Wake Me When My Daughter is 20

End of the innocence. Mine. Bus pass pictures taken on the first day of school grade 7 to 11 - the high school years in Quebec. 

I came in still a child having been in elementary school just two months before. It appears I didn't change too much too fast that until grade 10 when it looks like I might have had a wee puff before the picture was taken and then who knows what's going on in the last picture ... Cynical? Menstrual? Sad it's my last year on the kiddie ride of life? Thrilled that it is? 

If the change in my signature is any indication I was a different girl every year. But, I didn't give my parents as rough a ride as some who know me may think. Those years were good - for the most part - and I was a still a virgin for another 6 months after that last picture was taken.

I had a few part time jobs, lots of friends, enjoyed my tokes but never bothered with anything harder, and while there was heartache and confusion the only thing that really stands out is the nickname I had to live with almost all the way through: Flatsy Patsy. No boobs, that was my lot. Could have been worse for sure. 

But that was back then. When the phone was attached to the wall, pot grew out of the ground and porn wasn't something we'd see for another decade. Divorce was rare, moms didn't work and no one worried about bad men in panel vans.

We have a daughter and she is changing, she still has another two years of elementary school. But those two years will be gone in a blink of an eye and with it all the stuff of childhood.

She's changing, no doubt about it, but so far so good. She’s not moody or cranky, petulant or obstinate (yet) but she has begun to feel emotions and confusion to new depths.  She's wise and cautious and she’s beginning to do what we have been preparing her for - stepping away, just a little. 

But at the same time she is every bit a kid and she still believes, wholeheartedly, in fairies. I am loathe to have these remaining innocent years sullied with discussions about the less magical side of life. We make her aware without giving her details, frankly and I am in no mood to have to venture forth. I want to go back. I want to go back far enough to stuff her back into my womb. Forever.

Can't. So instead we discuss danger in tender terms and endeavour to help her - and her younger brother - develop the skills they need to ease into the world that awaits. Try to take it one step at time while their environment relentlessly pulls them in at a rate that we can barely clock. 

I am not looking forward to this next decade of parenting. 

I pretty much sailed through my teens and I am ill prepared to help navigate the seas ahead for my daughter - assuming she even lets me aboard. We are headed for uncharted waters rife with sharks and stingers and undertow. 

These first ten years? Loved all of ‘em. I remember sleepless nights and puke fests thinking; “One day I will long for this kind of soothable, washable problem.” And here we are getting close to them.

Heart break, hormones, cyber safety, text anxiety, smelly pits and acne angst is The Dark Woods around the corner and my daughter, though still frolicking in the Enchanted Forest, has one toe out on the troll bridge. Once she crosses over she’ll never get back to fairyland. 

And all the Good Queen power I have had at my fingertips to repair and calm, will be gone, as will my council when I unwittingly morph into her pathetic court jester, my very existence enough to embarrass and shame her into silence and my fix-it-with-a-kiss spells will only make things worse where once they had the magic of Merlin.

Someone pass the sleeping potion and wake me when she's 20.