My Twins Turned 18, and This Column Is Heading Into Midlife

Hi, lovelies, as of exactly twelve days ago I'm the mom of three legal adults. Welcome to midlife 😉 My banking apps have removed the kids' accounts. All three can now do whatever they want with their money.

They can sign their own contracts for part-time jobs. They can all drive without a parent in the passenger seat and slip out in the middle of the night. They can write their own absence notes at school. They can go to slot-machine arcades and play roulette (heeelp, please no), and the bouncers at the club won't turn them away for their age anymore.

The twins' 18th birthday was truly lovely. It started with the school app announcing that first period was canceled. And third and fourth. And seventh. Having a little extra time that morning was obviously fantastic, because it left us enough time to sing, blow out the candles on the cake, and get lost in the first presents.

The problem with seventh period being canceled was that I had invited all the surprise guests, family members and godparents, to arrive right when the boys would be getting home from school. The new schedule blew that plan to bits. But we haven't been parents for decades for nothing, so of course we can roll with something like that 😉

They had borrowed my car to get to school, and of course they came home way later than expected because they wanted to drop their best friends off first. We were waiting impatiently, since a few more surprises were waiting for them here. At some point their big sister couldn't take it anymore and called to ask where on earth they were, hehe.

The sweet part was that they asked for pancakes for breakfast. And when I asked what they wanted for lunch, they said: fish sticks with mashed potatoes and spinach 😉 A little piece of childhood! I could cry from the sweetness just writing this down. And of course that's what they got! And the mashed potatoes didn't come from a powder packet, made in a rush the way I did it back in the three-hungry-little-kids-and-no-time phase. They came from real potatoes, yum.

Guests trickled in bit by bit, and we ate cake. Their big sister had baked two and I'd baked one, so the day before, our kitchen looked like a bakery, which was lovely. It was the most gorgeous September sunshine, and somehow it couldn't have been more perfect.

What surprised me was how long and how intently the boys went through the two photo albums of their first 18 years that morning. I'd put them together, admittedly partly in tears, buried under far too many unsorted photos from the past years.

We had also reached out beforehand to people who've been part of the boys' lives and asked for a few sentences about them. And a photo. I really want to recommend THIS to you, because it was incredibly beautiful not just for the boys but for us as parents, too.

I simply messaged a handful of people on WhatsApp and asked whether they could send me six sentences at most about one or both of the boys, whatever they most associate with each of them, plus a photo of themselves. Some sent handwritten notes that I photographed, others made collages, and others just sent a short hello.

I had all of it printed in color at the copy shop and bound, so we ended up with little personalized booklets. And I'll just say this: Stories came to light that even we hadn't heard yet… so beautiful. Overall, we had the feeling it was one of the best days of our boys' lives.

The next day, a few relatives were still here. We all had breakfast together and spent the day together, the boys had a soccer game in the afternoon, and in the evening… oh, also so sweet.

A godfather had given one of the boys a gift card for a burger place in Cologne, and the boys knew right away that they wanted to use it that very evening. As a treat for their friends, how great is that! Still: a first drive with a full car ("Whoa, how expensive is gas, anyway?!")… phew, were we glad when everyone made it back in one piece. That's another thing we'll have to get used to now.

From Teen Time to Midlife Time

And because all of our kids are now growing out of the teen years in big strides (our oldest is already in her twenties), I wanted to check in with you: Would it be okay with you if the Teen Time column for teens became a Midlife Time column?

Of course there will still be teen topics, and how we as moms and parents can handle them, since they'll keep us busy. But we also want to put us women in the spotlight, and how we handle this stage of life. With the question of whether the best part, with births and weddings, is already behind us, or whether the really great years of calling our own shots are only starting now.

Because what we're noticing is how differently women shape this time: one who has a late baby, another who goes back to school or suddenly discovers something completely new for herself. One who falls into a crisis of meaning because she's still overwhelmed by how to shape the second half of her life… and who then plants a flower garden on top of the compost heap.

Another who's looking for new meaning, for a change, for new joy: We'd love to talk with you about all of that IN ADDITION to the Teen Time topics. Would you come along? And maybe you even have requests? Then fire away!