A London Birthday Celebration

Indagare founder Melissa Biggs Bradley shares highlights and special moments from a birthday trip to London with her daughter.

This year my daughter and I chose to throw a destination birthday party in London with some of our best girlfriends.

Neither my daughter nor I have ever been big birthday celebrators. But this year, contemplating her twenty-sixth birthday, my daughter thought that we should take advantage of the fact that our birthdays are one day apart and celebrate with some of our favorite female friends in London. It wasn’t a milestone birthday for either of us, but we have both been traveling a lot for work this past year and don’t get enough time with friends who we adore, so she suggested we celebrate together in one of our favorite cities—and I, who had suggested a party for her 18th and 21st, only to be rebuffed, agreed immediately. Since she has a core group of friends in London, my daughter took the lead in planning the trip there. (Yes, given my profession, I see the irony.) She designed a fun, digital, Union Jack invite and booked a private dining room in a venue known for its dinner-into-dancing atmosphere.

So that’s the origin story, and how lucky am I to have a mid-twenties daughter who wants to celebrate her birthday with me. But the backstory is even richer. We both feel blessed to have so many wonderful women in our lives, from my three sisters and their many daughters to friends that we admire and adore, so the event was really more to celebrate our good female fortune than our actual birthdays. At first, I didn’t imagine that many of my friends would come from the States for the weekend, but as my husband pointed out, many of my friends—not surprisingly—are travel junkies. Some of our oldest and best friends couldn’t make it but as the yeses rolled in from family and friends, we expanded our plans. We each made separate dinner reservations for our groups for Thursday night. For Friday morning, I planned a special visit to the National Portrait Gallery, asking a guide to put together a visit to focus on historic women, which have been newly emphasized in the collection’s reordering. My daughter arranged a guide at the Wallace Collection for her friends. After our respective tours and generation-specific lunches, we would browse shops in the afternoon. My age group would stick to Chelsea and hers to Notting Hill.

Related: Just Back From: London

Three months after the invitations went out, thirty-one of us gathered for dinner with only four men present, including my husband and one of his brothers. I gave a toast to my daughter and praised her for being her fiercely independent self and for bringing us all together to celebrate how lucky we are to have found such great friendships. All of the women received t-shirts emblazoned “Matriarchy Now,” which had been designed by Chiara Hardy, the daughter of jewelers John and Cynthia Hardy, to support nonprofits that support women and girls that I had found in Bali. In honor of each guest, I made a donation to send a girl to school for a year through Vow for Girls, an organization fighting child marriage. Twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings moved together from dinner to dancing past 2:00 a.m. at a club, which ended up with a particularly high quotient of women on the dance floor that night.

The next morning, I arranged for a vintage double decker bus to drive us around London’s landmarks, but with one surprise stop. At the age of 16, my mother had come from Sydney, Australia to attend the Sadler Wells Ballet School before joining the Royal Ballet in 1953. My daughter, like all her grandchildren, adores my mother, who is now in her 80s. She has heard stories and poured over photographs of my mother’s time as a ballerina, but amazingly none of us, I realized when I reflected on it, had visited the Royal Opera House, where she had spent years rehearsing and performing. So as the last stop on our tour, I arranged a back-stage tour. Parts of the building have been updated, but much, including the royal boxes, main stage, costume storage and some rehearsal rooms appear just as they must have in her dancing days. Our guide explained that not only are these dancers as fit, mentally and physically, as Olympic athletes, but only two percent of the ballerinas who train in the school are accepted into the company. Thousands of miles from her family, my mother rose to the highest level as a principal dancer by the age of 18. To see the stage where she danced before 2,500 people a night and the halls where she rehearsed for years, in the company of one of my sisters, several of our daughters and some of our nieces (all of whom are older now than my mother was when she hung up her pointe shoes to come to America) for the first time was a shared moment that is sure to become a core memory for all of us.

The evening before, I had thanked my daughter for being my very best birthday present ever, when she had arrived the day after my birthday twenty-six years before—and for her inspired idea to have a destination birthday party this year. But that is her, she lives and loves intensely, and I realized that this celebration may well lead to another. Next time we...We may have to bring my mother back to London with all of her children and grandchildren to celebrate three generations. Whatever comes in the years to come, I surprised myself by learning—or, at least, by reminding myself—that sometimes events about one person, or in this case, two, can be about so many more. They give us a chance to gather, and to share, and to acknowledge each other, individually, and to feel the power we have when we're united. Matriarchy Now—yes! But also, just: Now!