Valkyrie's Child

Today I let my ten-and-a-half-year-old daughter go to the shop without an adult for the first time.

This is, apparently, a perfectly normal thing to do.

I did not experience it as a perfectly normal thing to do.

Beatrix wanted to go to the shop with her friend. Her friend is eleven and, apparently, goes to the shop on her own anyway, which she announced with the casual confidence of somebody who could not understand why this was even a discussion.

Beatrix is ten and a half.

Ten and a half is basically eleven.

At least, that’s what I thought when I agreed to this.

It turns out that ten and a half feels considerably younger when you’ve just watched your child disappear around a corner without you.

Still, the shop isn’t far away. There are no major roads to cross. It was the middle of the day. There were two of them. They knew where they were going.

All perfectly reasonable.

So I gave Beatrix my bank card and let them go.

And then I discovered that there is a considerable difference between intellectually believing your child is old enough to walk to a shop with a friend and actually watching her disappear around a corner without you.

I set a ten-minute timer.

Not because I was worried.

Obviously.

It was simply a completely rational calculation based upon the approximate time required for two children to walk from our flat to the shop.

Ten minutes.

I could relax for ten minutes.

There was absolutely no point worrying during those ten minutes because they couldn’t reasonably have reached the shop yet.

This worked surprisingly well, provided you overlook the fact that I positioned myself in the part of the kitchen from which I could see the corner they would eventually have to walk around to come home.

The ten-minute timer went off.

I set another one.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes to walk there, followed by five minutes to wander around a relatively small shop deciding what to buy.

This was not anxiety.

This was logistics.

Or at least that’s what I told myself.

What I was really waiting for was a notification from my bank.

Because I’d given Beatrix my card.

And if a transaction appeared, that meant they’d reached the shop.

So I waited.

And, because the human brain is a truly magnificent organ, mine used this opportunity to remind me of every terrible thing that has ever happened to a child who went somewhere without their parents.

I thought about them getting run over.

There aren’t even any major roads.

I considered ringing the shop to tell them I’d sent my daughter there with my card.

I did not do this, which I think demonstrates considerable restraint.

Then my phone pinged.

£9.63.

I cannot adequately describe how reassuring it was to discover that my child had just spent nearly a tenner of my money.

They’d made it.

They were at the shop.

They’d successfully selected whatever apparently essential merchandise costs £9.63 and Beatrix had successfully used my card to pay for it.

And something in me immediately relaxed.

Not completely, obviously.

They still had to come home.

But they’d got there. They’d crossed the roads they needed to cross. They’d walked into the shop. They’d bought something. They were together and they were fine.

Chances were, I reasoned, that if they could make it to the shop, they could probably make it home again.

So now I just had to wait.

I remained in the kitchen where I could see the corner.

Obviously.

Five minutes passed.

Then a little longer.

I heard shouting and running outside and immediately started listening more carefully.

And then the intercom buzzed.

I answered it in the manner I often answer the intercom:

“We don’t accept callers.”

There was a pause.

Then the deeply offended voice of my daughter:

“DAD!”

Oh.

Her.

The child whose safe return I had spent the previous twenty minutes monitoring with all the relaxed confidence of an air-traffic controller was, in fact, safely home.

And I had just refused to let her into the building.

Anyway.

She went to the shop.

She bought something.

She came home.

Nothing happened.

Which, of course, was the whole point.

She did something without me, and nothing happened.

I’m not ready to let her go to the shop completely on her own yet.

And that’s okay.

Today she went with a friend.

She had my bank card. I knew where she was going. I knew roughly how long it should take. She had a way of contacting me.

It was a small step.

But I think this is how independence actually happens.

Not in one enormous moment where your child suddenly becomes independent and you nobly wave them off into the world.

It happens in tiny increments.

You let them walk a little further ahead.

You stop accompanying them somewhere you’ve always accompanied them before.

You trust them with something you’ve always done for them.

You give them your bank card.

You watch them disappear around a corner.

You set a ten-minute timer.

Then, perhaps, a five-minute timer.

You wait for £9.63 to disappear from your account.

And, very gradually, you learn to let them go.