“I Love Me”, it says in big blue marker on my daughter Isabella’s dresser. The phrase is positioned just so; she can read it when she lies in bed with her head on her pillow. I wonder, does she need to be reminded she’s comfortable in her own skin?
“Why did you write that?” I ask, and the answer is as unsatisfying as it is predictable: “I don’t know.” Ah, the eternal six-year-old’s cop out.
“Well,” I say, “I guess it’s important to like yourself.”
“Why?”
Here we go; try having any kind of meaningful conversation with a first grader, and you are sooner or later confronted with a question that will take years to answer. If said first grader is a girl, you’re in an even bigger quagmire; raising girls is a challenge that deserves a category of it’s own.
Why do girls need to like themselves? It’s a question that can’t be brushed off with a thoughtless ‘when you’re older’-type statement; if we wait until the answer magically comes to us, it’ll be too late.
Raising a girl is a big responsibility, and it comes with the uncanny ability to take everything we hear on the news personally. “What if that was my daughter?” we ask ourselves, when we hear yet another story about child porn, rape, teen pregnancy, and the devastating consequences of eating disorders. It is much easier to worry about our children being victims than it is to ponder their potential for landing in jail; predators are everywhere, even under their own skin.
I realize that ‘like yourself’ really means ‘respect yourself’, and that my biggest hope for my daughter is that she internalizes that respect. Getting there is a balancing act; I don’t believe in building our children up to the point of no return. No child is the absolute smartest, coolest, or most perfect; everybody makes mistakes and you can’t be good at everything. She doesn’t need to be the best first grader; she just needs to be the best Isabella. If only there was a blueprint for that, but the nasty little secret is: there isn’t.
At some point we have to let go and hope for the best, which is potentially the most unsatisfying parenting advice anybody can fathom.
When I started college, there was a girl in my year who had everything going for her. Her parents were rich; she was smart and good-looking and had had –up to that point- a well-rounded education. She had plenty of friends, and no apparent worries; yet, before the end of our second year, she was hooked on heroin and homeless. Why? I don’t know. Something made her restless, something awoke a need to push her limits to where she lost herself completely. I’m sure her parents wondered what, if anything, they did wrong.
It is possible that they messed up somewhere along the line, it is equally possible they didn’t have a hand in the final outcome; I don’t know. It makes me grateful that for now, all I have to worry about are the incidental six-year-old dramas. Hitting her brother over the head with a well-aimed blow, and not listening when I tell her to finish her dinner, are as yet worst-case scenarios. The knowledge that things won’t always be this easy can be pushed to the periphery of my consciousness for a few more years. Maybe by then, I’ll have the answer; if I do, I’ll make sure to advertise it. In the meantime, I’ll make sure to, for once, not yell at her for writing on the furniture.
