Daughter Sets Off to Find Her Way in the World

I released my youngest daughter to the world this week. She said she was ready.

As I hugged her goodbye at a Holland youth hostel door Sunday night, Jenny said, “It’s OK, dad, it’s time for me to grow up.”

A recent graduate at Buena High School in Ventura, Jenny is just 18.

She and I were finishing a 10-day orientation in London and Amsterdam.

“Don’t worry,” she said calmly. “I won’t do anything dangerous.”

Studious but sometimes absent-minded, Jenny will spend the next month traveling in Europe alone. Lots of family and friends consider that dangerous. I won’t breathe easily myself until she returns Aug. 5.

But it is time for her to stretch her wings in the real world, away from protective parents and comforting routines.

I took a similar trip when I was Jenny’s age. I never again questioned whether I could go it alone. Likewise, Jenny saw this trip as an important step in her coming of age.

“It’s foundational,” she explained to one of my colleagues.

In some ways, Jenny takes this first solo trip better prepared than I was. She speaks some French, Spanish and Italian. She knows far more about European art, history and literature than I did.

When we poked our noses literally onto the stage for a boisterous “Hamlet” at London’s resurrected Globe Theatre last week, it was the eighth time she had seen her favorite Shakespearean play. “Perfect,” she said. “Perfect.”

She admits that her sophistication is mostly academic.

Yet more than a year ago, I promised her a European trip for her hard work in school. For a while she had flirted with the idea of a monthlong religious mission in India, despite incidents of violence against Christian clerics there.

So we were relieved when she finally opted for Europe. The only condition--one solidified by her mother’s heightened concerns--was that someone show her how to survive on $30 a day, a Eurailpass and an International Youth Hostel card. And that someone explain over and over why she should not stay out in strange cities after dark.

That was me.

So we flew out of LAX nearly two weeks ago, landed at London’s Heathrow in midafternoon on Sunday, June 25, and soon were looking down on Trafalgar Square--Britain’s symbol of colonial greatness--past a statue of Lord Nelson to the Big Ben clock tower.

I took Jenny’s photo. She took mine. We took the photos of three 50-something sisters from Ohio, who had brought their aging father to Europe. Jenny told them her story. How she would use this trip to help her decide what she truly wanted to study in college, how she could fit into a larger world.

Then, as if on cue, the youngest sister, a teacher, told Jenny: “I did the same thing, except four years too late. By then I’d already graduated from college and couldn’t change my direction.” Jenny--a future lawyer, diplomat or writer--still can.

Day after day, my daughter showed practical skills I’d never seen from her. She quickly mastered London’s subway and bus systems. Her memory was sharp for detail. She roused herself early from bed. She was careful to keep within a budget. She enjoyed the discipline. She liked being frugal. She walked for miles each day.

While in the university town of Cambridge, she struck off on her own for two hours. She came back with stories of an out-of-the-way museum unmentioned in any tourist guide.

On our third day, she set out alone to soak up debate in Parliament, took the subway the wrong direction--twice --but righted herself. “I learned a bunch about how to handle myself when I make mistakes,” she wrote in an e-mail to her stepmother. “I’m in this crazy and wonderful place.”

By the time we reached Amsterdam, Jenny was ready to lead us from the train into this vibrant capital. The challenge was this: The Dutch were semifinalists in the European Cup soccer championships and that match was about to start in a stadium just one mile away. Draped in patriotic orange, tens of thousands of fans jammed the streets and hotels, tossing beer cans and chanting for victory.

The tourist information center at Central Station had closed early. The line to the station’s cash machine was 100 deep, and another machine down the street was broken. Nearly every room in town was booked. Jenny walked and worried. We bought a few Dutch guilders at a bad exchange rate.

Finally, through a private tourist shop, we found a youth hostel in a basement beneath a Korean restaurant that rented beds for $20 a night. By then, Jenny was so worried she lost her way for a minute. And as far as she could tell, only young men would be sleeping on the beds near us. (Two Chinese women, it turned out, also stayed there.)

We checked in, then fled to the streets. Face flushed, Jenny sat down and wrote in her diary. That calmed her. And that convinced me that even when everything goes wrong, Jenny can handle the pressure.

The next morning she talked her way into a fully booked youth hostel far from our basement hovel, and stayed there with other young women for the next three nights. We met for lunch, to see museums and go to the symphony. But otherwise she hooked up with a bunkmate and explored.

So as I left her at her hostel’s steps, she was quick to assure me that she would be OK the next day when she caught a train, alone, for Switzerland.

Was there anything else we needed to talk about, any question unanswered?

“Nope,” she said, before whispering this aside: “You’ve said it all 10 times.”

Enough said. And after a long hug she closed the hostel’s red door with a clang.

It’s a good thing she’s doing, I thought. But I did not sleep well. And I still haven’t.