Last week I drove my daughter to a job fair at a local resort that caters to the ultra rich. At 20, Emily has been driving for two years, but the place is perched on the top of a mountain.

The private road from the gatehouse to the main hotel snakes steeply uphill for over two miles. She was nervous about the drive and the interview, so I volunteered to be her chauffer. I figured I'd wait for her (and remain unseen) in one of the guest parking lots while she went in for her interview.

Emily wants to work in the hotel's greenhouse and gardens. She's an incredibly talented artist. Painting was her first passion, but she loves beauty in all its many forms. In the past year, she's developed an obsession with plants and gardening. She planted a pollinator garden at the edge of our yard and has been aquiring an impressive collection of indoor plants.

She currently works in a greenhouse that's part of an independent supermarket and garden center. They don't grow or propagate plants. It's a retail job with a green thumb vibe. She wants to do more than care for and sell plants. Nurturing seedlings, tending to gardens, sculpting her surroundings — all of these tasks fill Emily's artistic cup.

Emily is a sponge. She wants to learn everything possible about the plants we hang in our windows and place on the shelves in our homes. That's how we found ourselves creeping up that narrow mountain road in the fog, headed towards what may be her very first full-time job. I'm happy for her. I want this for her. I also worry about the world crushing her spirit, though I know this is kind of inevitable, particularly for artists.

I've been a writer my entire adult life, though I didn't make my living from writing until six years ago, at the ripening age of 48. I now spend my days writing, but it's mainly for other people. I'm truly grateful for this work, but…I want to write what I want to write. I wish that was possible.

I don't know any artist who is able make a decent full-time living from their art alone. My husband, for example, is a drummer. He makes money with a series of side gigs and projects including teaching drums in his home studio. His first dream of artistic success was all about creating his own music, an album, a band — you know the drill.

My first dream of writing success was all about creating my own books. I wanted to be a novelist. I'd clung to that fairy tale for decades, writing when I could find the time between full-time jobs, then parenting, then dealing with my older daughter's illness and subsequent death from cancer. There was never enough time.

I realized something as Emily and I drove up the mountain towards what may or may not be the next phase of her life — so much of what I've created as an artist has been for people much wealthier than me.

I work for large companies with fat budgets so they can sell services and technology that cost more, annually, than my mortgage.

I kept this admittedly bitter thought to myself as we approached the guest parking area and I watched Emily ascend the stairs to the hotel lobby where the job fair was taking place.

The resort employs hundreds of people. It's a good place to work, a decent job. It's also an incredibly fabulous place to stay if you can afford room rates that start at $900 per night.

Until the day of the job fair, I'd never wandered the grounds as a guest might.

But I had some time to kill, so I abandoned my car and decided to explore. The place is huge and a bit disorienting with its multiple buildings perched on different tiers of the mountain. Steps connect the lower-level parking areas to the hotel and other buildings . There is a famous tower on the property that touches the sky and, on clear days, provides a breathtaking view of six states.

I made my way to the gardens that my kid would potentially be spending 40+ hours a week tending. The resort grows its own herbs, vegetables, and flowers. Highly-paid chefs create farm-to-table meals with ingredients grown just steps from the kitchen.

Guests can purchase seasonal bouquets while they bask in the resort's many amenities — fishing, rock climbing, swimming, horseback riding, axe throwing, golfing, (hunting people?) It's the kind of stuff rich people with lots of time can enjoy.

It was raining when I reached the gardens. They were in an early stage of growth, with rows and rows of young tulips beginning to emerge from behind plastic fencing meant to keep the deer away.

Thick fog had descended upon the mountain, pushing its way into every space. I walked through the eerily quiet flower beds beneath a hand-crafted walkway made from whole logs and branches. White-throated Sparrows, blackbirds, and robins dove in and out of the structure, busily tending to nests.

I imagined Emily working there, weeding, clipping tulips, head bent in concentration, knees and back aching, surrounded by beauty not meant for her.

Emily doesn't need my cynicism. She needs my support. She needs a purpose beyond retail servitude. She needs to feel and see nature. This job would give that to her. The place is surrounded by nature. It is a feast for the eyes and the soul even on an overcast, early spring day.

I want this job for her because I know she'll love it. I hope it will teach her a lot and, perhaps, present some opportunities for her. She had a rough time in her teens. She lost her sister. She struggled with depression and blotted out the world with weed.

Emily spent half of high school in her room curled around her laptop, trying to find the motivation to participate in what passed for an education during the weird, dark, apocalyptic time of covid.

She continued creating art through all of this. She was always exceptional, but her painting reached new heights as she hit her mid to late teens. I thought she'd be in art school. I thought she'd be able to leverage this astonishing talent to land in a better place than I did when I was in my early twenties. Life swallowed me and my dreams back then.

I want something different than working class drudgery for Emily, but we are working class artists, my husband and me. Neither of us graduated from college. It seemed like college might be a way for Emily to avoid the low-paying service and vocational jobs that my husband and I had in our twenties.

It turns out the vision for a better beginning for my kids was as aspirational as my dream of becoming a novelist. I simply did not know how hard it would be to break free from a life of living paycheck to paycheck, a life that has largely been about sidelining my art because I've had no other choice.

I now have much more time to write. I'm even considering a bigger project than one-off essays — maybe a memoir, maybe a novel. I'm also 53 and I still rely on client work to pay my bills.

When the time for Emily to go to college finally came around, we had no way of paying for it. She got some financial aid and even a generous scholarship to an art school, but it was still too much money. So, she went to community college for a year and hated it.

She fled from that school and got the job she has now, starting as a cashier and ending up in the greenhouse. She's learned how to work with people. She's learned that she's good at following directions. She's learned that she wants more from life than working retail jobs. She wants to create beauty, somehow. She wants to be an artist, some way.

I wish we could afford to send Emily to the very best art school. I wish she could paint all day, travel to Europe, learn about ancient cultures and meet interesting people.

I wish she could live in a place filled with beauty, a place surrounded by mountains and trees and birds — like a remarkable resort on top of an iconic mountain. Maybe, someday, that will be her reality, but Emily is going to have to work hard to get there. I don't think it's such a terrible thing to work hard for your dream. But I'm her mother. I saw what losing her sister did to her poor heart. I want less pain for Emily. She deserves beauty without hardship. We all do.

Maybe this job is the threshold to Emily's future. Maybe it's just a backbreaking working class job that will wear on her soul. Probably, it's a little of both.

I'm trying not to worry. And, after all, she hasn't gotten the job yet. She had her second interview yesterday. Right now, I'm holding my breath for her. I'm incredibly proud of this young woman who was once my baby. No matter what she ends up doing, I know she will bring beauty into the world.