20 Years a Mom, and Our First Birthday Without Her at Home

Hi, friends. Today I've been a mom for 20 years. Two decades ago, our wonderful little girl came screaming into the blinding light of the world. It was the summer of the World Cup in Germany, the one Germans still call the “summer fairy tale,” and it was hot! Not as hot as the recent heat wave, but in every photo from the hospital, sweat is running down our faces. At 20, our baby is officially no longer a teenager!

20 Years a Mom, 20 Years a Daughter

Big birthdays are always special, but this one is special in a whole new way. Last September our daughter moved out. She's been living in a shared apartment in another city ever since, and where I used to set up the birthday table in our kitchen first thing in the morning, this year will be different. This year there's no birthday girl at the table when I come downstairs… and how weird is that, honestly?!

And what a shame she's not in school anymore, because for once, finally, her birthday would have landed BEFORE summer break instead of smack in the middle of it. Our state, North Rhine-Westphalia, starts its summer break so late this year. So here's the plan: she'll celebrate in the morning with her roommate, then go to class, and in the evening we'll visit her and take her to dinner at a restaurant.

It raises some very practical questions! Do I bring a cake? How do balloons go over in a restaurant? And do I pack all the presents in a suitcase?!? Okay, kidding.

I'll probably set up a birthday table like always and wait for her to come home for the weekend, the day after her birthday. She does that a lot, since her part-time college job is still near us and her boyfriend lives nearby, too. She's only an hour away (if there's no traffic), so the distance is easy enough to bridge.

Her Second Big Birthday

So here we are at the second big birthday of her life. It's fascinating when the kids you once carried around turn into grown-ups. People who manage on their own and go their own way. Who are still part of your universe, but now circle the galaxy as satellites.

“She's really just gone,” one of her brothers said the other day. Even ten months after the move, it still sinks in that there's one less person in our everyday life. When she works at the café on Sundays, we often drop by and order apple strudel. Sometimes she sends videos from her new hometown on Snapchat to the family group chat.

Her jogging or biking or pulling all-nighters before college deadlines. The great classes she tried through her Urban Sports membership, or how good the food is that she cooks with her roommate. Then we're in touch even more when it's her dad's birthday or her brothers' upcoming 18th… when it comes to that, she's still totally in the family game. She doesn't miss family celebrations, either!

A New Life Without Us

How happy she is that she found this apartment. How much she likes her classmates. How she's noticing that when it comes to keeping house, different things matter to her than to us. That's a process, too! A growing process, a finding-out, a learning. How she's still curious about travel, even though she now often goes without us, because we're still (!) tied to the school vacation calendar…

How amazed she is at how tall and mature her brothers have gotten, simply because she doesn't see them every day anymore. And when she does come home for a visit, we think it all the time, too: WHAT a young woman! Just wow. Where will she end up next year after her bachelor's degree? It's such an exciting stage of life, with so much still open and new and no path laid out yet.

And it takes us back to our own twenties, too! How lovely to get to experience all of it again! We're so happy about this wonderful girl of ours, and today we're celebrating her, and ourselves, the right way!

HAPPY 20!