There is a strange transition that happens when your daughter becomes a young adult. For years, motherhood means teaching, protecting, correcting, guiding, and sometimes making decisions on her behalf.
Then one day, the job changes, she still needs you, just in a different way.
My daughter is almost 21, and recently she expressed frustration about relationships. She looks around and sees people her age dating, falling in love, finding boyfriends and girlfriends, while she feels like she is standing still in that area of her life.
She knows her worth which is good, so that's not the problem. She loves herself thus, that's not the problem either. She has standards, and isn't willing to lower them just so she can say she has someone and HONESTLY? I don't want her to.
The problem is that sometimes waiting feels like being left behind. As her mother, I want to reassure her that she isn't behind and life is in no way happening without her. There isn't a timeline that says she should have found her person by now and at the same time, I don't want to dismiss what she is feeling.
She wants companionship. She wants someone on her level. She wants to experience love and a healthy relationship. She is allowed to want those things while still being completely secure in who she is. We often tell young women, "You don't need a man,” and of course she doesn't need one, HOWEVER, she is still allowed to want love that doesn’t just come from me or her family. I wish I could hand her all the wisdom that took me years, relationships, heartbreak, and healing to acquire.
I've lived enough life to know that simply getting the relationship isn't the prize. I've loved. I've been married, I’ve been divorced and been heartbroken. I've experienced disappointment. I've had to heal. I've learned things about love, relationships, boundaries, and myself that I couldn't have understood without living through them. Looking back, I can see that sometimes the greater blessing was the relationship that didn't work.
The person who didn't choose me. The heartbreak I thought I would never get over and more importantly, the endings I didn't understand at the time.
Those experiences eventually taught me what I deserve, what I will never accept again, and how important it is not to abandon yourself just to keep someone else.
Naturally, I want to take everything I've learned and place it directly into my daughter's hands, but I can't give her my experience, I can only share it. She gets to live her own story, so when she wonders why she hasn't found someone on her level yet, I remind her that finding someone quickly isn't the goal. Finding someone healthy is. Being chosen isn't the goal because being valued is.
Having a relationship isn't an accomplishment if maintaining it requires you to shrink yourself, ignore your standards, accept emotional unavailability, or lose pieces of who you are.
She can want the boyfriend.
She can look around at everybody coupled up and wonder, "Okay, where is mine?"
She can be frustrated.
She can even be sad about it, and she can feel all of those things without settling, because loneliness is not an emergency, and waiting is not failure. Unfortunately this is one of the hardest parts of raising young adult daughters. We remember our heartbreak, so we desperately want to protect them from theirs. We can't.
We can teach them what emotional maturity looks like, we can talk about boundaries, we can encourage them to maintain their standards. We can remind them not to confuse attention with love or being chosen with being valued. Eventually, they get their own stories, their own choices, their own disappointments, and their own lessons. When life inevitably hurts them, we can be there.
That's the shift I'm learning to make.
For most of her childhood, my job was to help clear the road in front of my sweet kiddo, now my job is increasingly to walk beside her. To listen, to offer wisdom when she needs it, to remind her who she is when life gets frustrating, and then to trust the woman I've spent all these years helping raise.
Motherhood doesn't end when our daughters become adults, our position simply changes.
Raising young adult daughters requires growth from both of us; she is learning how to navigate adulthood for herself, and I am learning how to mother a woman who no longer needs me to make her decisions or to live her life for her. She just needs to know that while she learns to live it for herself, Mom is still right there beside her.
