“It feels safer this side of 18. The ground feels surer”

I PULL into my drive just before midnight, and from a distance see three women tumbling out of the house in heels.

I watch them pick their way across the uneven ground carefully, shrieking and laughing. I see now as I park that one of them is my 18-year-old daughter and she’s flanked by two old friends. I get out of the car and they greet me — arms outstretched — with a degree of enthusiastic fondness and delighted surprise that smacks of drink immediately. All sparkled up for clubbing, they stand in front of me. My daughter says, “dad’s in the bath” and asks if I can spin them into town instead. “He says he’ll be down in five minutes,” she says, “but you know what he’s like.”

“Hop in then,” I say on a tired out-breath, “quick.” They clack across the concrete, shouting effusive thanks and in a quick, coltish flurry of legs and swinging hair, they fold their long smooth limbs into the car, one of them sticking a leg back out and grinding a lit cigarette stub under her heel before drawing her leg back in. Their mood is effervescent, expansive and fills the car. I can feel myself smiling, despite my tiredness. The conversation is fragmented by arrangements shouted into phones and punctuated by ring-tones, but I pick up the pieces; they talk of this lad and that lad. Both lads, it seems, like one of the girls in the back. “But she’s unattaaaaaainable,” they tell me. The girl shrugs, says she doesn’t want to go out with either and then they all start to bob about, singing, “I like them tall girls, I like them short girls, I like them brown-haired girls, I like them blonde-haired girls, I like them big girls, I like them skinny girls, I like them carrying a little bitty-weight girls… I get all the girls, I get all the girls, I get all the girls….” It’s a Calvin Harris song, they tell me before tripping up on the lyrics from laughing too much.

They seem totally, confidently autonomous; in charge of their destinies. Good luck to the Calvin Harrises, I think.

Outside the club, they spill out of the car, tugging short skirts down and straightening tops. They look lovely; they’ve learnt the tricks; there’s a whiff of elegance and subtlety now: not too much foundation, it’s blended properly along the jaw-line and cleavage doesn’t escape its confines with quite such purpose — they have nothing to prove — they’re grown women now and more comfortable in their skins.

And what a relief, I think, sitting in the car. Eighteen. I turn the number over. A fragile phase behind us and I’m glad; things feel safer this side of 18. The ground feels surer, no doubt about it.

I look at them again. They’ve navigated a way through, over, under and around the series of ‘firsts’ that define the teenage landscape: first application of mascara, first vodka shot, first real fight with you, first sexual encounter, first Oxegen festival, first state exam, first job… I remember the other series of firsts — the lurid one I conjured up in my wildest, grimmest midnight imaginings: first encounter with a predatory adult male, first drunken blackout at a bus stop, first pregnancy at 15. I take a deep breath. One down, one to go, I think.

They run across the road, calling thanks for the spin and I realise that they’re equipped with more than just an unnerving air of invincibility now, they know their way around the world at last, how it works.

It’s a delicate business, watching your daughters traverse the teenage years — hats off to them, I think. They live in a world where popular culture has fixed ‘being hot’ as the fulcrum around which everything else pivots and yet managed to come out the other side with their faculties intact. And happy!

I watch them tottering down the pavement to join a group of friends. They squeal greetings and laugh some more. It’s so good, I think in the car, that this phase is behind us. I feel like fist-pumping the air suddenly: no more ‘I am being wronged by mankind’ outrage. No more fantastic froideur when I managed to hold tough on heated negotiations about pick-up times. One of my daughters has made it! And she seems fine!

Best of luck to the Calvin Harrises, I think again as I drive off; those girls look all joy and light but there’s a sliver of pure steel underneath. The Calvin Harrises will have their work cut out with those girls, I think, those three skinny girls with perfect amounts of little-bitty weight.