My twenty-one-year-old daughter Maria called me Friday afternoon.
“Mom, where are you?” She is living with her grandparents in the city for a semester to save money while at college.
“Having a late lunch with a friend,” I answered. “Why?”
“Can you come get me?” a sound of desperation in the air.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s Grammie,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like living here.”
Was she kidding?
“No, you don’t understand. She is so controlling.”
“No. Really?”
“I’m not kidding, Mom. They want to know everything I do.”
Yawn. “Uh-huh.” Reveling in the feeling of ‘for-once-even-Mom-is-cool.’
“You have to come rescue me,” she begged. I want to spend the night at home.”
“I’ll come get you as soon as I finish lunch, Honey,” I promised.
“When will that be?”
As fate would have it the next week my mother pulls me aside at a family dinner.
“Let me tell you about your daughter.”
Here it comes. “What’s the matter?”
“She goes out and comes in well after the 11:30 rule.”
“No. Really?”
“This is serious,” she said. “She doesn’t want to tell us where she is going. She acts as if your father and I aren’t even here. And she doesn’t even want to run the sweeper if we ask her.”
Double yawn. “Uh-huh.” I’m feeling that this is probably better than heaven.
“So maybe I wasn’t so bad?”
Silence – deer in the headlights look.
I maintain that if you wait long enough, everything in life eventually comes fulll circle. Patience is the key.
Mary Lee Gannon is a cultural turnaround and leadership expert who went from being a stay-at-home mother with four children living in an unpalatable marriage behind the facade of a country club life to the reality of divorce, homelessness, and welfare. As a national guest speaker she demonstrates turn-around strategies that transform corporate cultures and took her from an earning capacity of $27,000 to the president and CEO of a hospital foundation. Her book “Starting Over – 25 Rules When You’ve Bottomed Out” is available in bookstores and on Amazon.com. Visit her Web site for a free e-book at www.StartingOverNow.com. Sign up for her free e-newsletter at info@startingovernow.com.
