This is my dear daughter Jessica Aldridge nee Wise, who’s visiting us over spring break, and today is one of the moments we’ll leave the experiences Caroline, Jessica, and I have been exploring together to take a journey a deux into the absurd out on the road. My daughter, a troubled soul, in her attempts to find a direction, is throwing the proverbial monkey poo at the wall, trying to see what sticks, but so far is simply all over the place. Considering that she has an inordinate amount of time for herself, we’ve been encouraging her to consider delving deeper into her creative abilities. To that end, we lead by example, hoping Jessica might discover some level of fun in one of the many things we share with her, but nothing seems to stick. Sure, she’s started enjoying photography and has taken to writing but the hit-and-miss nature of paying attention to it is limiting a rapid evolution and growth.

So, on a spur of the moment, the two of us jumped into the car for a road trip east with no plan or idea of what might actually come out of our jaunt down the highway. Whatever it was going to be, it was likely to end up in a book we were putting together as a keepsake of her time in Arizona with Caroline and me.

I almost forgot to share with the reader that I’m rather tardy with posting this sequence, as in a dozen years late. I posted a few bits and pieces back in 2011, but I was too busy showing Jessica other creative endeavors, and then we were also overwhelmed trying to knock out the hardcover book that was evolving day by day. We’d even recruited the help of my son-in-law Caleb to make a contribution from afar so when he sees the book; he can feel like he was a part of the adventure with his wife.

I suppose my desire to lend influence to my daughter has a lot to do with not having the most active role in her childhood because her mother and I divorced. Twenty-two years ago, I followed a love that was never really present between her mom and me. That obviously meant there would be a delta between us, especially after she moved back to the United States some years before I eventually did, too. By the time I was landing in Arizona, she was over in Texas, and her mom had remarried. To be frank, and Jessica will be the first to admit the same, my ex-wife married a half-wit, and on more than one occasion, in conversation with Sheila, my ex, she as much as said so but felt economically trapped. The anti-intellectual stance of Jessica’s stepfather, with a propensity for psychological torture, conspired against everyone in their household (there were six in total) to accept mediocrity reinforced by deep poverty.

Jessica knew she wanted out of Texas and even asked seriously if we’d bring her permanently to Arizona so she could escape the psycho named Barry, her stepfather. We denied her for both selfish reasons and in deference to her mom, who invested as much as she could to give my daughter the best life she could, and it was Jessica who helped offer Sheila a semblance of refuge, most times. After a time, it started to appear that Sheila was sacrificing her own sense of self as she obliged her husband and his increasingly peculiar behavior. Well, it turned out that on top of everything else, Barry had early-onset dementia.

By the time Jessica was turning 17 she decided that she was going to try joining the Navy. Initially, I wanted to talk her out of serving in the military as I didn’t see a good fit, but she convinced me with the argument that she wanted out of Florence, Texas, before she was pregnant or on meth. It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic when those are the options for many in small-town America. Military life proved to be a constraint she wasn’t ready for, and fairly early on in her soon-to-be-over naval career, she went AWOL. Sheila contacted me about the situation, but I had no more information than she or the Navy had. Jessica hadn’t contacted me while hiding out. To be honest, my initial impression was that there was some likelihood that my not-very-angelic daughter might have turned to a life of ill repute.

Luckily for all of us, my daughter wasn’t taking starring roles in porn and developing that meth habit she feared in Texas. She was simply hiding and playing video games while her then-boyfriend covered for her. Somehow, the Navy let her go without her spending a single day in jail; how that worked out is beyond my imagination. So, here we are today, and Jessica is about 25; I’m not good at remembering what year she was born, as I was distracted at the time by my own dramas. I suppose I’d like to save her from distraction, but I also understand that we all have to fall to earth on our own terms.

Help me, Dad, I’m asking for a hand to drag me out of the desert of the woman I don’t know yet! Sorry, daughter, but you will have to struggle, likely for some time, as learning who we are is a traitorous, unmarked trail through ambiguity and hurt. My apologies for not having this knowledge myself when I was younger, so I might have better been able to convey to you something valuable about how to negotiate one’s self, but the good stuff arrives with age if one is able to cultivate such things.

Go forward and nosh on the bitter experiences as they present themselves as you are cursed with a curiosity that might get you in trouble, but unless you are willing to roll over and accept an existence you resented your mother for taking on, you might walk in an old pair of my shoes and just have to try everything because why not?

You’ve already learned that doing what others demand of you tastes like shit, but the balancing act between self-exploration and the need for survival takes a lot of work. You are finding indulgence at too young an age and are simultaneously lucky and unlucky that you are able to wander so far and wide.

You desire to fashion yourself into a kind of Thinker; you love reading, traveling, and new experiences. You don’t shy away from discomfort but only on your own terms. Be careful, as this is a means to finding yourself stewing in a heap of nothing very meaningful. Discomfort and struggle make the wins so much sweeter.

Today, though, we’ll go out and catch up with the play we lost when your father, for all intents and purposes, turned away from you. Love and happiness are evolving things, just like adding a new book and another trip to your repertoire of tools you pull from to shape how you see the world. We learn to find in others those attributes we’d like to see in ourselves and hope that they might love similar things within us. Those aspects of becoming human should find entanglement in ways that make your soul sing, but this can be elusive, and if and when it shows up, will it really be the right time?

It’s all fun and games when we don’t yet understand the things we aren’t yet ready to know.

The enthusiasm of my daughter to find what she hasn’t seen or places she’s not been is great, if only she could attach that to some extended learning about skills that can catapult her further down the proverbial road. Then again, maybe Caleb and this half-crazed girl in a woman’s body who appears to be pushing against the idea of growing up will find the symbiosis to explore the world together.

The story behind these photos, if it could really be called a story, is found in the book we put together, but as I looked at it with the idea of transferring it to this entry, it just wasn’t going to work out. That idea is dead, like the body below my left wheel.

After all my lecturing and criticism, my daughter jumped into a vehicle in Duncan, Arizona, with the idea of escaping her father; little did she recognize that the abandoned truck wasn’t going anywhere and hadn’t in many years.

So she took off on foot, determined to get back to Florida rather than suffer another moment with Mr. Critical.

There’s so much we wish for our offspring but at the end of the day, if they are happy, we should be on their side for finding some of that. I think that, for the most part, Jessica is excited about her prospects and lacks any fear about jumping into new adventures. All the same, I do worry about her financial future as she meanders through life.

Yes, this was her reaction to the idea that I’d had enough of her and that she needed to return to her husband; spring break was over.