Many, many Goodnight Moons ago, when my Mom was often mistaken for Joan Baez and I was in pigtails, I was instructing my Mother - yet again - on a more effective parenting strategy that would result in increased audience buy-in regarding bedtimes being actual times.
I remember it as if it were literally this morning. My mother's dancing black eyes staring deeply into my dancing black eyes as she utters the gravest Yiddish curse a Jewish mother can hurl:
"May you have a daughter exactly like you."
And so it has come to pass.
This very morning my 8-year-old daughter offered me a similar parenting pearl while I sputtered on about consequences for dawdling and dilly dallying:
"Mom, don't threaten. It never works."
What do you do when you receive excellent parenting advice from your 2nd grader? It's not exactly rude. She says it politely, matter-of-factly. Sometimes she'll even add "no offense."
There is, of course, the occasional snark attack:
"Aren't YOU supposed to be the parent here?" or "I thought we agreed we'd ALL work on our issues in this family."
I am the daughter of a Freudian analyst, so I know the drill, having myself been the psychologically-astute preschooler. But how, oh how, do you effectively parent a highly intuitive, wildly articulate, psychologically astute 2nd-grade-singleton? Reading the post: "The Wonder Begins at Home" really hit home. I grew up as the focus of psychological attention and now, I'm searching my daughter for clues to both my childhood and hers.
There are moments when looking at her stunningly feels like watching myself at that age. (Yes, I understand the minefields of this.) Yet, this new, improved version of me/not me knows herself so much better than I knew myself, has so much more clarity, and says so. And, she is indeed differentiated from her mother.
"We have different styles and ideas, MOM. Just because you like it doesn't me I have to wear it. "
"Just because I came out of your body does not mean I AM your body. No tickling."
In many ways, she is my teacher. She asserts herSELF with strength and clarity. Even if I wasn't trying so hard to respect her selfhood, she would be. I would have nursed that child until college. She was done when she was done. If left to my own devices, without my husband's wisdom and my daughter's will, I'd opt for SuperGlue Attachment parenting.
It turns out every cliché about parenting is true. Because I'm the Mom, my life has transformed. Mothering changed everything. I lost my old self/ves, gained new ones. I see myself everywhere in her and nowhere. She is at once mini-me and yet entirely other.
Thank goodness.
