daughter dilemma

I had the rare opportunity of spending some time alone with Maria, my almost-19-yr-old daughter. Well, as alone as we could be with her cell phone in hand. I tried to get enough words in between her text messaging so that she could 'hear' me. Not sure how successful I was.

Our relationship has been better in the last 6-9 months and part of that is due to the fact that we don't get together much, plus we don't dig into the volatile issues anymore. She holds very high ideals which immediately place my 'racy' lifestyle in her 'wrong' column. Time will right all that as she gets her own dose of reality, but until then, we strive to have a pleasant relationship.

Tonight I needed to bring up the topic of me moving, which I'd like to do in the next year. I wanted to know if she was open to any of my options (translated: which was the lesser of two evils in her mind) I am considering either moving with Christie (my 15-yr-old daughter and her sister) to California to live with Andy, or staying in town and moving in with Rob (whom she despises for no other reason than she associates him with the family breakup--and by the way he had nothing to do with it).

Let's just say this was a no-win conversation. Basically she said that if I moved to California she'd pretty much stop talking to me, and if I stayed in town and moved in with Rob, she'd never come over.

This pretty much nixes out the 2 men in my life. Which leaves me with the following thoughts/ideas:

1. To hell with what she wants, it's my life and I need to go live it. But I risk losing her, which, as a mother, I can't bear. The guilt would eventually eat away at me.

2. Look for a new guy close by that I love as much as Rob, and hope Maria doesn't find something drastically wrong with him.

3. Continue to live without a man in the house. More of the same and I'm getting pretty tired of that.

4. Ask Andy to move here. She likes him, although she thinks he's immature and doesn't understand his paintings. But I don't want Andy to move here. He belongs in LA, that's just who he is. I couldn't ask him to do that, nor would I want to change who he is.

Because there is no immediate answer, I sit here feeling kind of deflated. And disappointed that we had to revisit those emotions when all I wanted to do was have fun and some more mature discussions. Guess that was premature.