Blossom Is 14 Years Old Now

My eldest child has done it again. She’s gotten a year old and a that much closer to adulthood in what feels like a blink of an eye. My baby, the beautiful and bold Blossom, turned 14 today.  It seems like yesterday she was a newborn …

Sweet Babou and I were delirious with joy at the arrival (more than a week overdue) of our new daughter, and my parents were over the moon as well. Not only was Blossom the first (and yearned for) grandchild, she was born on my dad’s birthday. Happy birthday to Papaw, too!

There was such adoration of the new baby, you would have thought Blossom was the first and only child to ever come into the world. And we quickly discovered she was an infant of strong opinions. For one thing, she was easily exasperated by our novice parenting.

When exasperated by our foolishness, she’s scream. Strangely, this screaming almost always took place between 2:00 AM and dawn. I was a very tired mommy, as well as a thrilled one. And I was thrilled to discover the personality in the this tiny bundle I brought home from the birthing center. She was awesome, and alert, and grumpy, and possibly the reincarnation of a little old Jewish man …

Oy! These parents she has!

That first year was a exhausting time of discovery, insanity, and elation, and before I knew it my baby was a year old.

Then I turned around and she was two …

Then three …

And before I could brace myself for it, she was taller than me and shooting into her teens. 

 

She’s as delightful to us now as she was when she was a baby, but it is strange having a daughter only four years away from being a legal adult. We are no less worried about her, and desperate to make her life wonderful, but we have so much less control over her environment.

She’s in secondary school (high school for Americans) and dealing with some bullying. Some kids are being cruel about her autism. Some of the ‘popular’ kids who were her friends last year have turned on her, because they’ve figured out that no amount of American accent can make her ‘cool’.  Some of the boys are hassling her because they don’t know how to handle any girl who doesn’t know how to be ‘girlish’ by the current cultural standards of femininity.  She is an unabashed geek with a love of art and anime and manga, a polyglot getting top marks is Welsh, French, and Chinese, and knows how to code … but is way too curvaceous for them to think of her as one of the guys.  Some of the girls call her ‘fat’ (she’s not, she 5’6” tall and is a USA size 8/10) to make her feel ashamed of the figure she got way earlier than theirs.

And there is very little I can do to make teenage school kids be anything other than snarky little shits.

Blossom is doing okay, though. She has also retained all the enthusiasm, daring, tenderness, kindness, and sense of justice that she showed even as a toddler. She loves almost everyone, tried her best to comfort those in pain,  fearlessly defends those who are bullied, and looks out for her little sisters to the best of her ability.  She has a core group of good friends – fellow drama and art geeks like her – and loves the teachers at her school. The school is doing it’s best to cut the worst of her bullies off at the knees. She has finally learned girls who are nice to you one day and mean the next day are ALWAYS toxic and she needs to stop trying to build/repair friendships with them. She is doing better about ignoring boys that are pestering her for attention; she only gives them attention when they are speaking nicely to rather than goofing off and teasing her.

She’ll be fine. But my God how I hate having to watch her deal with all the teen bullshit. I know I lived through it too – that we all go through it – but it hurts to see her have to learn to navigate these stormy seas without me at her side all the time.

Happy 14th Birthday, Blossom. Thank you for making my life a better one, and the world a better place to live by the grace of your presence.