What Should I Do?

I have young adult children who live across the country from me so we are often talking on the phone with each other.  The other day I received a call from my daughter and she was amplifying the many melodramas in her life.  I had been here before so I decided to lean back in my chair and listen to the tortured rendition of life as she was currently living it.  So I heard how the roommate was a slob and so very inconsiderate of any of her concerns or priorities. Her boyfriend was an insensitive pig and she couldn’t understand how she could ever have had agreed to go out with him in the first place.  Then her teacher was very unappreciative of all her great gifts and was even mean by asking her to do things that were way above her reach.  And, of course, the job was abusive. She had to deal with all these hostile customers who never thought to say thank you and her boss was completely inconsiderate of her feelings and in the end she thought she should quit her job and school and move to Europe. I had been sitting back filing my nails while listening to this ranting and trying to say the occasionally supportive “Yes I understand dear, that must be hard” or the poignantly placed “Yes, I see”. Or just the curt “uh hun”. Suddenly, as if from nowhere I heard her say: “So Mom, what do you think I should do?’  Totally shocked I lurched forward in my chair and had this surreal experience where it seemed the pause button had been pushed on the phone and our conversation went into suspended animation and I started to tell her. “Well, I don’t know why you ever picked your roommate to begin with. I knew she and you wouldn’t be compatible and I’d get her to move out as quickly as possible. And the boyfriend was a complete loser from the start. That was apparent to the uninitiated.  What were you thinking when you took up with him?  As for your teacher, find someone who will appreciate your genius and never challenge you around anything, after all who better to know your skill than you?   And that job has been the worst possible place you could have picked to work.  I’d file a complaint with someone about how difficult you are having it.  Quit your job and move to Europe? - “what a spectacular idea, can I come?”  After this fantasized ranting of mine I snapped back into my sane mind, the pause bottom was cancelled, and I was heard to say: “Well, I don’t know, dear, what do you think you should do?”  She does, of course, have all the answers for her quest and my job is just to listen to the ravings while she navigates the vagaries of life.  Or as Gertrude Stein said: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. there never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”