TWELVE!

My oldest - the child of the last of my bumbling youth, my firstborn - turned 12 today.

And twelve is a big deal. Twelve feels very much like the end of childhood, like the very last of it and then it's onto Teenagerland and the vast plains of adulthood and this is not precisely a sad thing unless you really romanticize being a kid, but it's poignant, at least.

"You're not going to be a bad teenager, are you?" I asked her this morning, and she gave me a funny, scrunchy look.

"How would I know?" she said. "I can say right now that I have no plans to be bad, but apparently hormones give you brain damage, so I can't PROMISE you anything."

I was sort of a late bloomer and by "sort of" I mean "I was the dictionary definition of a late bloomer and entered high school as a short little breastless child" and I floundered my way through adolescence and it's really, REALLY shocking to me that I came out of it with a lovely husband and a life that had worked out more or less exactly the way I wanted it, since the path there was so hard and meandering. I want things easier for my kids, want them to have a life without needless pain. The horrible part? Me WANTING that doesn't make it happen - my kids are going to go through what they go through and all I can hope is that what we have given them in the breathtaking short years of childhood has been enough.

I still dream about being a child all the time, as though childhood was this place that feeds everything else in my life, as though childhood is this other room with the door always slightly open. And my oldest child - my firstborn, the child of the end of my bumbling youth - is standing in the doorway of that room, standing in the threshold and what I hope for her is that her childhood will always be this magical place for her, a place full of sunlight and days at the farm and fairy houses and St. Nicholas Day and her parents' flawed, human love, that her childhood is a radiant place and that the rest of her days are human and golden and happy.