehearsals for her 14 month World Tour this week, and says "Why don't you go somewhere that makes you happy and write?" She's right, of course, as she normally is. I just need to work out where that is.)

Right. I will go for a jog by the river now, and then type out a story.

Labels:  Maddy, the terrors of absolute freedom, being a parent, what Maddy looks like