I wrote this blog a few weeks ago, intending to post it in a couple of days.  Twenty four hours later, my daughter called me hysterically crying and talking about suicide again.  In the blog I had written, I had been thinking about the need to cut off the financial help to my daughter (tough love) to let her reap the consequences of her financial decisions.  I just couldn’t cut her off financially in the midst of such depression though so we are still supporting her.

One positive step she has taken financially in the last three weeks is that she did sell her broken down car.  At least now the maintenance expenses and car insurance expenses are stopped though she still has to pay off the loan that she used to buy this car (that turned out to be a “lemon”).

(Three weeks ago)

There is a parental fine line with young adult children between “Reasonable Help” and “Enabling”.  I have yet to completely master the distinction as there are times such as now where the line is so gossamer thin that I have trouble seeing it.

In my last blog, I talked about the trauma of finding out that my younger daughter had purposefully taken an overdose of sleeping pills.  I am pretty sure that my reaction and my husband’s reaction…once we knew she would be ok…was not unique to us.  After the first shock was over, we went into data collection mode to understand where her stress points were, followed by rescue/fix-it mode.

Finances and spending in a mess?  We found a financial coach that specializes in working with young adults who struggle with managing finances.  Plan B could be we as parents; after all we manage both our household finances and business finances.  My daughter refused all offers of financial coaching from any source.

One would think that extraordinary financial stress would cause my daughter to agree to let us help brainstorm ways to adjust her lifestyle to get out of the large amount of debt she has piled up (credit card maxed plus a car loan for a car that turned out to be a lemon).  What is half fascinating and half frustrating is that she wants the same parameters to her life that she had before that got her into the financial mess she is in…keeping a higher priced apartment, keeping the broken down car instead of selling it and stopping the bleed on the car insurance, having to uber to work 20 miles away instead of finding a job closer to her, and so on.

Our philosophy is that what is “broken” is the way she got into debt, not the debt itself.  The process of working to pay off the debt is going to teach her to manage money more than if we paid off her debt for her.  We therefore are contributing an amount of money each month for a specified period of time for her living expenses while she pays down her debt. We even wrote the agreement down in a contract form just so she would understand what we were offering and what we expected.  We made her sign it.

Fast forward from last Fall to March now and the quandary; 3 months out of the 7 months we were giving her have now passed.  She really isn’t fulfilling the spirit of the contract which was to start shifting around her lifestyle choices until she could start paying down the debt. As I type this, she has $7 in her checking account after paying her rent (including what we gave her) and though she has paid down her $2000 (maxed) credit card bill $150, she will have to start charging to survive the next days/weeks.  So are we crossing over the “Reasonable Help” line into “Enabling” her if we give money but she isn’t changing her lifestyle?  I think we are.

As difficult as it will be to do, I think what we need to do is to snip the financial umbilical cord and let my daughter start living the consequences to her spending lifestyle.  Of course, the result will be that she will somehow blame us, be angry, not speak to us, not show up to family events and so forth which causes stress as well since relations with my other daughter (the one just out of jail) are strained.  Back to the quota expectation I have; only one strained relationship per family please.

Because of the pill overdose, there is always the concern that she might do it again.  I remember my daughter saying something to us that first evening in the mental health facility she was taken to for a week after her hospital stay.  She said, “Then I will really be unhappy” in reply to something one of us said.  I said back to her that it sounded like she was threatening us with doing something again if we didn’t do what she wanted.  I don’t believe she said anything in reply.

I’m not a medical professional.  I am unable to tell the difference between a spoiled entitled young woman and someone who genuinely took pills as a cry for help.  That’s why we have insisted on her seeing a psychiatrist though with limited success since my daughter has not been completely honest with the psychiatrist.

Seriously, can’t parental issues be easier than this?  How about a nice, straightforward crisis for my daughter like a bad hair day?  I could handle that in my best mom manner.