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I just spent the weekend moving our daughter, Brook, into her first real apartment in New York City. She's now the proud owner of a Crate & Barrel couch, a Cuisinart, and a gas-and-electric bill, her signature on her very first lease. Life will never be the same for any of us.This is the real deal, a rite of passage that makes that classic benchmark, taking the kid to college, seem like much ado about very, very little. After all, college kids are home for vacation every couple of months -- way too often, you find yourself thinking, as you write out yet another whopping tuition check -- with a posse of new friends in tow. Even when Brook got her first job two years ago and moved into a shared apartment, it was just an overgrown dorm room, a two-bedroom partitioned into three, with a grimy bathroom, a sink full of dishes and a tiny landlocked living room.
This time, there's no denying it: She's a card-carrying grownup. It's a misty afternoon as we ferry furniture into the small but immaculate studio apartment. As she shows me her new digs, I'm amazed at how much farther ahead in life this generation is than my friends and I were at the same age.
What a difference from when I moved into my first apartment in the same city. At age 25, I was already a divorcée, leaving an ex-husband out in the suburbs. So far, neither Brook nor any of her friends has made such a colossal mistake. Offspring of the most divorced generation in history, they seem determined to take their time and marry smarter than many of us did. Meantime, they're seizing on their extended single-and-child-free status to live lives that are bigger and more exciting, blossoming in ways I couldn't have imagined.
For one thing, many of them are world travelers. Brook spent the weekend before the big move in Paris, a trip she cobbled together with a bargain-basement airfare and a borrowed flat in the Marais. At the age of 25, I hadn't even been to Chicago, let alone Paris.
This is how life in America is supposed to work, each generation more successful than the last. A friend used to tell me that she couldn't wait until her son "turned out." Whenever things with Brook started to get a little hairy, I'd repeat her phrase, with all the promise it held of better days down the road. My friend is right: There's real happiness when your child bypasses the pitfalls, gets a good job, "turns out."
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