Someone declared that turning 18 makes you an adult.

I don’t know who that was, but I’m pretty sure they didn't have a daughter.

You can now vote. Go to war. Buy lottery tickets. Legally marry.

At 18 the world calls you an adult, but you have been this way since about the age of three.

Always an old soul. Always intuitive and perceptive. Always aware.

And while your 18th birthday is the headline, it is also the age of my business career, which started the week you were born.

It is no coincidence.

When a young couple finds itself pregnant with the first child it's like being caught in a Tsunami that tumbles and tosses you until you land hard on the beach, a baby in your arms at three in the morning, the hum of a lactating machine in the background, the father fills a journal with out-sized emotions as if he were the first person in the history of the world to become a parent.

Pregnancy with the second child brings different emotions. More fear than the first time but without the same new-car smell excitement. Instead of a rolling thrill ride, it is a train coming down the track and it's gonna run over whatever normalcy you've built into your life.

So sometime in late 1997 we knew you were coming. Your brother just past his first birthday when we learned you were percolating.

The Clinton/Lewinsky mess was about to explode and I was still writing for a living when I knew that we'd need more room, a bigger house, a second everything.

I hired a consultant and found a company in New York and transitioned from being a journalist with a degree in English Literature to a CEO with nary an Econ class to his name.

Mommy sat on the hospital floor, holding you swaddled in a blanket co-signing bank documents. It is the kind of thing you do when you are just starting out, because we were young and figured there was time to make mistakes...if we made any at all.

I couldn’t know then that we would raise venture capital in the summer of 2000 just as the dot com bubble burst. I couldn’t know that we’d launch our flagship product in New York and Washington in January 2001 just months before both cities were attacked. I hadn't yet lived through the purchase of a South Korean business where the employees quit en masse to compete. I hadn't survived September 2008 when my CFO frantically called saying that Lehman Brothers couldn't pay their $75,000 bill from the previous month.

But the company grew, as did you, and I would chide my employees by comparing: "She's crawling, are we?"

I can recall every up and down of this business, each deal that we won and lost, every business slight, bad month, disgruntled employee, as I lived and died on quarterly financial reports.

I have no similar memory of our time with you.

There must have been bad nights, but we forget, fights and messes we don’t recall, highlighted by happy times captured in photo albums and the cloud.

I am unable to remember what it was like, the daily rhythm of you as a small child. I remember trips, birthdays, moments, but they don’t tie together. All I know is we want more of them.

Business is a difficult child, behaving well, then poorly, growing, then going flat. But when we needed growth we'd buy something, when earnings disappointed, we'd cut.

But not with you.

There are times we probably wanted to sell you off or you wanted to have us fired, but it doesn't work that way with love.

The bigger the business gets the more it needs me.

The bigger you get, the less you need us.

You and Marketresearch.com were born the same week, but I no longer compare the growth paths or trajectories. I built a company through acquisition, people were hired and fired, businesses bought and sold, but you outpaced them all.

No matter how low you think our stock might be you cannot fire us and we cannot let you go, even in a down market, when cash is low and sales are weak. None of this matters, our currency is love.

It doesn’t matter if you walk across that stage with a diploma or sign a document that calls you an adult, because you remain in our hearts the girl who earned the name Messy Jessie because you always smelled of vomit, everything you ate ended up in an orange ring around your neck rolls.

You are not a business that needs a budget and cash flow statement to tell us how you are doing. We watch you move through this world with amazement and we know you are the best investment we ever made.

We don’t see gradual.

I looked up one day from our intense preparation for his college departure and realized, he was already gone.

Our parent's generation doesn't seem to understand. Somehow my departure from the stage wasn't such a cataclysmic event.

When they say "What's the big deal, no one died" I want to shake them and say "you don't understand, I'm just gonna miss him, his presence, the pleasure of his company."

I am trying not to be overly dramatic about the first one leaving the nest, but even the most hard-bitten friends have talked about the emptiness that comes when they do.

“It’s like they cut a hole in your heart,” according to friend I would call, unemotional.

Nothing ages you like your children's passages. When you send them off to college and realize the clock really is ticking, not on them, but on you. It forces us to think about all we are in the midst of: Jobs, marriages, friendships, life.

In a much passed-around article, columnist Michael Gerson compared dropping his child off at college with the ending of the universe. He notes that Cosmologists, who I thought gave facials, “assure us, our sun and all suns will consume their fuel, violently explode and then become cold and dark. Matter itself will evaporate into the void and the universe will become desolate for the rest of time.”

Okay, that’s dramatic, but only a little.

We started preparing early, at the start of senior year, a time everyone told us would be a disaster. But it wasn’t. The college application process, the waiting, the pull and push of a teenager trying to escape childhood and parents trying to keep order.

Everything flew generally on time and according to plan.

And then one night a few weeks ago I headed upstairs to drop the new copy of Sports Illustrated on his bed and found myself in the center of his empty room. There were lots of days like this, with work, friends, and his own angst changing the household routine, I would leave before he was up and he was out when I went to bed. His job as an 18-year old waiter conflicted with my schedule as a human. I could go days without seeing his face.

I hadn’t been in his room in weeks. It used to be a regular hang out. At first to tuck him in, read a book, make sure he was asleep, then make sure he was home. It was a place where serious talks took place and stories were told in the confidence of darkness.

And now I stood in a foreign zone, duffle bags splayed open like patients on an operating table, packages of t-shirts and socks, various dorm room requirements, fresh toiletries still in their packaging. Along the perimeter was his past. An outer ring of memorabilia that tracked his childhood:

A baseball glove, a collage of pictures with kids from another neighborhood, stacks of books from various years, Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Road. Some are dog eared, some un-cracked. Old bobble heads, long-forgotten ticket stubs, a sea shell, baseball caps of all sizes, a faded art project, a piggy bank stuffed with pennies, a replica of the Forum, an empty Coke bottle from Israel, a deconstructed science project.

A friend of mine calls this a “memory minefield.” These places that shake us with their history, of a time that no longer exists.

I look for them in every room, every block of our neighborhood, every memento. The school, the restaurants, a dent on the couch, things from a different era, when the house had a different rhythm. Gerson said that parenthood is a lesson in humility: “The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else’s story.”

Hunting around these corners, preparing myself for these moments, I realized that while I was still on stage, he was already gone. Off on his new adventure, while I am here with the memories, a minefield for me, a past for him.