i suck as a parent navigating motherhood one day at a time

While many kids are heading to college this fall to start on a new adventure it’s good to remember that not everyone takes this “conventional” post-high school path.

And that’s ok.

It may be hard to accept, but our kids are on their own journeys and they need to find their own paths. But, maybe, just maybe, as our guest blogger, Christina Jones, found, part of that “different” path is not so different from yours after all.

Having a daughter who took a “different,” non-traditional path, has been a challenge to my own identity. She is my first-born and I was a young mother in my twenties with hopes and dreams (and expectations) when she was born. I was a bit of a rebel myself and often went the extra mile to resist conforming as a teen so I wanted my daughter to be spirited, too—a rebel—and to create her own path; I just didn’t expect her to surpass my own spirited nature and I certainly did not expect the range of emotions that “her path” would stir up in me.

I should have known what path my daughter would take when she was 4-years-old and she had a ballet recital. I had invited her grandparents (my father and his wife) and my oldest sister, who was the most conventional among my four sisters, to watch my adorable little ballerina. As all the little girls lined up towards the audience, their backs to the mirror along the wall, and began to perform the ballet moves they had practiced in sync with one another, my little one stood facing the mirror, back to the audience, and made faces in the mirror the entire time! I thought she was shy…yet, when I look back on other examples throughout her childhood, like wearing sparkly sandals with wool tights to church, or wanting to change her name to Brenda, or telling everyone when she was six that she was going to go to college in Bethlehem, that she was on her way to becoming the free spirit she is now.

I always considered myself an open-minded “hippie” (I was born in the 60’s after all!). I was the first in my family to live on campus at college in Chicago, the only one of all my sisters to take up weightlifting as a young teen with aspirations of being a body builder! I spent a semester abroad in college and married a free-spirited guy (outside my race, mind you) and spent a year backpacking through Europe, living in Greece and Ireland, and traveling everywhere in between, sleeping in tents and hostels and hiking through the mountains, teaching English to young children while my husband played guitar and made signs in calligraphy for any business that would pay for this lost art (did I mention he is her father?).

Never did I expect that 20 years later, my own daughter would make my escapades look conventional. When she was a junior in high school, she started to drop hints that she did not intend to go straight to college. I then, like the supportive, non-conventional (or so I thought) mother that I am, brought home brochures of gap year programs and suggested she take a year off to explore one of these programs. She was less than enthused; clearly I had missed what her intentions were. “I would never travel with an organized school program,” she declared.

I think I was still in denial.

I continued to make suggestions that included sending her to Greece to stay with relatives and sending her to a yoga retreat in upstate New York. Although she enjoyed these experiences, her itch was greater than mine ever was…or was it?

After graduating from high school, she called me on the phone and asked for her passport. When I asked why, she simply replied, “I am going to India.” After several more questions I realized that her plan did not go beyond that—no program, no mission work, no time-frame. I told my then 18-year-old that she did not have my blessing. Her response? “I don’t need your blessing, I just need my passport.”

At that point I thought about what my own mother would do. I could bribe my daughter with a car or offer to pay for sculpting lessons or plan a trip to India together so she could “get it out of her system.” None of these ideas were realistic, nor she did not care about those things anyway. When I told my family what she was planning, they said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I didn’t understand. I went to college straight after high school and then grad school, too. Sure I became a vegetarian and married outside my Greek culture and took off with a backpack and a tent with my new husband at 23. Sure I opted out of law school for a career in social work, but I was married and I had career goals and, and, and.

Then I realized: I created this. The more I said this out loud the more I started to feel proud of the young woman I had raised and proud of myself, too. She took off for India for several months and came back with the determination to work and save all her money to go back.

And she did.

She went back and has never come back.

Photo credit: Naomi Pongolini

No, she is not still in India; now she lives with her Italian boyfriend in Berlin, working and going to school (and, no, not a conventional university). Yet, now, when she called me upon enrolling in the program for naturopathic medicine and said “Mommy, I’m going to be a witch doctor, or when she Facetimes me to tell me she just got back from Croatia where sleeping on a hammock and not showering for a week at a time is when she feels most “at home,” I think to myself, “I created this” and “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” She is her mother’s daughter and she represents, not only the rebelliousness I have in me, but also the courage, determination (and stubbornness) to do whatever she sets her mind to. Her experiences go beyond what I have ever done—she is still, after all, on her own path, far different from mine—but there is a part of me that lives vicariously through her…awaiting to hear about her next adventure.

Photo credit: Naomi Pongolini

Christina Jones is a psychotherapist and a mother of five in a blended family. She writes about challenges (big or small) that individuals, couples and families face in this journey called life! www.christinajoneslcsw.com