Stand firm or drift

My oldest daughter is a freshman in high school this year, and even though she has only been in school for a couple of weeks, she has had some interesting experiences. First of all I have to say she is not your typical teenager. She is intelligent, beautiful, level-headed, athletic and very sober.  She is naïve and innocent.  She has never seen a rated r movie. She does not cuss. She has no desire to smoke, drink alcohol, or do drugs. She has no current crushes (at least that she'll admit to me). I think she is having a bit of a hard time adjusting to high school. She is on the varsity soccer team and she went to a team dinner last night. The dinner was fine, but afterward the girls pulled out a game--Cards against Humanity.  She and her friend (fellow freshman) were horribly uncomfortable and left the dinner.

Her experience made me reflect on my own high school years.  I think I could probably be described similar to my daughter except for the beautiful and athletic parts (she gets those from her dad). I feel like we are different from most teenage girls and even now I feel like I don't relate to most teenage girls. Am I weird? Is my daughter strange? Are we wrong to not belong?

I admit to a kind of feeling of moral superiority when I was a teenager. I saw all of the teenage lover tiffs, best friend cat fights, and other seemingly immature displays and thought they were silly. But were they?  I think it takes all kinds of people to make up this world and no one person has any more right to take up more than anyone else. I remember thinking that the self-imposed chaos I saw in the teenagers around me was crazy and not for me, but did I miss out? Would I be a different person, maybe for the better, if I had loosened up a bit and experimented? Should I encourage my daughter to do some crazy things while she has the chance and lacks the responsibility?

I don't know. I think my daughter will do what she wants to do.  She makes her own choices. We've done what we could to instill good values and high morals, but she has to choose who she is and what is important to her. 

I do know she will have more and more situations like the one she had last night.  I think she is beginning to see how different she is from your "typical teenager". Luckily, she has as I had, good friend with similar interests and similar values so she doesn't have to stand alone. I just always hope that she maintains the confidence to be herself and not shift her values and feelings about things to drift with the crowd.