So Far Away, and Yet So Close...If You Have Facebook and Google That Is.

My daughter has the travel bug. She is 16. She is in Thailand. Isn't that almost as far away as you can be from your mother? I ask myself, why did she want to go as far away from me as possible?

• TREKTIP: Encourage your child to travel and support his/her excitement even though it is sometimes hard, or seemingly unbearable.

My facebook status for days has simply been, "I miss J." It says it all. She is off the grid. Traveling from northern Thailand village to northern Thailand village, doing community service. She has built a wall around a school and taught English. She is having the "time of her life," she states in the one email message sent to "Everyone." It must be the "Thai massage" she got after sleeping on a bamboo bed for 4 nights. Maybe it's the cool friends she bonded with before takeoff from LAX.

• TREKTIP: Traveling as a youth breeds independence, awareness, worldliness, tolerance and human consciousness!

In any event, I have been waiting for her to resurface, for over 10 days. And there it was, a comment to my facebook status: "I miss mommyyy." And then, "I'm online if you want to chat!" I am reading this from my iPhone, at a restaurant, wondering how fast I can get home to my MacBook. I get home, sigh, and slump my shoulders. I comment back on my status, "I missed you by 17 minutes. Ugh." And there she is! She pops up on google chat. We tried to video iChat, but it didn't work. We just google chatted, without video. Whatever worked! She is still having the time of her life, but most of all she misses me. TREKTHERAPY DOSE: My daughter may be as far away as possible, but she is closer to home than ever.