I have lost my little girl to Reading Festival
Judith Woods knows it is time for her 16-year-old to fly free, but still has a churning feeling in her stomach
Somewhere in a field crammed with tents, empty beer cans, full vodka bottles and discarded roll-ups, is my 16-year-old daughter. I’ve been peering at all the aerial shots of this weekend’s Reading Festival – Where’s Wally style – looking for a 5ft 2in strawberry blonde last seen wearing a Burberry bikini top and huge flappy Nike trackie bottoms, but to no avail.
Rationally, I know she is having the absolute time of her little life, high on friendship, freedom and God only knows what else. I know it. But I don’t feel it. I feel anxious, jittery and weirdly, I am uncharacteristically bereft without her.
Along with thousands of other GCSE students who received their results last Thursday, my eldest daughter has made the four-day pilgrimage to Reading Festival, which ends tonight.
The rock festival may be pushing 50 years old, but it has become something of a rite of passage for today’s teenagers. A final summer destination where they go to decompress after weeks of waiting for results. With the hefty price tag of £200-plus to see Post Malone, Dua Lipa, Sigrid and dozens of others I haven’t heard of, the event is twinned with Leeds Festival, to add to its cultural (to today’s teenagers at any rate) significance.
I was out when my daughter left and all I can piece together is that she set off with the following comestibles: chocolate chip brioche, custard creams, a bag of satsumas, vegetarian Scotch eggs and a single bottle of Lucozade.
However, I know exactly what she was wearing. She has new and very beautiful sugared almond pink acrylic nails and bang-on-trend trainers. Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world, whatever her GCSE results may be.
My firstborn travelled by coach along with 80 of her closest friends (some of us can barely summon eight, even for a birthday drink) and with no regular updates, I can only presume she’s alive, well, and having an absolute blast.
Festivals weren’t part of my upbringing; I had to gently explain to her grandmother that it wasn’t a “reading” festival and she wouldn’t really appreciate a book token.
But they are pivotal to my daughter’s generation; living in London, she’s been to the grime orgy of Wireless and its tamer counterpart LoveBox two years running.
I’ve always tended to err on the side of laissez-faire motherhood. I didn’t turn a hair when work meant I missed my younger daughter’s first day at school. Her father was there, job done.
My love is no less intense, but I have no truck with the overbearing sentimentality that comes with the modern cult of helicopter parenting.
I’m here for the long haul, the big stuff, so spare me sports day guilt or the plinkety-plonkety penance of the summer music recital, year after year.
When the elder one was tiny and wanted to climb high walls or impossible trees I would let her, on condition that if she fell off, she promised not to cry. Aged 13, I sent her to a survival skills camp and she loved it. After her exams this summer I didn’t bat an eyelid when she went to Nice for a week with three classmates and stayed in a chichi apartment by the promenade, unchaperoned.
So why have I been feeling so churned about Reading? There’s the sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll factor for sure, but also something deeper.
Her father and I have had the drugs talk about MDMA (that’s ecstasy in old money), the horse tranquilliser ketamine and weed or cannabis or spliff or dope or whatever it’s called these days. Referring to skink instead of skunk didn’t help my case much.
Anyway I kept shouting “Just Say No” – it worked at Grange Hill, didn’t it? While I set about Googling the song released by Zammo and the rest of the cast, my husband gave her some proper advice. I’ve no idea what, but that’s possibly for the best.
The sex in a sleeping bag talk was brief (Ewwwwwww! As if?) and the rest was me brightly announcing I’d ordered a Shewee off Amazon (the original female urination device which allows women to stand to urinate without removing any clothing, perfect for possibly inebriated young girls not wanting to get wee on said bang-on trend trainers.)
Stunned silence ensued from both, even as I explained that, no really, this discreet plastic device with a little funnel was a Festival Must-Have. The daughter had never heard of it. But hey, no sign of it in the bathroom cabinet, so she must have taken it.
As there’s nowhere to recharge her phone, she keeps it switched off most of the time and we haven’t spoken since she arrived. And I miss her. I miss her in a new way that, truth be told, is much more about me than her.
This weekend is a milestone for us both. For the past 16 years I have been so fiercely protective of her, in Forget the first steps, words and days at school – these are the real parenting rites of passage.
Being accepted as a Facebook/ Instagram friend. Once it was social death having you on there, and woe betide you should comment on anything they have posted. Now they think it’s a good way of keeping in touch, and quicker than a phone call to let you know where they are.
Arguing about drinking (yours not theirs). A father used to take a son to the pub for their first pint – now they’re having quiet words with you about your units, and asking whether you really need to open another bottle?
Watching Love Island with them. There’s no more us and them TV any more. You’re probably more into and up to date with “their” programmes than they are, come to think about it.
They swipe right for you. They coped with your divorce and are now in charge of finding you The (next) One. You’ll thank them for it in the end. Probably.
Jane Edwards
my own low-key tiger mother way. I have instinctively, swiftly intervened on her behalf when necessary with conviction and forcefulness – with teachers or frenemies or any figure of authority who would arrogantly belittle someone, simply because of their age and lack of experience.
And now? Now she is all but grown up and I must learn to let her grow away. My job title is the same – mama – but my remit has subtly changed without anyone needing to say it.
My daughter is coming home tomorrow afternoon, or at least I presume she is. I will put fresh sheets on her bed, cook her very favourite supper of vegetarian lasagne, and stock up on Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough chunks.
When that 16-year-old young woman staggers through the door under her huge rucksack, dishevelled and exhausted, I will hold her and hug her like the precious baby cub she will always be to me.
And then I will find out what it’s really like using a Shewee.