A Daughter Just Like You!

Dear Father William,

My daughter is 23 and is in therapy where she has begun to look hard at her life and she sees some areas in her childhood where she feels I let her down.  She is not hesitant to let me know the ways I made mistakes or bad judgments.  This is hard for me to hear, of course, because I take pride in having been attentive to her, and to her handicapped younger sister, taking into account their strengths and abilities, and understanding just how unique, and precious they both were.  My question is that I sense that now that my girls are on the threshold of their 20's I have to learn, again, how to parent them at this new stage in their life, and I feel hopelessly inadequate to give advice. I used to feel challenged and invigorated by their stages of development when they went from milestone to milestone. In fact, my 23 year old doesn't even seem to want to ask me for guidance.  I have an impulse to write her a long, very sage letter, but really I think this would be more for me than for her.  She needs to learn about her life from herself and her therapist now.  This makes me feel useless to her, and that is a new feeling, and makes me very uncomfortable.  What can you tell me?  I want to do something.  Doing is my experience of mothering, and I find it hard to just sit here and be because I am really waiting for her to telephone.  What can you tell me about this?

Feeling Useless & Unwanted

Dear Useless & Unwanted…

Of course you're feeling this way!  What parent of a 23 year old who's conscious hasn't?  For most of us, it starts a lot earlier than that.  In our family we had a joke that our middle daughter (a delightful child and young girl) woke up one morning when she was 13 and had turned into a real bitch.  Five years later she woke up again one morning as a mature young lady who was a joy to be with, and I didn't seem to make any difference what we did in between.  This is not about you.  It's about a normal and healthy process all parents and children go through in one form or another, and it tends to be roughest between members of the same gender (that's why we have sayings like "daddy's girl" and "mama's boy").

This normal process that feels so abnormal is part of growing up.  To become an adult and stand on her own two feet, your daughter has to become her own mommy and this means pushing you out of that role for a while.  This is not much fun for you, I'll grant, but it can be even rougher for fathers and sons.  (There's an old saying to the effect that, "In order for the son to live, he must slay the father."  Of course this means the internal father, but occasionally that distinction is missed.)

So your daughter is creating space for herself by pushing you away, and being young, she probably isn't doing this with the grace and tact available in your maturity.  In fact, she's probably making it just about as painful for you as she knows how.  Everyone else knows who she is and how to be with her better than you do.  Her therapist is brilliant and you're stupid.  You have done terrible things in raising her that she can never recover from, and, if she does, it will only be through heroic achievements on her part (guided, of course, by her brilliant therapist and understanding friends).  While I say these things humorously, they feel terrible when you're caught in them.

My advice is don't try to change your daughter or keep this process from happening.  It's necessary, and it will take some time.  What you can do is manage yourself so you don't unduly suffer as it plays itself out.  How you do this?

First, remember your own process of separation from your mother and how angry and injured you were able to feel toward her at times.  Go back to some of the most unpleasant interactions and recall objectively how you behaved.  Being able to do this lets you see your daughter as yourself, and this helps you feel empathy even when the crap is all coming your way.

Second, use your unusual intelligence (which your question clearly indicates).  When you start to get "hooked" into feeling abused, stop, take a deep breath, recall a vision of how beautiful this child can be, remember you two are participating in a normal developmental process and know "This too shall pass."  No matter how hard this maybe, the burden is on you.  Why?  Because, as my lovely ex-wife Nancy said when I was regularly getting "hooked" into meeting my two-year-old son Matt at his own tantrum level:

"Bill, you're forty-four and Matthew’s two – who do you think has the maturity and to adjust here?”

Like it or not, if there's a conflict in a relationship we value, we’ve each got to bring all the life experience we have to bear.  I imagine you've got at least twenty years on your daughter, so, if you like numbers, that means you got to do at least two thirds of the work.  Sorry but that's just how it is.

Third, own up wherever you honestly can.  As parents we've all made thousands of humongous errors in our child-raising, so much of what your daughter blames you for will, in fact, be accurate.  Of course it will be one-sided, too, and not nearly as significant as she makes most of it.  Still, the best thing you can do is to acknowledge what ever truth there is in her attacks and help her exhaust the energy behind the content.  It's not the content that's important; it's the process of her becoming an adult equal with you, and this means she's going to have to overdo her "equality" for a while.  Why?  Because she’s spent twenty-odd years being your subordinate, and for her to know she's achieved equality, she has to have a number of turns at overpowering you.  This is because she's using outward behavior to change her internal self-image (which is one of being subordinate daughter, not equal adult companion).  Just as people who’ve lost a lot of weight still think of themselves as fat until they get enough feedback to change that self-image, adolescents need lots of "equalizing" experiences to believe they've grown beyond parental control.  Yes, this will be hard on you. Yes, you have to go through it.  And you'll be amazed at how much easier owning up and listening deeply will make it.

Fourth, have a sense of perspective and humor.  Our relationships with our parents are never like any others.  No matter how well we do our process of separation, Mom and Dad are still Mom and Dad.  My father lived the last four years of his life with me from 83 to 87, and, even though our roles had fully reversed and in reality I was “the parent,” he was still the father whose approval I’d never gotten enough of.  I had a friend whose mother lived to be 96; my friend was still having "mother issues" in her seventies, and, what made it all bearable, was that we could joke about it.  There are some things in life we never get over, but we can learn to enjoy them as they are, especially if we can laugh with them.

Well, Useless & Unwanted, I hope this helped.  If so, you might find yourself thinking it's pretty ridiculous (and funny!) that you’d ever refer to yourself as "Useless & Unwanted”!  You might even want to make yourself a sign with this title (like H’s Scarlet Letter) to wear from time to time…

Love, Father William