Proud mother moment

The womanchild just called. She's going to hang out with friends for awhile before starting her first night at her first real job. She'll be waiting tables at a Chinese buffet restaurant. I've warned her about hurting feet, smelling like the food, having to actually smile and be polite, and horrors of horrors for my little vegetarian, actually having to handle meat. She'll learn about payroll deductions the hard way.

At the beginning of the school year, she set three goals, raising her grades, which had just slipped off the honor roll her freshman year, getting her license and getting a job after she turned 16. The grades are back on the honor roll. She's obtained her learner's permit, and now she has a job.

The womanchild is a person who takes life hard. (I just wonder where she learned that.) Part of her still hasn't gotten over the late elementary and middle school years of bullying torture. She still holds a few grudges. A couple of years after her eating disorder became manageable, she still has some physical side effects from her starvation and purging days. Like me, she has become a daily monitor of her own personal depression meter and speaks up when she needs help. Unlike me, she has turned her voice outwards. She is known at her school for her intelligence, outspokenness and willingness to publicly address what she sees as wrong, whether it comes from one of the school's appointed athletic heroes, a vapid hair tosser, a thug or the administration itself. There are many people who don't see her sweetness because of the sass, but it is their loss.

When I look at her, I see someone who has chosen strength and honesty. I see someone who's determining what she wants in life and not letting others get in the way of that. She's the teenager, and I'm supposed to be entering the wisdom years of my life, but I learn from her everyday.

teenagers, motherhood