My almost 17 year old daughter, the one who ran away last week and is now serving out her restrictions, fights against herself. Give her a taste of success and she’ll sabotage it, deeply convinced that it is undeserved. Left unsaid by her is, “If I deserved good things, my birth mother wouldn’t have left me,” simplistic yes but, more so, very primal and the root of my children’s inner pain.

Slowly she’s learning that good things can and do happen to her. She’d been taken out of school, by me, for excessive fist-fighting. I home schooled her for the remainder of her tenth grade year; we grew very close which both empowered her and scared her.

She returned to school the next year, passing almost every class but she knew she’d have to make up her tenth grade classes so I have her now in an intensive summer school program, making her face the failures but also enabling her to overcome them, knowing that each success she earns will greatly strengthen her.

She wants someday to be a chef and like the carrot in front of the donkey, I keep finding ways to motivate her, our local technical college now has a culinary arts program.

Tim Appelo wrote an article, “Success is Made, not Born,” in which he interviewed Thomas Harrison, the author of Instinct: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Business Goals. Harrison says,

“One of the most important success promoters is painting a mental picture of success, visualizing oneself in the successful role one aspires to. This sets us on a path of activities that keep us focused on that picture and attracts people and events around us that will help us get to success.”

When my Vanessa had, in essence, quit school, I suggested that she practice saying, “Do you want fries with that?” knowing she’d limited her future chances. I kept believing that she’d return to school, and she did so faster than I expected her. She’s not been in a single fight at school since then, she did receive detention for texting her sister at school, indeed they ended up serving it together.

Now she’s deep in summer school, as we sit here tonight, shut inside by a violent thunderstorm, she’s at my desk working on a physical science project when many of her friends are now at the beach. I’ve gotten the concept of deferred gratification across to her and she’s practicing visualization on her own, seeing herself graduate, to march with her class in the coliseum next May.

I see her giftedness in food preparation; her obvious love for the art of it. She brought this gift with her when she moved in. I want my kids to choose their own paths, it’s my job to encourage, not control, their choices.

Thomas Harrison quips,

“Successful people may have something extra in their DNA, but they aren’t born fully grown. Entrepreneurs don’t usually show up in the delivery room yelling, “I smell opportunity here!”

I’ll help Vanessa find opportunities, I’ll work on her financial aid packet, hunt for scholarships and emotionally cheer her on. She’s a strong-willed daughter, who had a very rough early life, the one in the sib group that for some unknown reason bore the brunt of their birth mom’s fury. She’s also the one that immediately, not superficially, but strongly attached to me within the first few years of living within our family.

She’s come a long way and she still has a long way to go, but she’s got what it takes and she’ll make me proud.