Letting Go

Being a mother, I have always been reluctant to send my now adult children out into the mean streets of life and because of this I have done many things to shelter them from reality.  When I was in college, I had no money and worked twenty or thirty hours per week to pay my living expenses.  I never had enough to eat, to wear, or to sit on, but I managed to get through with a bachelor of science degree.  Just the same, I suffered the entire time from privation and from major depression, anxiety, and at times full blown psychosis.

My children were not going to suffer the way I did and so I made sure to spoil them so they could concentrate on their school work and enjoy their youth while they had it.  My oldest child suffered anyway because that is her nature.  She is, unfortunately, bi-polar among other things and therefore her experience of the world is never in balance.  This is a tragedy but it is not insurmountable.  Because I have spoiled her and never forced her to make hard choices, she has no idea how hard life really is.  She is scheduled to graduate from art school within the year and given her recent behavior at an important family gathering I have decided to begin the painful process of weaning her from the money teat.

When she went away to college I gave her my VISA card and set up on-line banking so I could monitor her spending and add money to her account whenever it went low.  She took advantage of this situation by buying anything and everything she wanted ("needed") in order to cope with the demands of living on her own.  She liked the feeling of superiority that being the "rich bitch" among her peer group gave her.  She was the one who could join the ZipCar program and pick up the check at the sushi restaurant that everyone loved.  At the time, I didn't give her much grief about this because her dad had a high-paying job and her grandparents had funded her education expenses.

In her sophomore year of college, she spent two weeks in a psychiatric hospital on a medical leave of absence which stabilized her, but at the end of the semester, she realized that she needed to come home for a year.  We call this the year of living dangerously.  She took a class or two from the local community college while selling kitchen knives for Cutco.  She made good money, thanks to the referrals her dad gave to her through his place of work but the pressure to sell-sell-sell was too intense as was the crush she developed on her boss who used this to his advantage (not sexually, to her dismay) and she ended up burned out but wiser for the experience.  In the fall, she enrolled in art school and we lucked into a great living situation for her.

Art school was exactly where she needed to be because she is most definitely not a mainstream student and neither is anyone else at this particular institution.  Her creative juices began flowing and her two dimensional drawings of anime-like characters became three-dimensional costumes enabling her to begin role playing.  Sounds like good, clean fun, and it is for lots of people.  My daughter, unfortunately, has a shifting view of reality and loses herself in these fantasy worlds to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

On the evening of her grandmother's 90th birthday party, she wanted to be at one of the big Anime conventions in order to compete in the costume design and execution competition.  Fortunately, the judging took place in the morning and the convention was in the same city as the family gathering.  Unfortunately, she and her friends won "best in show" and this meant that she was absent for the adulation and accolades she desperately wanted for her beautiful work, not to mention her beautiful self in her big-hair blonde wig.  During the birthday dinner, she kept checking her iPhone for updates on the judging and when she learned that she and her girls had won, she let her fury rip.

It was an unfortunate situation but how could she not attend her grandmother's 90th birthday party?  Especially since it is this grandmother's money which finances her private school education.  Fortunately, she is a great actress and made a lovely toast with a genuine-looking smile on her face.  The rest of the time, she did her best to get my attention by slugging down as much wine and champagne as she could get her hands on and trying to get me out in the hallway so she could berate me for "forcing" her to be where she did not want to be and preventing her from being where she did.  I had had enough and I told her to suck it up.

She called a few days later to demand an apology which I explained she was not entitled to.  The person who needed an apology was Daughter #2 who had been seated next to her during the dinner and who spent two hours after the dinner in tears because of how horribly Daughter #1 had behaved at an important family celebration.  I was proud of her for not hanging up on me, although she did her best to deflect responsibility for her rotten behavior.

It is time for Daughter #1 to learn to face reality and to that end, I have removed myself as co-signer on her credit card and have put her on an allowance.  I am expecting a very rough ride for the next few months but she believes that she is an adult capable of adult responsibilities.  Better she learns this now -- before she moves to San Francisco and meets reality in all its meanness.