Help! I have a 17-year-old daughter!

Dear Cary, 

I am a twice-divorced 54-year-old woman entrepreneur who supports herself through the practice of her craft.  I have a 17-year-old daughter. She is bright, creative, articulate, sleeps a lot and talks to her friends and boyfriend on the phone, is an artist, cartoonist, and enjoys studying underwater hydrothermal vents. Senior year is around the corner and the world has gone mad – we live in a hotspot. Returning to high school where wearing goggles and a mask in an overcrowded school is mandatory does not appear to be an environment conducive to learning. She has enrolled at the local community college where she can get a free year of college – but she doesn’t drive.  

Time seems to be collapsing and she appears to be clueless about what to do with her life. I can totally relate but at the same time I want to scream at her! Get Up! Help Yourself! Help Me Help You! She doesn’t know what to do with herself. I’ve done all that I can, single-handedly provided a pretty good upbringing – a cell phone, some nice travel, visits with out of state family, and transportation to the few events she wants to attend and can’t get a ride for, all with very minimal support – financial or otherwise – from her father. 

I never insisted she do anything she wasn’t comfortable with and now it seems she is uncomfortable being in the real world.  I get it – I’m not all that comfortable there myself but I don’t have a choice. Now I fear she’s a little lazy and lacks direction because I never pushed her. Growing up, I was never pushed into anything and I did a bunch of stuff in High School. She was never pushed and it appears to me she’s been in hiding.  

It is her journey – not mine. I am feeling compelled to push her with love and compassion and strength and I don’t know how. When I try to talk to her about it she becomes defensive and everything I say comes out wrong. 

Help.

Thanks! 

a Mom

Dear “a Mom,” (at first I wrote, “Dear Mom,” but that felt awkward)

My favorite part is the underwater hydrothermal vents. You say she enjoys studying them. Which means she enjoys thinking about them, which means they have an emotional meaning for her, likely a metaphorical meaning.

The underwater environment is cold and silent. The ocean is a relatively thin layer of water bounded by air on one side and earth on the other. The surface of the earth under water, is for the most part an impenetrable thing, a boundary past which we cannot go. We rarely get a glimpse of what is inside there. We just walk around on the surface, or we swim down to the bottom of the ocean, the ocean “floor”. But an underwater hydrothermal vent is an opening into the earth, a hole in the boundary between outside and inside, and out of that hole, out of the unknowable earth, spills warm water. From inside the earth. What an amazing thing. To know that inside the earth it is really hot, amazingly hot, and things are going on that we normally never know about. And that this warm water can spill into the cold, silent ocean, perhaps warming it up a little bit. That you could perhaps be underwater in this cold, still, dark place, and sit by one of these thermal vents. Maybe you could feel the heat of the earth on your skin. What a beautiful thought.

The other thing about these vents is that they appear to harbor, or to have harbored, Earth’s earliest known life forms. What a staggering thought.

Your daughter is not immune to beauty. Nor is she immune to metaphor. Maybe this metaphor says something about her. For her, life now may be much like the cold, silent underwater world. She may be floating around, voiceless, alone, unable to speak, unable even, in that environment, to breathe, without a tank, and the tank will run out, it has not an endless supply of oxygen. So her time in this medium is finite. She may be sensing how finite that time really is. Perhaps for the first time she is sensing that her time in this wondrous but cold world is finite, that she can visit the source of warmth pouring out of the earth but she will eventually have to surface, to return to life with other people, perhaps a life that is thinner, less concentrated, less amazing, but also full of greater possibilities.

And of course the possibilities of life are what bedevil a 17-year-old. People start talking to her about choices, making choices, and what does she know about choices? All she knows is the dream, the dream of being underwater, being close to the thermal vent. But then, she may intuit this also: We are what we dream. We are not our collection of avatars and roles; we are not our grades or our occupations; we are, most profoundly, what we dream.

She has a beautiful dream. That doesn’t mean she’s happy. Nobody is happy. We are only happy in our dreams, and our dreams are short.

If you can let go of her and trust her not to run, trust that you have some magnetism still, that she is drawn to you if you will let her be drawn to you, and just sit with her and know that this is an amazing moment, that she is your child, that this moment is mostly filled with things you cannot know and cannot control but is still all the more amazing for that, if you can just be there with her, finding the right distance, maybe that will be enough.

She has moved out of the realm of your protection and into the realm of consequence.

If you can find your proper distance, far enough away to let her fall but close enough to catch her, maybe that will be enough.

Addendum (some random thoughts and links that didn’t make it into the main piece)–ct