Born to be Wild.

My youngest child's teenage years - part 1.

Our youngest child broke the mold of “teenager” that had been established by her older siblings. She began as an easy baby and toddler, encountering no problems until she was diagnosed with dyslexia at age five, and afterwards she acclimated well to appropriate teaching methods. Later, she was diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school, she began taking Ritalin - which helped her a great deal - and she did well in school with the continued aid of pull-out reading classes and private tutors. Her ADHD was well-controlled on medication throughout middle school. She headed into high school with continued learning struggles, needing tutors and accommodations to complete normal classes.

This daughter was a musical child and began playing violin at age seven. She played violin in the orchestra throughout middle school and her first two years of high school but later became disinterested. She failed to practice and didn’t seem to care about music very much, certainly not in a way she once did.

She enjoyed playing volleyball for several years in middle school. She was a strong middle blocker on a club team and went on to play for the high school junior varsity team. However, failing to make the varsity high school volleyball team was a devastating blow, and things began to do downhill for her.

By tenth grade, she was routinely written up for bad behavior and talking back in class. She began to skip school and in eleventh grade she got involved with an older boy from Fredericksburg, a town near Austin. They met on a church mission trip in which he was supposedly her “counselor.” (To say that I regret having encouraged Laura to go on that church mission trip is a huge understatement.)

She had several car wrecks in her green VW Beetle. The first involved carelessly plowing into the back of a car that was fully stopped. Her second wreck happened at midnight while driving home from Fredericksburg—she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a tree. Luckily, she wasn’t seriously injured. When she totaled the VW beetle, her father bought her another car.

By her junior year, she was a horrid teenager, unbalanced and unchecked in every way. One afternoon, she purchased and brought home a pig from the pet store. She was thoroughly amused, but on that day, I finally lost it. I screamed at her, and we had a huge fight. My husband stayed perpetually infuriated with her, also yelled at her often, and attempted to keep the two of us apart at home. It seemed as if we three were caught in a sick, codependent triangle of bad behavior. Yes, she had been seeing an adolescent psychiatrist and felt that her therapy was helping her.

She always had trouble with money (and math), and the more we gave her, the more she spent. Sometimes she stole money from our wallets. Once she stole one of my credit cards and bought a pair of $600 boots. In high school, she acquired several tattoos, one on each inner wrist, and one on her hip. In Austin, tattoos are simple to come by, even though the age of consent is supposedly eighteen. When I insisted that we visit her tattoo parlor together to see if they used sterilized equipment, she just rolled her eyes but allowed me to visit. One wrist tattoo spelled out FAITH, and the other HOPE. The tattoo on her hip was meant to show her hand in God’s hand. Because of this, I kept believing that she had a good character hidden deep down inside her. We could no longer see it.

In addition to all her bad behavior and all the acting-out (cries for help), she became alienated from her group of high school friends. Only Mr. Sanders, the mild-mannered, friendly assistant principal, seemed to understand her troubles. He would listen to her excuses and merely assign her weekend detention or more community service hours. In our sessions with him and her math teacher, he would chuckle about her antics and reassure us that all this misbehavior was transient.

Her psychiatrist told us that she had an anxiety disorder and perhaps bipolar depression. She opined that she could have borderline personality disorder (BPD), and that the dosage of medication she was given for mood stability would help her confirm which condition she had. At age eighteen, she was still “too young” to be diagnosed with BPD.

My cell phone ring tone for this child was “Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf. The NICU nurses thought it funny to hear that song play every time she called me. Once she left home for three days, having driven off to Fredericksburg to see that young man. She called me in the NICU that third morning begging for us to come and get her, which we did.

In all seriousness, it is painful for me to describe just how unbelievably discouraged I felt about my daughter during her high school years, and all the while, in my heart, I felt like I was the wrong mother for her. She needed a patient, understanding, and compassionate mother, and I was nowhere close to that. Since she excelled at continually pushing my buttons, I began psychotherapy and was struggling to learn how to walk away from fighting with her.

The summer before college began, she worked as a counselor at a camp for autistic children in Oregon, and apparently she loved serving in that role. At age eighteen, she went off to college far away from Austin, and attended Willamette University, a small liberal arts school in Salem, Oregon. She told me later that she chose this school to get “as far away from us as she could.”

Part 2 next week - Her college years.

P.S. My daughter have me permission to tell her story.