I’m often astonished at the maturity my kids show.
The “teenage years” were a period I’d imagined would be challenging, and that is true, like all stages of parenting, but what I hadn’t imagined was the joy of witnessing the unfolding of awareness.
Just simple things expand my world a little more and today everything changed again.
I’m a bit of a softie and if my daughter feels tired and asks for a lift to school instead of getting the bus, I rarely say no.
It was a lift like any other, Taylor Swift plugged in from the outset, having to turn back because she forgot something.
Quick telling off, quick apology, quick forgiveness of both her absent-mindedness and my own reaction.
And we discussed the presentation she’s giving today.
“I just don’t see why you’d care about what anyone thinks,” she said.
“I mean, everyone will have forgotten about it by tomorrow, it’s not like “the event” of Year 8 or anything. No one’s that interested.”
Not how I saw things at her age at all.
She expanded: “When did we start caring about what people think?
I mean, when in history after Adam and Eve did we decide to start caring about that?”
My daughter goes to a Catholic school so this is the lens she currently asks the question through.
Keen to ensure it’s not as one-dimensional as the impression I got of Christianity growing up, I turn down TayTay and ask her if she knows what an allegory is.
That perhaps the Fall occurs in each moment we give into the temptation to believe that the outside world has the power to make us feel happy/sad, forgetting that it is actually our inner power to choose.
“Do you want to give that power away by letting other opinions (probably imagined) decide for you?”
By now she’d zoned out and put the volume up again.
“Yeah, I get it. This is the best song!”
Damn, just as I was getting warmed up!
Always my teacher. It’s not about what I think I know or want to communicate. Or what I want for her.
She’s not even 13 yet.
Right now it’s all about TayTay.
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