My 15 year old threw her first real party this weekend. We had the house full of happy, loud and drunk teenagers. There's nothing out of the ordinary about teenage drinking, Danish drinking culture is very permissive. They were all really nice young people. most of them were more or less queer. my daughter's generation is significantly less homophobic than my own. For them, queerness is simply a fact of life, not a friction point. At least here society has progressed.

It was a really good experience. They were all enjoying themselves.

For ages we've had lots of dumb conflicts over parties and drinking. Although both of us have come from a good place, my partner and I have been disagreeing about how to handle it. She has been concerned with safety and anxious about what could happen, trying to hold back the tide, I have been more concerned with building independence and been more on the permissive side. Our daughter has felt unfairly restricted compared to her friends, my partner has felt like she was the only one trying to keep her safe and I have felt caught in the middle, torn between loyalty to my partner and my belief that our daughter could handle the responsibility. But lately it seems that my partner has thawed to the idea that our daughter has entered that phase of life. Having her friends over gave my partner and I the chance to meet them and see that they're alright and it gave our daughter reassurance that she can be open about this part of her life as well. It feels like we are all much more in alignment with eachother than before and I'm much more calm about her starting high school at the end of this summer and the parties she is undoubtedly going to attend in the future.

It also turns out that there are practical benefits to letting your teenager host a party. She has never been as motivated for cleaning up as she was preparing for her guests to come and she threw away all the junk in the garden that we have stared at mournfully every weekend, always meaning to do something about yet never quite finding the time for.

It doesn't feel like that many years ago when I was 15 myself and just as eager to take on the world. I'm really happy and relieved that my daughter has a much more positive experience being a teenager than I had myself. She has friends and girlfriends and has lots of fun, nothing like the grey loneliness that was always my curse. It is a weird complex feeling, seeing her going through this period of her life reminds me of how I had it and that fills me with grief thinking about what could have been but I am also immensely happy to see her thrive and proud of her.

Our six year old is growing more independent as well The next day we took him to his second-ever football tournament. Last weekend the weather had been great and his team had won all their matches, this weekend it was cold and windy and rainy and they lost all their games. He took it nicely though and their coach was really good at keeping their spirits up.

On Sunday my mum came over and we drove out to meet a stone cutter. My father passed earlier this year and it was about time we got him a proper headstone. We met the stone cutter at his workshop way out in the sticks. It was an interesting place. The yard around the workshop was essentially a graveyard for old headstones that had been salvaged from discontinued gravesites and was now waiting to be recycled into new memorials as the blackberry vines was overgrowing them.

The stone cutter himself was a really nice guy who loved talking about his craft and told us about how he worked and showed us his shop that he shares with a sculptor. He told how he was one of the few remaining independent stone cutters as a large corporation was now dominating the headstone market. The tendency of capital to concentrate is no loss pronounced in the death business than everywhere else.

Eventually we settled on a headstone. My mum got what she wanted and even though it is a non-standard shape (which is fitting, for better or worse my dad was a non-standard man all his life and it would have been a poor memorial to give him the same kind of stone that everyone else gets) it didn't end up costing more than an ordinary shape would have.