On being 19 in Europe

My best friend Haley has a daughter, Bellamie, who turned 19 yesterday – a birthday milestone I have a hard time reconciling considering I still feel (and sometimes act) 19 myself.

I’m blown away with Bellamie’s life today… after living the majority of her life in a relatively small town in Washington state, she’s now in college as an art student living in Paris, living on her own with friends and schoolmates, authoring hilarious substacks from a late stage adolescence POV, navigating life in such a nostalgically familiar YET novel way. Her mom and I travelled a lot when we were the age she is now (haven’t stopped since), but we never full-send committed to living abroad ourselves.

Listening to Bell’s various recaps on nights out at the disco until 3am, politely navigating away from “stuff parents aren’t supposed to see” on fake insta’s, chuckling at the shenanigans, and tearing up at the relatable heartbreaks… it’s INCREDIBLE to see your best friend once-removed in the form of a fully functioning 19 year old baby girl.

I both wish to fast forward on my own 5 year old’s trajectory to experience what this will be like in 15 years AND, wanting to smash pause to never, ever get there.

I remain obsessed with the full-send nature of shipping your kid across the globe to learn how to adult, and am equally proud of Bellamie and Haley (and Paul, can’t forget him!) for doing what I know a lot of other parents simply wouldn’t be able to, based on insecurities and fears and the endless lot of “what-if’s.”

Thinking about Bellamie being 19 and in Europe led me down a path of none other than reflecting on me + Haley around this time… because to some degree I am self-obsessed (duh) and on a path to being the cringiest version of myself. But mostly I want to relate and hopefully get a few “OMG I’M DEAD” reactions from Bell on what Mom and I were up to years before she was even born.

Our experiences, while wildly different, are sort of cut from the same cloth and I love being able to share both old and new memories with one of my favorite girlies.

Happy birthday Bellamie, I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane and know that I love having a front-row to the memory lane you’re currently building. ❤️

I’d convinced Haley to spend summers with me in a tiny village in Romania where my grandparents lived, on a farm with no running water (and told her about this on the flight over). One particular summer, my cousin got married and it was the experience of a lifetime.

My mom would whisk us around Europe and half micro-manage us / half let us run absolutely wild. We were 17 at the time, and being this age in Europe was/is completely different than being the same age in U.S. We recognized that quickly, felt the power fast, and maxxed it out.

Everyone mistook us for being 25 although we had the personalities of 15 year olds, and we found ourselves in some pretty precarious positions as a result. Drunk, dancing, smoking cigarettes, eating @ 3am, whatever. We held on to our cash tightly and were reckless in every other way.

We were fiercely in protection of each other though, and there may have been a time where Haley kicked down the door of a bathroom stall where a boy was trying to kiss me behind the closed door and I was giggling too much to understand the real risks of the situation. There may have been a time I had to argue with a train conductor in my broken Hungarian that we were on the right train and insisting I had bought tickets while Haley looked on, confused, until he showed us he was packing and I shut up fast.

There were also times we pushed each other through discomforts for the sake of living it up – Haley’s one eye would swell up completely shut when we walked through the open field next to the soccer field at my grandparents house but I made her continue with the days events, and despite my severe allergic reaction to flea bites all over my body (that would get bloody and ooze with puss), we still agreed to hop on the motorcycles of the village boys to get to the local hang out bar and bet random village bois to chug a whole beer for $1 (an easy bet, considering it was a days wage for them without us realizing).