“Hold your mum’s hand and call an ambulance.”

“Should I give her extra morphine?”

“Good idea.”

Then I say something I rarely say when I don’t know the full situation.

“Your mum will be OK.”

At 16, the roof shouldn’t cave in like this on your life, but it sometimes does for this courageous carer of a terminally ill mother, and I am sympathetic.

Thankfully, a short hospital stay restores my patient, thus inserting a good chapter in a bad story.

That evening I am dictating letters and mulling daughters as caregivers when a question slices my tension.

“How much can I spend on your card?”

On the eve of turning 16, my daughter is out with friends, an idea I vaguely remember endorsing.

“I’m happy to pay for dinner,” she said, flaunting her newfound “bank” from a minimum-wage job.

‘You don’t have to,” I offered.

“OK, then!”

Now, I am tempted to play dumb. What dinner, what card? Instead, I text a smiley face and “spend what you need”, pairing trust with responsibility.

On the surface, there are no similarities between my daughter and I at age 16. If I factor in my mother, who turned 16 in the 1960s, the experiences are foreign.

My Indian mother staged a hunger strike to attend university. Her father vociferously objected to her all-male class, then commissioned a rickshaw replete with opaque curtain to ferry her and decreed that she sit in a corner, away from prying........

© The Guardian