You Cannot Dial-A-Child

 One thing I’ve learned, in watching AT grow up, is that you cannot Dial-A-Child.  This was brought to the forefront this week when we went to a museum.   When I was a child, we always hit the museums, given the opportunity, and my dad liked taking the role of a teacher, saying, “What do you think that is?”  Often, I knew the information and I also knew that he was pleased when I had the answer.  He probably doesn’t even realize it to this day how much I saw him as a teacher when I was a child.  Now as an adult, I enjoy the role of being a teacher and I give him credit for my being a teacher now.

So, with my own child, I harbored fantasies that I would be teaching facts, that she would be a voracious reader (as am I), that we would share information, that we would share books to read.   When she was little, I promise I read to her constantly.  I imagined that when she was a preteen, I would read wonderful young adult books and pass them on to her.  We would go to the museum and she would be amazed and interested in the information I found.  I, in turn, would be amazed at her prior knowledge. 

Ha!  I repeat….Ha!

That’s not the child of my household, and, at the museum this week, I had a twinge.  Where was this mini-me that I had dreamt of?   Why was she dancing and prancing, instead of looking at the excellent exhibits?  Instead, I have a child who is intense, imaginative, and determined to manage her own ship. She loves her family and friends intensely.   She wants to read for information, not pleasure.  She wants to write her own books, not read the books of others.  She wants to draw, to create.  I’ve learned her creative soul does not want the 5 steps to a project, starting at step one (which is the way my mind works).  Her creative soul wants to create and ask for help only when there is a problem.  She may check in with me for the first time at step four.  Her conversations are peppered with “What would you do if….?” and I’m not even going to fill in that blank because her questions are so far out there and crazy and funny.   When she was younger, her imagination would get her in trouble, because she would ask herself “what-if” questions until she stirred herself up into a frenzy of worry.  We would even say, “No more ‘what-if’ questions.”  She’s matured out of that, thank goodness.

She is socially adept, not shy, like I was as a preteen and teen.  She didn’t want to be out of school this summer because of all the new friends she made at her new school last year. I watched her as a three-year-old, initiate conversation with the leader of the band. As an 11-year-old, she appropriately inserted herself into the conversation with the dad of a child star, so well so that the dad later came to retrieve her to meet the star.   

She is determined to be the master of her own ship.  She knows what she wants, what she approves of, and where she wants to go.  She has firm boundaries around her.  And, in the end, she will be the master of her own ship, as all our children are, and I’ll be left on the shore, holding my breath, whispering “Diligence, diligence!” and waving goodbye.  I did not have the opportunity to Dial-A-Child, but I think God knew what he was doing.