Cuckoos in the Nest.

 "She was coming to a realization that accepting who she was would be the jailer's key to liberate her from this cuckoo's nest."
~ Judy Byington

I cannot be the only parent who has looked at their children in bemusement & wondered just where they had come from.

One understands, naturally, the process of *The Birds & The Bees* but the exact combination of genes, DNA, opportunity & sheer dumb luck that makes one child one way & their sibling something else entirely seems a most extraordinary process requiring more courage than most parents realise when they enter into the contract.

As you can see we produced 5.  The first & the last are gingers, & red hair, as I'm sure you know, is a recessive gene requiring both parents to carry it in order to reproduce it at all. The twins are identical & the least said about that probably the better. Some days it seems we have yet to move on from:  You try this on so I can see how I will look in it. Twins, especially identicals, inhabit a world of plurality singletons will never grasp. There is no me, my, mine, only us, we, ours. They are natural socialists.

And no matter what political progressives think girls are nothing like boys. They are wired differently even before they are born.

A month ago our 2 youngest moved out together.  I do not think either of them thinks this is an optimum arrangement  but it was the only way either of them could manage it at all, mainland rents being what they are & their income being what it is.

After more than 30 years parenting being a parent is always going to be a part of who you are but  I was determined I was not going to sit at home & mope.  I started counting the positives: I did not have to wait up for the last boat so my singer could be safely collected from twice weekly rehearsals; I did not have to get up before the crack of dawn to run my mainland worker to his boat; I could actually watch some of the weird & wonderful t.v that only I enjoy without a chorus of groans & enough no votes to veto any chance I had of historical documentaries getting a look in; No~one to nick my cat to be their foot warmer; My chocolate would remain uneaten until I was ready to eat it...

True my co~vegetarian left me with a carnivore...but then she took the other carnivore with her.

It is the strangest thing...the child who still works on the island rings most mornings so she can get a lift & use our internet prior to starting work because no~one at her house has got round to hooking them up yet.  She investigates the fridge like a love~lorn woman. Her brother arrives next week to use my computer because his doesn't have word...And before we could even begin to get used to the idea that after all these years we were back to where we had begun, just the two of us, the Missionary Child arrived home from Chile & this is her home base. 

The tenuous balance I was seeking has tippled dangerously, a gunnel dipping below the waterline. One cannot reprimand a 26 year old independent woman as though she was 5 but she, apparently, reverts to being a daughter of the house as if she had never left. And my daughter, in the way of these things, is far more like my mother than she is like me ~ which makes for some unsettling & very strange encounters.