“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........