THE GENESIS
Pure frustration created the spark. I was frustrated with my adult daughter’s behavior and my inability to understand her perspective or effectively communicate with her. Emily, our oldest of three, had recently graduated with her bachelor’s degree in just three years, which is quite an accomplishment in our eyes. We were immensely proud parents, yet things were headed down an unexpected path.
After graduation, in lieu of moving out into the workforce and world, Emily had returned home without a whole lot of direction, and we (Emily, my wife, and I) were all stuck in this haze of disillusionment. Frustrations transitioned into heightened tempers, heated discussions, and one-way conversations, which most times produced a stone-silent daughter. I felt like I was failing as a parent. As an effective leader within my profession, able to communicate, actively listen, and clearly ascertain results, I was nowhere close to achieving the same results with my daughter. I had to find another way to bridge the gap.
I was not sure how best to connect, so I adapted. I moved to a more acceptable mode of communication: texting. While communicating to my daughter face-to-face would have been preferable, it seemed to be easier to convey my thoughts through the conduit of her default language of texting. What initially started as a two-day gesture to provide an uplifting message soon became a daily ritual. I found that trying to provide verbal guidance, advice, or feedback was reluctantly received as a “lecture from dad” and tended to be rejected on the spot. And yes, admittedly a few of my texts still come across as lectures. What is a dad supposed to do?
My new journey, which originally started as an effort to boost my daughter’s self-esteem and confidence as well as counter the misguided counseling and harsh words from a few of her so-called college friends, turned into a daily labor of love. A commitment to better connect. It quickly transformed into a personal pursuit to share wisdom, knowledge, and the meaning of life—to the best of my ability. My messages consisted of all that I should have communicated many years earlier. To fully appreciate the position that I had found myself in, we must dig a little deeper.
As was mentioned in the introduction, I am a regular guy. Like many men my age (early 50s), I was raised in a loving yet very patriarchal environment, with my paternal grandparents leading the way. Both New Englanders, they lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the subsequent postwar economic boom. My immediate family included my parents, my younger sister of six years, and me.
It is important to address my relationship with my sister, as our age difference did not induce a great deal of interaction during her transition into adolescence. During her informative years, I was gone; I had moved on to community college and life. I do not bring this up to assign blame, only to identify the missed opportunity to experience this key transition in life with her. Through introspection, I realized that there was nothing in my upbringing that truly prepared me to understand what an adolescent girl was going to experience or what support was essential.
To further compound this lack of firsthand knowledge, when my daughter reached this same transition point in her life, I took a job that inadvertently caused me to travel for work for a seven-year period. Yes, you heard it right. In October 2008, just after her eleventh birthday, I boarded a plane to work in Dubai, UAE. Regrettably, I arrived just in time to watch the global economic meltdown of the Great Recession from 7,800 miles away from home. My plans for our family to live together in another country and experience other cultures quickly evaporated. Soon, my ability to provide for my family was now tied to working away from home to the point that I felt like a visitor in my own home. I am not complaining. I was gainfully employed; we were all healthy; and we were doing relatively well under the circumstances. The obvious downside and the result of my decisions translated into me becoming an absentee father. My wife took on the burden of raising three kids while I was building projects in the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, then later in British Columbia, Canada.
Now in her early twenties, I came to realize that while my daughter had been raised in a loving home, she grew up in an era of inflated self-esteem through her upbringing, education, and interactions with social media. In a societal environment where everyone was special, it meant everyone received ribbons for participation, no one kept score, and no one lost. If you happened to be different or fell short in any way, it was not your fault; you had simply fallen victim to someone else’s wrongdoing or were not as privileged as others in society. Couple this mindset with being the first generation to be raised with “in your face” technology, social media, and online videos where everyone is special and all things in life are portrayed from a favorable light, I felt unprepared and ill-equipped to compete for my daughter’s attention or see the world through her eyes. It is no wonder my daughter struggled, and it is abundantly clear to me now how we reached this crossroad.
Looking back, I am sure I offered such sage advice as, “Suck it up and deal with it,” or similarly anecdotal guidance. I hope I was more caring than that, yet you get the idea. Unfortunately, it is safe to say that there was probably not a lot of empathy coming from the adult in the conversation.
I can say with confidence that when Emily was preadolescent, she was very much a daddy’s girl, and I was no different than many—an openly doting dad. Unfortunately, I did not prepare for what was going to naturally occur. Yes, I could have done some homework. I am sure there were plenty of reference books, medical journals, and such to rely upon. Yet why educate yourself when you can fake it until you make it? Regrettably, this was too important for a passive or thickheaded approach. Unfortunately, at the time I was too consumed by work, worried about earning a living and providing for my family, to know the difference. Did I mention that I am normal guy? Additionally, I neither understood nor appreciated the intentional grip and strength of the social media tentacles that had a firm hold on her psyche. Frankly, at the time, no one recognized the long-term impact of this new technology on our life.
What was about to occur was a pure shot in the dark. Frankly, it felt like a last-ditch effort to correct the past, mend a fractured relationship, and bring us closer than ever before. I desperately wanted for this to work.
