growing up is a painful process

molly mentioned recently how painful it is to watch your children wrestle their demons and come to terms with the world. i've found myself thinking about that quite a lot over the past couple of days. as you know, i have just the one rather spoiled perfectly lovely child. there are, however, two other almost-not-children-anymore in my life because husband has two daughters from a previous marriage. they're 18 and 15 and they come to our house every other weekend. they are adored 100% by their little sister, who gets the benefit of being both an only child and a little sister, and they seem to adore her back in equal measure. we're very lucky.

i'm fortunate to have escaped the drama i hear that other step-parents experience. i think because i never tried to be their mother. as i see it, they have a perfectly good mother of their own, so my role is something else. authority figure in our home, certainly, but more of a cool (in both senses) aunt than a parent. and that has worked very well for us. mostly because husband is very good at handling it and takes my side in matters of discipline. but there haven't really been matters of discipline, so that's helped it be a good situation now for more than a decade.

but even tho' they're not my children, they are an enduring presence in my life, so it's a bit hard watching them in their struggles. the older one has had a hard time with school. she switched gymnasiums and has repeated the first year. she seems to be doing better this time around, but there are signs of an inner struggle for her - she's gained weight and she's visibly lost confidence in the past year. instead of growing into a more capable young adult, she in many ways seems to have regressed a bit and needs more support rather than less. we're pushing her out on interrail this summer so she can experience getting along on her own (well, sort of, since she's going with a friend) a bit. we think it will be good for her.

the younger gets top grades in school, but lives like a vampire. not in dress, but in her habit of not being seen during daylight hours. she'll sleep 'til 3 in the afternoon and she doesn't seem to want to do any form of physical activity or anything other than watch television. her sisters shamed her into going outside on one occasion this weekend. sadly there was a downpour while she was out and she came back soaking wet since she was inappropriately dressed for the weather, but still, she did finally go outside. and her iPod didn't zap the hell out of her when she got soaked, so that was a plus. luckily for her vampire ways, the sun was behind clouds the whole time, so she didn't turn to dust.

what's worrying about the younger is that she doesn't seem to have any interests in any extracurricular activities (unless you count shoplifting, which isn't the healthiest of those and which she won't be doing again after getting done for eight counts of it a couple of months ago - or at least that's what we all hope). she was sent to dance as a child, but never really liked it the way her older sister did. she's tall, thin, willowly and beautiful (aside from some typical teenage incidents involving cheap hair color), so it's not that we think she needs to watch her weight, but we just worry that she doesn't have something she is into, something she burns for and is focused on. sabin has her horse. big sister has sports and dance, but middle sister doesn't have any visible interests.

when they come, i encourage creativity by providing materials and tools to support it - we've got loads of how-to-draw books, good pencils, fabric, sewing machine, stitching - everything you could want. and sabin and her oldest sister are often found sewing up monster dolls or designing costumes in sabin's top model books or building a shelter out of old boards and branches down by the lake. but it's difficult for us to pry middle sister away from the television and her facebook on sabin's computer.

i can appreciate that it's hard when you're a teenager to spend every other weekend away from your friends and your own everyday stuff. they have their own rooms at our house, but with the move, everything is still chaos. we've living out in the country and it must generally be rather "ew" for a teenager in her prime, especially one from a copenhagen suburb. but that's what's painful about watching it. the lack of engagement. i wonder what she'll remember when she looks back? will it be how she slept through it or how miserable she was, or will it be that they ran around outside and got soaking wet and came laughing in the door? it's hard being a teenager, but it's also hard to watch the process as a parent (or even as a cool aunt). you want to ease the bumps and blows that inevitably come of it.

i have different expectations for husband's daughters than i have for sabin (princeton undergrad and the danish olympic riding team are not too much to ask for her are they?), but i would love to see them discovering and then unfolding their talents and coming into their own. i see lots of young people both in real life and around here in the blogosphere who seem so much more mature and worldly and seem to be pursuing their passions, be it photography or art or rocket science or politics or whatever. i wonder what we can do to encourage that when it's only every other weekend we can exercise our influence. don't get me wrong, i'd go crazy if it was more often than that. and frankly we couldn't afford the grocery bill long term. but watching this process of becoming is, as molly said, a painful thing indeed.