All That and Then Some

ALICE - Parents Just Don't Understand

"IS IT A CRIME to miss my family?"

"No, but it's a crime to just walk out of campus halfway through a semester, board a train without telling anyone, show up out of the blue and scare the life out of me!"

"Actually, I think you'll find it isn't."

I lower my eyelids and release a long, slow breath the way Hippy Harry has taught me to do when I feel negative emotions bubbling up inside me. I hear his therapeutic voice in my head, guiding me back to a quiet place: I am floating on an ocean of calm. I am floating on an ocean of calm.

With my eyes still closed, I reach blindly across the cafe table where I have parked my truant daughter to find out why she's shown up here without warning when she should be four hours away at Queen's University studying for her first set of Economics exams. I grope for her hands and try to engage her in a calming round of co-breathing, but Maeve isn't up for it. She shakes my hands off. I crack an eye open and find that she's still staring at me belligerently.

"Mum, could you not today with this new age-y stuff?"

With a sigh, I wade out of my ocean of calm and re-engage with the present. Unfortunately, the present seems to be defined by my daughter being here instead of there (where I'm paying for her to be, I might add) and looking at me like I'm the one with the problem.

"Why are you really here?" I ask her pointedly. If she's going to blast a hole in my calm raft, I'm going to poke a hole in her big fat lie. Missed us. That'll be the day.

So you understand, my daughter is the most ambitious person I've ever known -- and given that I've spent half my life working for egomaniacal CEOs, that's really saying something. Secretly, and I say this with love, I have Maeve pegged as the egomaniacal CEO of the future. Not that she's not a good person. She has a good heart. She volunteers. She's the only vegan I know who doesn't automatically tell you they're vegan and why within ten minutes of meeting. But she is also rabidly ambitious and loves, loves, loves to make money. When she was only thirteen, she used my credit card to import vanilla and distilled it in her school locker with illegally obtained vodka, which she turned around and sold through a Shopify storefront for a 10x profit margin. By the time I discovered what she was up to, she'd amassed more money than any thirteen-year-old has the right to.

I was so proud.

Vic, my husband, was less so. He's never been part of the corporate world, so I think he finds ambition suspicious in anyone, but he specifically didn't like it in his own child. It took some time for him to see her drive for the positive characteristic it is.

This innate ambition of hers underscores why it is extremely out of character for Maeve to abandon her coursework and show up here unannounced. An Economics degree from Queen's was a first, tangible step toward her ultimate goal. When we moved her into student housing at the end of last summer, she was almost offensively excited for us to leave.

Okay, she'd said, the moment the last box was set down on the tiny dorm room floor, hustling us out the door and toward the parking lot. Guess you guys better get going. Long drive home! Love you, bye!

So, what had happened in the intervening months that would make her high-tail it home before exams had even been written?

"Are you finding the classes too hard?" I venture.

She scoffs. "It's Economics, Mum, not rocket science."

Personally, I think Economics sounds plenty hard. Number-y in a way that my mind definitely wouldn't find easy. But I know what she's saying. She gets math. Spreadsheets, calculations, forecasts are like her native language.

"Then what happened? Is it the social aspect? Are you finding it hard to make friends?"

That, I can imagine. As business-smart as my kid is, she is not social-smart. The only proper friend she's ever had was Jeffry (the artist now living in New York and whose obese cat I tend). As sweet as he turned out to be, he wasn't the most likely candidate for BFF: a homeless teen who squatted outside the local liquor store. Maeve had approached him about a business arrangement (she needed someone to buy vodka for her locker-based vanilla distillery), and that turned into a long-lasting friendship as they both matured into young adults.

Outside of Jeffry, she's never had a close friendship. I'd worried about this lack of social aptitude when she was in grade school. I knew from the other Mums' Facebook posts that little girls were supposed to live in each others' pockets. Sleepovers, secret pacts, eating up the household bandwidth on a constant stream of facetime with their little girlfriends. Not Maeve, though. When I'd asked who her best friend was in grade six, she'd adorably said 'my teacher.' And that's just how she is.

So, I can see how dorm life would be a little... difficult for Maeve.

"It must be awkward living with a roommate, right? Such a small room, too. You're right on top of each other."

Maeve purses her lips and says nothing. I can't tell if I've cracked it or missed the mark entirely.

"Listen, it's been nice catching up, but can we talk about this later?" She huffs, pushing back from the table. "I have stuff to do."

"Oh, okay," I watch her move toward the front door, then call after her: "Wait... what stuff?" She doesn't look back. My fierce, unsociable, inscrutable daughter just marches out the front door, leaving me as much in the dark about what she's doing here as I started. "Will you be home for dinner?"

But she's gone.