Cracks in the pavement

My daughter will begin a new phase of her life next week. It’s not a phase that I thought she would go through when she was a child and I daydreamed about what lay ahead for her. When she was young I envisioned her life at 15 as being packed full of softball practices, learning to drive, and possibly some trips to the mall to hang out with friends. It never crossed my mind that she would need to get psychological counseling.

I had hoped we would have a relationship that would allow us to be open and honest with each other – that we’d really talk about what was going on in her world. I wondered how I would approach her questions about drugs and drinking given my own lack of experience with one and too much experience with another. I wanted to be able to trust my child and hoped that she would trust me.

Of course I assumed that she would argue with me, keep some secrets, and not want to tell me about everything going on in her life – but I never thought I’d be forced to pay a stranger to talk to her and tell me only some of what they learn. I never thought we’d one day have to remove the door to her room because we couldn’t trust her to not have friends crawl through her window at 10:30 p.m. Perhaps I should be relieved that she wasn’t crawling out.

I ache with a sadness that cannot be consoled. I want the daughter I know is inside of her to be freed to smile and laugh and enjoy her life as she used to. I want to break open the unhappiness and self-hate that have hardened into a dark shell around my beautiful girl and sweep it away into the cracks in the pavement.

~ by mrsmarshall on April 19, 2007.