As adults, we are conditioned to pursue self-improvement.
Eat healthier, lower your cholesterol, lose weight, quit smoking, quit
drinking, be more organized, be less organized, have more fun, have less fun?,
exercise more. There’s a self-help book for every obsession, affliction,
personality quirk and nuance, and ten minutes with Oprah or Dr. Phil will make
you painfully self-aware of every flaw. And you might pick something – for me its
patience – to work on. And if you’re like me, you’ll make the effort daily and
most likely you’ll fail, daily. But it’s okay, or at least you’ll tell yourself
this as you fall asleep, because there’s always tomorrow. Today was just a crazy day.
But then one day, you see yourself in your kids.
L is 4, a frustrating age anyway. Then again are there
non-frustrating ages? I don’t know…yet. I’m hoping. But no matter the task, she doesn’t need any help. She knows
everything. Just ask her, she’ll tell you. And I smile through clenched teeth
because she is just like me. Down to
the face she makes when she’s mad, her independence, her inclination for
solitude, her wandering.
It’s a relentless challenge to battle L’s unyielding
stubbornness with give. To show her patience, not just tell her about it. These
are real teaching moments – there are actual lessons in there, for both of us. But what about accepting, even loving, all the
other imperfections? The ones that make
her, her…even if they also make me, me.
This weekend, we went to a birthday party. When all the kids
were outside, playing in the sprinkler, L was inside playing at the kitchen set
by herself. When all the kids came inside for cake, she went out to the picnic
table to color. Mr. Beaker leaned over and whispered to me: I think our kid is the weird kid. And we
laughed because yeah, she totally is. I whispered back: Your wife was, too.
I think it’s a hard lesson to learn that you can’t self-help
your way into fixing your kids. I hope that I’m learning that when she’s four,
not fourteen or twenty-four. It’s both
exhilarating and terrifying to watch your children and see yourself, like
looking into an eerie crystal ball. Knowing the hardships they’ll face because
they have your foibles and fallacies, and the successes they’ll have because
they have your strengths.
Will she be bullied in school because she is different, more
imaginative? It’s possible. Can I do anything about it? More importantly, should I do anything about it? Can I, or
should I, teach her how to fit in? Encourage her to play with the other kids at
the party, even if what she really wants is to play alone? I honestly don’t
know. I didn’t. Truth be told, I sort of enjoyed watching her.
Doesn’t that imply some sort of self-acceptance? Well, take that, Oprah.
