Happy Birthday Isla!
Friday, August 04, 2006
My daughter Isla is fourteen years old today.
This is extremely scary, mainly because I'm still eighteen inside my head. The body no longer looks eighteen and the mental processes have slowed and, in some places, stuck, but something vital is definitely locked at the eighteen on the dial.
In a few years, then, my daughter will be older than I am.
That aside, Isla has been the beautiful core of the last fourteen years of my life. She is smart and kind and tolerant and funny and beautiful and she is very much her own person.
When she was very young and we still lived in Singapore - where she and her brother and sister were born when I was working there for Reuters - she and I would walk down each Saturday morning to the town centre and visit all the big shopping malls. (Singapore was not an exciting place!) Isla talked early and she talked well and she spent those walks asking questions and chatting. In some ways I find it hard to think of ways she's changed since she was a precocious two year-old. She has grown, obviously, but those early conversations seemed to be as full of as much magic and intelligence as her conversations do today.
Anyway, this is just a public Happy Birthday for a special girl. Thank you for bringing so much joy into my life.
This is extremely scary, mainly because I'm still eighteen inside my head. The body no longer looks eighteen and the mental processes have slowed and, in some places, stuck, but something vital is definitely locked at the eighteen on the dial.
In a few years, then, my daughter will be older than I am.
That aside, Isla has been the beautiful core of the last fourteen years of my life. She is smart and kind and tolerant and funny and beautiful and she is very much her own person.
When she was very young and we still lived in Singapore - where she and her brother and sister were born when I was working there for Reuters - she and I would walk down each Saturday morning to the town centre and visit all the big shopping malls. (Singapore was not an exciting place!) Isla talked early and she talked well and she spent those walks asking questions and chatting. In some ways I find it hard to think of ways she's changed since she was a precocious two year-old. She has grown, obviously, but those early conversations seemed to be as full of as much magic and intelligence as her conversations do today.
Anyway, this is just a public Happy Birthday for a special girl. Thank you for bringing so much joy into my life.
