Blue

What do you do when you have a child with a vastly different personality from your own? I ask that question with honesty, because I really don't know the answer. Some who know me and my kids might assume that I'm talking about the challenges of raising my son, who is a character all his own. But this time, I'm talking about my daughter.

For years, I'm not sure we really qualified as "parents" per se, when we were just raising Lenny by herself. She was such an easy kid. Now, this whole eating thing has always been a challenge. She was a runt as a baby, for sure, not just in size, but in her lack of interest in keeping herself sustained. That was hard--she needed to drink milk or formula in the middle of the night when she was a year and a half old, because she simply didn't eat enough during the day. But that passed and now she still doesn't eat much and she's still tiny but she's strong and she sleeps and she's getting taller so what the hell.

Sometimes when parents talk about raising a child who is different, they mean a kid with special needs or a kid who is struggling with identity issues. But I'm talking about something much more basic--I'm talking about a kid who is just a really different person than me, or her dad.

As I said, for years, we had it so easy. We never child proofed our house, because Lenny would pick something up off the floor and hand it to us. She would never think of putting stuff in her mouth, or doing dangerous things. She had a natural distrust of strangers, especially men. She could play quietly by herself as an infant--true story. When she was not even one, I could tell her on a telecommuting day that I was going to have a 2 hour conference call, so she would need to sit there quietly. I would give her a pac if she wanted one, and she would literally sit there and quietly flip pages in a book, watching me. I would hang up the phone and then she'd start talking. She potty trained herself. At two and a half, she would get up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom in the dark, flush, wash her hands and put herself back to bed. You could talk to her like she was a full-fledged person when she was one and a half. She started reading at three, learned to pump her own legs on the swing when she was 2, took care of her own nighttime nosebleeds, sat quietly in her room and played or read if she woke up in the morning before us, and never, ever caused trouble.

And that's it--that's what I'm struggling with right now. Where did this kid get her mortal fear of doing the wrong thing? I know we didn't teach it to her. She has literally been that way all her life. She hates conflict. She can't watch some animated movies because she senses that something uncomfortable might happen. I tell her, look, books and movies EXIST because of conflict--that's what they're ABOUT, that's what makes life interesting. But she's not having it. For a long time, this seemed eccentric to me, but you know, every person has a right to her personality, so I didn't think much of it.

Enter Augie. Lenny loves her brother and likes him. But she is still so jealous of him. STILL. The boy is almost four. Gabe might be able to relate to this better than me, but not really, because he is an only child. I'm the younger one, so I don't get it at all. I never had my parents to myself, I always had a sibling, so I never knew anything different than having to share folks' time and attention. When she acts out because Augie is getting attention, I have little patience for it, especially since I do more one-off things with her than I do with him. When she cries over homework--saying I don't know the answer! or I don't know what to say! I'm scared to make this presentation! what if I can't climb as high on the rope as I did last time! I honestly have no clue what to say.

It's not because I'm out of touch as a parent and I've forgotten what it's like to be little. It's because I was never like that when I was little. I didn't mind being wrong. I wanted to be right, but I shrugged off my own failures. I was pretty sure I wasn't the most-suited person for team sports but I played basketball and hockey anyway. I tested boundaries all the time and made my parents crazy with my inability to sit still and my interest in causing petty trouble. I was a good student but not as interested in perfection as my brother, so I did enough to be considered bright or gifted or whatever so people would leave me alone and I could eventually ditch class all the time and be forgiven for it. When I was deep in my tomboy phase, I refused to tie my shoes or clean my room and my best friend, definitely a type A personality herself, would get so fed up with my sloppiness that she would do those things for me. I did worry about consequences of bad behavior--usually after the fact, or if I got caught. I did learn early on how to be cautious and not put myself in bad situations, but that was not because I feared getting in trouble, it was because I had learned the hard way not to trust other people and their intentions.

So the thing is, I just don't get it. What is she afraid of, what is this horrible thing that might happen if she is wrong or gets in trouble or if someone else is better than her at something or if she forgets to do something she is supposed to do? Is her concept of love and forgiveness really so fleeting and conditional? It's hard to understand. It's frustrating. I feel weird being the mom saying things like "just let it go," "there's nothing wrong with mediocrity," and "you can't learn anything if you aren't willing to be wrong." Here I am, 37 years old, telling a child she should defy her teacher and just write her damn name the way she wants to write it. I try different tactics, telling her that is capable of doing things she's worried about, refusing to do things for her or even with her when she gets caught up in the idea of failure, but I have no idea if these are the right things. Gabe talks about her being a sensitive child, and I know he's right. But I am not a sensitive woman. I have been thick-skinned as long as I can remember. It's hard for me to relate.

I'm not saying that my way is better, just that I don't know how to put myself in her shoes. And then, I realize this:

My parents didn't get me either. And I turned out all right. Lenny and I have this in common: neither of us ever tells anyone else when we are upset. Or, if Lenny does tell us that she's upset, she cannot tell us why. If I try to get it out of her she will cry "I don't know." Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but all I can do is try and make sure that there's not some kind of outside force causing the trouble. If it's coming from within her, I just have to accept that she will always have that side of her. She will always be a perfectionist who wants to be right and is internally competitive with herself. That will bring good things to her in life--that fire in the belly that her mother just doesn't have, no matter how many people have tried to convince me that I should have it. I am never going to be super-ambitious, always going to be relatively complacent, fairly certain that good enough is good enough, willing to bend the rules or break them into pieces. My firstborn will be more like a lot of people I know, people who are interesting and driven and awesome, but she will be a challenge for me to raise.

I think about one of my close friends, a man who shares Lenny's nerdy love of geography and maps. One time, a bunch of us were bowling. Most of us were doing terribly, lucky to get a 100 at the end of the game, and this guy got a turkey. I thought the whole turkey thing was made up, but no, I witnessed someone get one in real life. Then, he only got 8 pins down on the next roll or something, and he was literally hitting himself in the head, pissed at himself. He was laughing and toasting the rest of us losers with beer during our turns, but even though he had smoked us all, he apparently felt the need to do better, to beat himself. I just laughed at him. I didn't get it, but who cares? This is the guy who takes a little gnome figurine with him on his world travels and takes his picture in scenic locations and sends the postcards to my daughter.

There's more than one way to be, right?

I tried something different last night, after Lenny was panicking about a presentation she needs to do for school. This is the kid who memorizes the entire play and pracitcally strong-arms her way into a speaking part, and she's scared of reading from a poster? After trying to reason with her, I just gave up. I told her to take a break. Then I said this to her. Hey Lenny, you know how you found out a bunch of information about Mae Jemison (first black woman in space, graduate of the Chicago public high school in our neighborhood) on wikipedia? Well, do you know that you can look up just about anything on wikipedia? The other day I was thinking about the color blue. So I looked it up and found so many interesting things. Will you do something for me? Write something for me about what you think about blue. It could be a word or a sentence, it could be about why you like blue or what is blue or what you think about blue, I don't care. I'm just interested in what you think.

And she stopped crying and seemed intrigued. I went out to get coffee with a friend and she was asleep when I came home. I asked Gabe if she had written anything, and he said, well, it's Lenny. She had to make it into a craft (I HATE crafts). And you know what? Of course she did. After looking at it (he said he had absolutely no part in what she came up with), I realized this.

We aren't so different after all.


Blue, According to Wikipedia
By Katy Jacob

This article is about the color. For other uses, see Blue (disambiguation).
Searching begets searching, as I yearn for ways to disambiguate
or even to understand the concept of something
that is neither ambiguous nor its opposite, but a way to explain
the inevitability of confusion.
You see? I’ve already lost sight of the goal.

Blue is the colour of the clear sky and the deep sea.
I’m starting to come to terms with things:
That even spelling is ambiguous;
in the first two lines, we just couldn’t choose.
And it pains me how we’ve started off with a lie.
Seeking clarity, we explain a name as if it is a truth.
Filled with hubris, we elaborate:

The harbour of Toulon, France, on the Mediterranean Sea.
We say this with authority.

Shades and variations of blue
This is how it all started.
This is what I wanted to know: how many?
I thought it would be simple, but
blue is not blue, it is a reflection of everything:
Sky. Navy. Cobalt.
Blue is important because of the past.
It represents us as we are, and as we have been:
Egyptian. Prussian.
Its very existence is in question;
some say it is but a wavelength,
that which comes between green and indigo,
while others do not differentiate it from green at all.
Relativity itself could not be so relative.

The war of the blues – indigo versus woad
Few things could make me so happy as this.

The search for the perfect blue
We’ve all been there, I suppose.
Someone once told me that midnight blue
was the only color that could not be accurately photographed.
He must have known that blue makes accuracy irrelevant,
as twenty years later I pass this idea onto my children,
stopping the car suddenly, admonishing them to look!
knowing that someday they will repeat this refrain
in the near dark to someone they love in a way
that is different from the way they love me,
but filled with the same mystery and impermanence of sudden blue.

Politics. Religion. Music. Lasers. Animals. Sports.
Blue has it covered.

Associations and sayings about blue
It is the favorite of many, and why not?
Blue could be anything:
Sympathy, harmony, faithfulness, friendship, confidence,
excellence, distinction, high performance, torment,
hostility, nobility, commonness, coldness,
infinity, distance, melancholy, truth, sex,
sadness, happiness, my God even drunkenness!
Blue could be eyes or ink, our world from far away,
berries or bells or birds.
Blue is blue is blue is
all that I can think about in the cold, in the dark,
and I know now that I am not alone in this.
I started off searching for something real,
something I could touch,
and I found nothing but mirrors.