My emotionally adopted teens

My Emotionally Adopted Daughter

There is one teenager who somehow deeply touched my heart in just a few hours. I sometimes have called her "my emotionally adopted daughter." I have talked to a lot of teens over the past 7 years or so, but as I look back she is one of the ones who has touched me the most profoundly and the most quickly. We have a love-hate relationship. It is very hard to explain, very unusual and very abnormal. She, like all the teens, found me because there are communication problems in her own family. Normally, a teenager would talk things over with their own parents, but these teens have learned that trying to do that is a frustrating, painful experience.

They are emotionally smart, so they learn about emotional things quickly. They learn when they are not truly accepted, loved, valued and appreciated for who they are. They can feel it long before they can put it into words. They can tell when they don't feel respected by their parents long before they can say "I don't feel respected." They can tell when they are afraid of their parents long, long before they can say the words "Mommy scares me sometimes." Or, "Daddy scares me a lot."

This is hard for me to write. I am almost in tears now because these teenagers have come to mean so much to me. Maybe I am wrong, but my heart tells me something is seriously wrong in society for so many teenagers to feel a need to turn to the Internet for emotional support and love.

The teen I am talking about and I stopped talking to each other for a while. I wasn't sure exactly why she stopped writing to me. It wasn't me who wanted to stop talking. In fact, I felt dependent on her for a time. She was such a joy to talk to. She laughed at all my jokes and had me nearly rolling on the floor with laughter as well. Then when she suddenly stopped returning my mail, it really hurt.

It is no secret that I feel alone. It is no secret that I have no children of my own, and I have voluntarily left my own brothers, sisters, nieces, nephew, mother and country of birth. If one wanted to say I am a lonely old man, I would not disagree. I get emotionally attached to many of the teenagers I talk to, especially the females. This scares a lot of people, and, more and more, I can see why. It is not the ideal helping relationship. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I first responded to a plea for help from a teen in the USA. In fact, as it turns out, she was not even a teen. She was about 11 or 12 years old. Her mother had died. Her father was, let's say, not the most emotionally supportive.

She and I kept in contact for several years. I got more and more involved in her life. Eventually I talked to one of her school counselors and to her father. From talking to them I had a better understanding of why she was self-harming before she ever turned 15. She lied about her age at first, trying to appear older, but one day she told all her online friends her true age. By that time she was 13, not 16 as she had been telling us all. But she and I had already talked well over a year. Her father and school counselor later confirmed her age. One day I will probably write more about her, but she is not the central focus of this writing.

Maybe I will never meet the teen I have thought of as my emotionally adopted daughter, but that doesn't really matter to me. I want to know she is safe; that she is alive. I have been very worried she would hang herself, or "catch the bus" as she calls it. I want to know that she values herself, that she knows she. She once wrote something like "It feels so good to know that you write about me and tell people about me." I want her to know only "know" she is special, but feels as she is, because she is one of the gems among the rocks and gravel in the world.

I believe one of my natural abilities is to see people pretty accurately and pretty quickly. Here in the hostel, for example, it has taken me about four days to figure out how pretty much everything works - who is a good listener, who is a control freak, what the values are of the owner, who likes to give advice, what the social "norms" are. Like in all cultures and sub-cultures, life goes pretty smoothly if you just go along with the "norms" or rules (whether you do so out of ignorance, fear or understanding and free will.)

Well, I want to post this before I catch a train to Belgium. So I will just end by saying I can't legally adopt any of the teens I have tried to help over the years, so the closest thing I can do is emotionally adopt them. But with this teen in particular it has been a rocky relationship. I felt thrown out as an emotionally adopted father. That really hurt. It helped me understand how a rejected parent feels. And, once, she really disagreed with an important belief of mine. That also hurt. So again I can understand a bit how parents feel when their teens reject their values and beliefs.

When you emotionally adopt a teen it is a bit easier to get out of the parental role than if you are legally the parent. So when she rejected me, I stopped making much of an effort to keep in touch. Then I found out she was still reading my site. This surprised me and later we laughed about it. She said "You piss me off to no end, but I still read your site." ha ha.

So, for now, we are friends again. I want so much from the teens I "emotionally adopt". I am not a very good substitute parent. I am too much like a bad parent who is approving, patient and tolerant when he is in a good mood, then critical, unyielding and impatient when he is not. I am too demanding most of the time. Whatever they do is not good enough. This leaves them feeling inadequate. I suppose I am guilty of exactly the same thing as my mother and her brother, my uncle. They both felt inadequate and disapproved of by their parents, so... nothing was good enough for them either. Then they tried to find their self-esteem or meet their psychological needs through their children. Now I do that with the teens I "emotionally adopt". This doesn't work very well. But for them and me it is the best we can do. Yet I want to do better. I always want to do better, since nothing is "good enough."

It would be healthier for both the teens and me if I did not expect or want so much from them. But this is hard for me because so few other people seem to share many of my values and beliefs, or be interested in the kind of lifestyle I have - traveling around on a low budget, staying in shared dormitory rooms in hostels, eating raisins and peanuts and calling that a meal, etc. many teens seem to think this lifestyle is cool and preferable to working in an office, but their parents and teachers typically tell them they need to finish high school and get a university degree. I, on the other hand, know that neither is necessary to be happy... or even to be rich financially.

In my 20's started my own business and was "successful" by all traditional measures. I made enough money to retire at 35. I did this after going to Indiana University, (where I was sexually abused by a professor, by the way), then I got a masters degree, an MBA from the University of Texas. I graduated with honors from both. But now, at age 50, I have been divorced twice and often contemplated suicide. So would we say that I am or was once, "successful"?

I want a better life for the teens I "emotionally adopt", just as most parents sincerely want a better life for their teens. But how is this "better life" achieved? What do we mean exactly by "better"? More money? Or better relationships? Or just what? I have my own, very strong, opinions about what would be better than the life I had, and these of course influence what I say to the teens.

So, getting back to this one particular teen, I would like to see her have her own business sooner rather than later. She is passionate about not eating meat, for example, and I would feel good if I could help her start her own vegetarian business. She doesn't need either a high school degree or a university degree to do that. But having someone who believes in her would help a lot. Another teen has talked of starting something like a hostel or a home for teens in New Zealand. I would like to help her start that, too.

Right now I have some savings but not enough to do all the things I would like to do. So I am looking for one person travel with me and help me so I can move to the next step with my plans. Which leads me to something which I hadn't started out to do... to make a request to the mother and father of the person I am talking about to give me a chance to help your daughter fulfill her potential, in a way that she herself wants to. I believe there are things she can do while working as either an employee or business partner with me which would give her valuable experience and also help me get one of my projects going. I also believe I can teach her more about what is truly important in life than she will learn in high school or a typical university.

I know that my website and some of my writing is scary to a lot of parents, so I am trying to make it less scary to them. I don't want to slice up any of the teenagers who I talk to, as one over-protective but abusive mother imagined. Instead, I want to help them become more healthy, mentally and physically (since some of them are already abusing alcohol, tobacco or other drugs - not to mention virtyally all of them who have contacted me are self-harming by cutting themselves.)

If you are a parent and have a concern, please contact me directly so we can discuss it. I welcome the chance to help your son or daughter. And if you are interested in traveling with me and helping me, please let me know, too. After Belgium, the next stop will probably be Turkey. It is getting too cold here in Europe, and it is too expensive. I looked at the prices and the weather in Turkey recently and thought "What am I doing in Amsterdam!?" It is so cheap in Turkey compared to here that in about 10 days or so I will have saved the cost of the flight to get there. I will be looking for a spot place to open a hostel of my own. I have thought about it a long time. I thought of Tallin, Estonia, because I really liked it there and met some good people, but it gets too cold there in the winter! I like to travel light and that means not carrying around a lot of winter clothes!

S. Hein
October 25, 2007
Amsterdam, Holland