I Miss My Daughter

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the world because it involves getting very close to another human being and then learning to let go of that closeness. You have to get very close to your child when she is young. You do so because your child is helpless and dependent upon you, and because you simply fall in love with that child. The child’s mission in life is not to remain helpless and dependent, however, but rather to grow over time into an independent person. That this developmental trend is at work doesn’t mean that children are supposed to become estranged from their parents when they become adults, but this outcome does happen sometimes when things go wrong. There are lots of ways that that parent-child relationships can go wrong as children grow to become adults. A common but opposite complaint to what you are expressing is that some children never become independent enough, but instead remain content to live in their parents homes forever.

Your life has not been an easy one with your failed marriages and the still-recent significant death in the family. These events have had to have been difficult, even traumatic, for all members of your family. You say that your daughter was in fact depressed around the 2004 time frame (at which point I gather she was an older teen). You also suggest that you’ve always set clear boundaries for your daughter which she needed to respect. Though you say that you and she never went through the typical teenaged conflicts, I can’t help if in fact you did but didn’t notice it because she kept it a secret. Maybe she perceived you as overly strict and uncompromising, and/or she may have blamed you for the failures of the significant relationships you’ve attempted. Her perspective as a teenager is not the seasoned perspective that you have and she is likely to have formed a different and potentially very biased understanding of why things fell apart. She likely never understood (nor should she have understood) the details of why relationships failed, and even so, she is likely to have formed conclusions based on her emotional hurts and losses and not tried to put herself in your shoes, or see things from a rational perspective. If your first husband abandoned you, you didn’t have any control over that, but your daughter may not see it that way. She may, instead, see it that you drove him away. There may be no evidence to support such a belief, but that wouldn’t stop her from having it. Where I’m going is that your daughter may have become a teenager who was angry at you for reasons that may or may not have merit, and that her anger and her sensitive age (as a young adult ready to become independent) may have collided with this friend of hers in such a way as to have convinced her that she is better off without you. This is truly unfortunate, if it has happened, but this sort of thing does happen.

It is clear that your daughter is not a mature adult at this point in her life, despite her desire to live independently of you. It certainly seems like she has formed prejudiced opinions about you, and has acted on those prejudices to act irresponsibly towards you and others (such as quitting her job without notice). As I think about other teenagers I know, this sort of flaky, emotion-driven behavior is typical enough. But people tend to grow out of that stage of life as they mature. Life crises happen, fair-weather friends aren’t around for support when they do, and you start to realize the importance of family. She may grow to see the error of her ways. Or, she may not. Only time will tell, I suppose. Either way, what she does or doesn’t’ ultimately do is not something you have control over.

What you do have control over is yourself, and how you behave towards your daughter. You can extend the olive branch to her when you’re able, you can work on not becoming bitter towards her for her failure to recognize you as someone who has done their best, and you can work on accepting that you don’t have control. This latter thing about learning to accept what you don’t have control over is particularly important. If you cannot accept that you don’t have control, you will continue to impale yourself with how much this all hurts you and how this shouldn’t be happening. It will still hurt you if you can manage to learn to accept that you can’t control the situation, but at least you won’t be re-wounding yourself all the time. Since you prominently mention that you are a religious person in your letter, I’ll suggest that you might profitably work on this problem of acceptance through prayer. There are other ways to do it too, however. Seeing a therapist for grief-work might be a good idea as well. You are definitely grieving the loss of your daughter. It is indeed the case that you don’t know this person that your daughter has become.

Since your daughter has rejected you in favor of these other people, I wonder if there isn’t anything to be learned from studying these other people and how they relate to your daughter. One of the questions I’d ask myself is, what are these people offering her that she cannot get from you. Not that you could offer what they offer, or should (as a parents’ role is to guide their children, and that means setting limits on them sometimes), but if you can wrap your head around what your daughter might find attractive about living with these people, you might gain some insight into what you can do to have a better chance inviting her back into your life when and if she is ready to do that. Parent-child relationships do have to adapt as children grow – it is important and inevitable that this happen, and parents and children who have difficulty adapting to the changed needs that adult children and older parents require can run into problems. If you can do some soul-searching now and come to a better understanding of what a mature adult interaction might look like with your daughter, you might be in a better position to act when/if she reaches out to you in the future. Certainly, if you come at her with rules and judgementalness she is likely to become defensive. If you come to her with how much you miss her you’re more likely to win her over (although you can overdo that too).

With regard to the possible lesbianism happening here, my advice to you would be to let it go entirely. Experimental kissing of the sort you describe doesn’t mean anything really; you cannot form any accurate conclusions about the nature of your daugher’s sexuality from such teenaged activity. Really, your daughter’s sexuality is none of your business. Would you want her poking her nose into yours? I didn’t think so. You have the right to not let her have sex with a girlfriend in your own home, but that about ends what you can and cannot do with regard to who she chooses to sleep with. And you would be frankly foolish to let worry over something like who she sleeps with interfere with your ability to reform a relationship with your daughter. There are bigger and more important things at stake for you personally then possible homosexuality.

I guess at some level this situation just sucks, and you have to suck it up, or take it on the chin, so to speak. Life is full of crappy things that happen (and some good ones too). Work on accepting what you cannot change (as the old serenity prayer advises) and that may help some. I hope this ultimately works out for you, but if it doesn’t, don’t waste your life pining away. Take the steps you need to take to put some happiness into your life, and the lives of others around you.