Sharknado

My nearly 13 year old girl is in week 2 of her August vacation away from Helicopter Mom and Easy-going Dad. It’s making me a little bit of a wreck.

Last week, she was at sleep away camp, a more than 4 hour drive away from our Northern Virginia suburb to the southern tip of the eastern shore of Virginia. She loved the whole camp thing – from new girls hailing from different places like Manhattan and Atlanta, to the food (imagine!) and the water sports (fun!) and she’s decided she’s interested in becoming a camp counselor one day.  Yeah!   Then she told me about the 2 dead sharks she saw on the beach there….

We are now in week 2 of the August Vacation Away from Parents, and my daughter is in Florida with a family friend and her daughter.  After arriving in Tampa yesterday afternoon, they headed out to the beach after dinner for a quick swim and sunset watching.  Last night, after several nervous and unanswered texts from me, my daughter texted me back and wrote this:  “Oh, me and Camille went to the beach and I saw a shark near the shore so I said ‘Camille, get out of the water’ and so she got freaked out and so it was cool but scary, and goodnight, love you guys.”

Yikes. 

I blame author Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg for my shark phobia; I was a beach obsessed teen growing up on Long Island when both the book and the movie of Jaws came out, which undermined my confidence and made me an extremely cautious ocean swimmer.  When I see dolphins dive lazily in the ocean not too far off shore, I’m convinced they’re sharks in dolphin clothing.  I mean, I have a real thing about them.

I immediately texted my daughter back with all the cautions about being careful, staying observant, not going too far out, not going in alone, blah, blah, blah; if I was there, I’d be on shark attack lookout, trust me.  My daughter texted back, reassuring me that she wasn’t going to go to that beach “much” and she would be careful and that I should go to sleep and forget it. 

Today’s shark attack?  The hair color attack.  There will be a trip to a hairstylist today and my daughter says she “only” wants a few blondish streaks.  Her friend has been known to have brown and pink ombre hair from time to time, which looks great (sort of), I just don’t want my daughter to have pink hair. 

Because my phone battery was dead this morning, my Helicopter Mom defense perimeter was down. My concerns about hair color may be ignored, as underscored when my daughter responded to my text on this subject: “Ya ya mom ok bye.”

The point of this post?  It occurs to me that the teenaged “Sharknado” years have just begun.  Whether real or imagined, there are sharks everywhere for my daughter and me to navigate:  Today, it’s a one-color hair color process – tomorrow it’s a fender bender or first boyfriend. 

In my own, sometimes over-the-top way, I trust my daughter to swim around those pesky sharks through the use of cunning, common sense and sound judgment.  And my kid is a good swimmer, just so long as she doesn’t go out too far.   

In the meantime, I’m standing on the shore, observant and ready to pounce if I have to.  Because sharks have big jaws and sharp teeth.  I know.