“You don’t think we should at least consider it?”
“Come on, Paul. It’s the same manipulation and control we saw before.”
Mia’s doing well, but in terms of certain behaviors, there’s more work to be done. The reasons she gives for not needing to graduate—I’m different, I’m special, I don’t need to do what everyone else has to do to succeed—are the same reasons she gave for doing what she did last year.
“That’s the way the world works, Paul, you have to jump through hoops to accomplish something—getting a degree, a promotion, getting anything. She’ll sabotage herself with this same attitude when she comes home and justify it every step of the way down.”
“I’m just afraid she’s going to get discouraged, it’s been such a long time. Don’t you remember being sixteen, Claire?”
“If it’s such hell, then why doesn’t she do what she needs to do to come home? All twelfth-graders are sick of school, but they finish that last semester, they do whatever’s necessary to graduate—why should she be different? I’m not taking the bait this time. I’m not sending the message that all she has to do is dig her heels in and we cave. I also think she’s had enough failure; it’s about time she create some success. She needs to have a sense of solid accomplishment.”
“Mia’s right,” Cameron tells us on a phone call. “She has gotten all the tools she can get from us. She’s just not using them. She’s afraid to shine, she’s a leader who won’t lead. She calls it ‘show-up games’—a lot of it is, so is life, that’s the point! What she doesn’t see is that she’s playing her own show-up game—how to show up empty-handed. It’s never about the levels, it’s about growth. This ‘waste of time,’ as she calls it, is her biggest mirror, it’s her biggest opportunity to grow.”
“So, what do we do now? She’s not budging, and she knows we aren’t either.”
“I think Mia’s lost her desire because she doesn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Not because it’s too long, she could be out of here in two months tops, but because she’s filled the path with obstacles. I want to give her a jump start, something to motivate her.”