My daughter turned 8 recently. It's a fascinating age. Tonight at dinner much of the discussion centered on Santa Claus. How will he get into our house, as we don't have a chimney? Well, he can get in through the fairy door in the kitchen (which has a matching door out on the tree in the front yard). It's a tiny little door, so how might that work? Well, he's magical and he can shrink things to get through, just like he is immune to the fire when he goes through the chimneys. It's an age of questions and pondering and the like. Santa is already a question mark, but in a way he's still a possibility as well. I love the innocence and the seeking of 8.
But of course 8 has its darkness as well. She has never really been an 'easy' child to raise like my son. From the time when we brought her home from the hospital, when she simply never wanted to sleep alone, until even the present day, when she still has her nightmares and still wakes us up at night, she's always had her insecurities. She rages once in awhile at us, and I know that she's the cause of my grey hair. We sometimes dread the coming teenage years.
One of the things we have been really watching lately is how she interacts with her peers at school. When it comes to younger kids she loves to play the mother hen...get her a bunch of kindergarten kids who need bossing, and she's there. But around her peers? The little girl who has never liked being alone doesn't mind so much sitting alone or playing by herself at recess.
On the one hand this concerns me, because as a parent I want my kid to achieve and succeed socially. Who wants to raise an outcast? Sometimes I worry she isn't 'ascending' into second grade social stratospheres (yes, the class structure is already starting to develop at such a young age). Part of it may be that even as we have lived in this town since she was born we'll always be considered outsiders on some level. That's just small town life for you...stay a generation or four, and you'll be fully accepted. But part of it may be that she sometimes isn't quite as mature as some of the other kids. She's rather dance around like nobody's watching. She still very much has that little kid imagination when probably a lot of her friends have already decided against Santa.
But on the other hand I'm proud of her. In her younger days she would have raged and cried about not having everybody rotate around her. Now, though? She's basically fine with it. What this seems to tell me is that she doesn't think she has to be a follower of what everybody else does. Girls of the second grade are starting to learn that meanness that will become something of their trademark for the next twenty years of their lives. They'll exclude and bully and gossip about girls who don't live as the gang leader says they ought to live. Childhood, especially for girls, can be cruel. But I'm grateful that my daughter may well be learning to live above the fray. While the other girls are off in their groups gossiping and plotting, she's playing on the jungle gym and singing a song to herself.
We tell ourselves as Christians all the time not be followers of the world's ways. Perhaps, just perhaps, this lesson is being learned by my daughter.
