Her independent streak runs at the speed of life

TEENGIRL is back in art school. She left our house like a vanishing storm, taking with her the noise and flurry that often accompany meteorological disturbances.

Her room had a faint post-apocalyptical look to it as she rushed out the door and headed for Chicago, seeking a new world of independence far away from the burdening influences of adults.

We’ve hardly heard from her since.

This is her second year at the Art Institute of Chicago and, at 19, her declaration of independence. It is the nature of young adults to be simultaneously dependent and independent as they search for the core of who they are, and it is not for me, or anyone else, to say what is right or wrong in the manner they pursue themselves.

Teengirl came to our house after a breakup with her parents in the heat of a quest to define herself. We guided her through her senior year and into college and now I sense she is shucking off the last little-girl memories that connect her to us.

I write of this today with mixed emotions of sadness and understanding. I joke that she is hidden in a witness-protection program, existing in a world devoid of the authority that was parental in nature.

She has begun a new life, Chapter 1 in her future, past those years that were simply prelude to the plot of life’s book. We’re all writing our own narratives each day of our lives, but it requires a certain esprit to make them interesting. One must dare and deviate in order to strengthen the plot. Surprise is the essence of an interesting life.

I know all that. I broke away from a dismal existence when I was about 17, went off to college, married and joined the Marine Corps and to hell with what anyone thought about it. I didn’t ask for advice from parents or friends. I just did it.

Teengirl’s quest embodies my own declaration of individuality. I disliked what I had at home and swore it would never be repeated in my adult life, and it never has been. No child of ours was ever beaten or denied the goals they chose to pursue. I understood confinement of the soul and would not be anyone’s jailer.

Teengirl was born with an amazing talent to paint, rooted in the genes of her parents and her grandparents, all possessed of the instincts to write or to draw. She began about age 6 creating cartoon characters with startling facility and has never stopped developing a skill to paint, sketch and create in many artistic forms. Art school is demanding that she study them all.

But with that inner fire comes bursts of outer heat, explosions of temperament that can leave one treading backward away from the flames that the burst produces, not unlike the sudden eruption of a long-dormant volcano. Combine that emotional transience with a determined quest for independence and one has a volatility that cannot be easily damped.

As grandparents, we exist in a strange, almost surreal world. While lacking parental authority, we somehow come to represent it by establishing the rules that govern the parameters of a normal household.

But rebellion brooks no status quo, and Teengirl found herself resenting what we had seemed to become.

She has defined our world as a separate reality from the one she occupies, and I don’t argue with that. We all move about in parallel planes, which is how we manage to survive and, hopefully, achieve as individuals among the noisy crowds. Our rebellions are signified by clenched fists thrust high above the pack. Teengirl’s is moving upward.

But while trying to understand the psyche that propels a young woman toward a book of her own life, one misses the little girl of dependency that emerges in photographs and in the indelible memories of her years in her own home and in ours. One longs for the sweetness before the storm, as she began the prelude to her life in sketchy forms.

You can’t go backward through time any more than you can gain ground by walking sideways. Little girls and little boys grow up, assuming characteristics of their own, leaving behind the toys and traits of their infancy. I would expect no less of our Teengirl, who is on the verge of leaving her teens behind like traces of a spent childhood.

Phases of an emerging personality create landscapes of their own, but when the difficult years of breaking the molds that confine us are past, we often remember with warmth those who helped us through them, as I remember big sisters who held my hand through hard weather and carried me past the mean years.

I suspect that Teengirl’s sensibilities will one day find the same gentle ground of memory and return with an attitude of embracement, reaching across from her parallel world into ours and gracing us once more with her presence. Dependence and independence are not always mutually exclusive in a society that dreams of individual freedom within an altruistic culture.

Teengirl is always welcome in our world, and I know she’ll return to it if only for a visit.

Meanwhile, if you should see her, tell her Grandpa says hello.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez @latimes.com.