What a day!  What a week, month and year (and a half)! 

I’m always nervous about making a lot of noise when things are going well because they can (and often do) change.  My quiet smile, or enormous grin, may seem smug to some but as much as we laugh at the parenting chaos and failures, it’s really important to celebrate the victories.  And for the first time in a long time I think I have a very good reason to celebrate.  My hopes, plans and schemes have finally paid off.

It’s been an insane emotional rollercoaster for me over the last 18 months, since my son narrowly missed the grades he needed for his preferred university course (A’level parents and students, I felt your pain acutely during this summer’s grading fiasco).   Being a bit ‘all or nothing’ he’d chosen to withdraw his UCAS applications for all but his #1 choice, on the basis that if he couldn’t do the course he wanted most then he wouldn’t bother with university at all.   So there he was, in the summer of 2019, licking his wounds from a disastrous boys holiday abroad – a cautionary tale for another time – and coming to terms with his good, but not good enough, A’level results.  He briefly took a live-in bar job and left home.  4 weeks later he resigned and moved back home.  He started creative projects, got distracted and gave up on them.  He argued against university then argued again that we should pay for him to study in Italy.  He couldn’t decide on the right job for him and refused to compromise so, without a reason to get up in the morning, he began to sleep later and spend his night watching Netflix.  Then Covid struck.  After months of living a nocturnal life (and driving me completely nuts with his midnight cooking), the noise of a family stuck at home during the lockdown forced him to revert to a normal sleep pattern and to interact with us.  Very quickly the choice between being stuck in the house with his siblings and going out to work motivated him to apply for any and all jobs, although by then a lot of people were in the same boat.

And then my eldest daughter, furloughed from her part-time job and with money to spend, decided she wanted to surf.  Where we live isn’t exactly renowned for its surf but where there’s a will (or a motivated teenager) there’s always a way!  As the lockdown eased and we approached the end of online schooling, she bought a surfboard and we spent days at the beach.  A few times we overheard visitors to the beach asking other people where they could rent surfboards and it didn’t take very long for an idea to form.  We decided to kill two birds with one stone and create an opportunity for her to surf and her brother to work…I bought an old horse trailer and set the children to work turning it into a mobile surf shop.  It was mid-Summer before we were ready to go, having spent weeks trying to determine whether we needed any licences, permits or permission.  No-one in the council, trading standards, police or coastal support services seemed to have a definitive answer so in the end, with the trailer looking fabulous and fully decked out, we just hooked it up and set off.  

It was really well received and from the start they had a steady stream of customers wanting to rent surf- and paddle-boards, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing.  While the sun shone my teenagers had fun and didn’t mind hanging out at the beach, but after a few weeks of early mornings and long days they weren’t quite so enthusiastic.  Unfortunately, for my son at least, I’d made it clear that this wasn’t optional – in the absence of an alternative this was now his job.  As we approached the end of the Summer holidays and the weather became more changeable, my son started talking about shutting down our seasonal mini-business but I had other plans.  He’d learned more about profit & loss, cashflow, pricing strategies and competition in a month of running a surf shop than he had in the two years of his A’level business course so I suggested that, if he was definitely wasn’t going to university, I could install a coffee machine and he could stay open through the winter.  He was horrified!  This was his future and he hated it (although I still think it’s a brilliant idea).

 Two days later he’d chosen a new university, overcome his dislike of phone conversations and called them, and was delighted to have received a conditional verbal offer for a course starting in a few weeks.  All he had to do was send them confirmation of his exam results and a copy of his portfolio.  For anyone else that would have been the end of the story. 

At 11.30am the next day I asked if he’d submitted the paperwork for his course.  He’d been up all night re-working his portfolio and told me it would be ready for lunchtime.  I thought the submission deadline was 2pm so was a teeny bit concerned when he was still editing it at 1.45pm, but he assured me the deadline was 5pm and he’d have it ready by 3pm.  At 4.30pm he had ‘almost finished’ and was getting irritated at my daughters’ and my concerned looks.  There was some shouting at 4.50pm when he couldn’t find the piece of paper with his exam grades that I’d given him 8 hours earlier, but finally, at 4.56pm he uploaded his portfolio onto the university system, followed at exactly 5pm by his exam grades confirmation letter.  And then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  I’d like to think they were getting him back for the last-minute submission although I know it’s just a busy time for ‘clearing’.  But if they were going for the ‘treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen’ approach it worked, because he was on tenterhooks for a week until Friday when he finally got his offer confirmation.  After a rollercoaster 18 months, in ten days I will finally exhale as I deliver my son to his new university halls.

And the surf trailer will be here waiting for him, just in case he changes his mind!