W hen does one truly become an adult? It’s a question I’ve been pondering since my 18th birthday, which failed to herald the epiphany of mature insight I had naively been expecting. Various subsequent milestones have seemed significant: planning my first solo trip abroad; buying a car; finally getting the cat I’d wanted since I was four. Wading through the labyrinthine horror of applying for a mortgage and completing a house purchase is obviously high on the list, as is filing my first tax return. Oh, and getting married (four years ago today at the time of writing) felt fairly major too.
But growing up is relative. However much you age and achieve on your own, your parents remain your parents. It takes a new generation to alter properly the dynamics: the first meaningful people in my life to see me truly as an adult were my stepchildren. This prompted the realisation that even if I didn’t feel at all like a grown-up, I should probably pretend for their sake. But the distinctions can be blurry. Sometimes you need a set-piece family event for the shifting current of intergenerational trends to reveal themselves.
All of which is to say, I am still recovering from Passover. Of all the Jewish festivals, the springtime celebration of the exodus from Egypt played the most vivid role in my upbringing. The Seder – the prolonged dinner-cum-religious-service that retells the story of the liberation, complete with the ritual eating of symbolic foods and a lot of raucous singing – has always mesmerised me. In my family, Seder means an eight-course meal for up to 30 people, hosted at either my parents’ house or by my aunt and uncle. Extra chairs are gathered from various attics, crammed around multiple tables joined together under white tablecloths, which will inevitably be stained by red wine spills. There is chicken soup to prep and silverware to polish, and there are eggs to boil, vegetables to chop, kneidlach (matzah balls) to roll. The trickiest part is sourcing a lamb bone to be seared emblematically by a blowtorch.
Children are an integral part of both the preparation and the Seder itself. Some of my earliest memories are of making special Passover biscuits out of matzah meal (no flour allowed) and falling asleep on someone’s lap as the night wore long past my bedtime. During the service, it is up to the children to ask the four crucial questions that the adults at the Seder then answer. There’s a hide-and-seek game for a special piece of matzah without which proceedings cannot continue. Little toys are handed out to represent the Ten Plagues (because nothing whets your appetite like a plastic frog or diseased cow). During one song, borrowing a tradition from Sephardic Jews from Iran and Afghanistan, we hit each other with spring onions – a vegetable whose lethality can only be fully realised when wielded by a hyperactive eight-year-old.
These are my memories. Except this Seder, it wasn’t me asking the questions. For the first time, my stepdaughters and the other children took centre stage. My job was making carrot soup and finding a lamb bone and transporting two dozen peeled boiled eggs in salt water across north London. No one needed my help to find the special matzah. They certainly needed no assistance with the spring onions. But someone did fall asleep on my lap.
Passover will always be a team effort. It was still hosted at my aunt and uncle’s home – housing trends mean it’s highly unlikely anyone from my generation will be able to seat that many people for dinner any time soon (our table can just about squeeze in six). My aunt still made chicken soup and fish balls, my mother still brought the plague toys. Logistics were spread out between us. But it was the children who created the magic. And suddenly, I was well and truly an adult, guiding them through unintelligible Hebrew songs and strange rituals involving salt water and bitter herbs like my parents guided me. As adulthood milestones go, it feels more significant than a tax return.
[Further reading: How to paint a new country]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 15 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Angry Young Women
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentFrom my experience, near 60.