MY daughter is about to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. I shall not send her one of those cards that have the key of the door as their motif. Quaintly outmoded as they are anyway, in her case it would be quite inappropriate. She already possesses the key of her own front door: she has been married for nearly two years.
It would be rash and impertinent to make generalizations about early marriages from a single example in one's own family circle - as indeed, it would be rash and impertinent to generalize about marriage in general, however comprehensive the statistics at one's disposal. Marriage is like an iceberg - so little of it shows above the surface.
Accordingly, I can say no more of my daughter's marriage than that it appears to be very happy; but as to my own reactions to it, I can be quite unequivocal.
One does not have to be a Mrs. Bennet nowadays to wish one's daughter safely wed. Having given our children, or allowed them to take, a degree of personal freedom unknown in previous history, we are punished for our indulgence by having to worry and wonder what they do with it.
We try to reassure ourselves with reminders of that good basic training we gave them in the formative years - to think straight, play fair, to value truth above all else: thus armoured, they are surely impregnable. We ourselves, we remember smugly, were rebels in our time, and look at us now. We have always shown our children that we trust them: they will not let us down.
And so on.
None of it helps. If children grow up earlier than they used, people stay young longer, and we are young enough still not to have forgotten the appalling chanciness of being young.
NO APRON STRINGS
And so we watch the clock despite ourselves, lie awake listening for the stealthy click of the latch. When friends inquire we tell them gaily, though it kills us: "Jane's sharing a flat with three other girls - such fun!"
Come holiday time, Jane is hiking in Scotland, ski-ing in Austria, sailing on the Broads, always one of a party of young people as unanchored and unpredictable as herself. Being an affectionate child, she dutifully sends home postcards to assure us she is having a wonderful time. We receive them with gratitude and apprehension.
From these anxieties my daughter has delivered me, and I am thankful; but I have derived from her early marriage more than these negative blessings. Our family group is the richer for a son-in-law who improves continually upon better acquaintance; and my relationship with my daughter has deepened to a new significance.
She has achieved her own identity and I have regained mine. I like to believe that as a mother I have been neither possessive nor oppressive, but such evaluations, I recognize are all in the point of view. My daughter, though in the friendliest possible way, may well have labelled me both.
Those requests that she do this or that, however politely phrased - what were they if not commands in disguise? Those dogmatic assertions of good and bad in music, literature, the arts - what were they but attempts to make her see with my eyes, hear with my ears, judge by my own yardstick of value and no other?
But now we start afresh: the slate is wiped clean, with nothing brought forward from the old account other than an unfaltering affection. We are guests in each other's home, welcomed, made much of, but still guests. We may help each other as opportunity offers, but we make no demands.
All this is as it should be. My horizons have widened, the world is my oyster, and I feel ready to take on any one and anything - even grandchildren.
