About My Girl

Admit it: sometimes you look at the world, all its misguided citizens, and you think you might mess up your kids, that they might turn out bad despite the unit blocks and the bedtime stories and the Pirate Booty. Okay, maybe you're not ready to admit that you're afraid your monthly "grumpy week" might have more impact than the time it was raining on picnic day, so you set up a full-on tent in the dining room and ate your sandwiches by flashlight. Maybe you're not ready to confess to worrying that, despite your faithful adherence to your own no-spanking rule, simply having said "I want to hit you" that one time might be enough to spoil the apple, turn her into that scowling cashier at the grocery store that nobody likes or that strange lady who pushes a still-boxed Cabbage Patch Kid around in a buggy.
I guess I'm ready--to say that I worry. A lot. If you know me, you know parenting is only one of a rotating list of horrors that keeps me up at night. It started with razor blades in the Halloween candy and, well, I just can't stop.
The thing is, though, I've got a girl in my house who reassures me with her humor, her fine attention to detail, her sense of justice, and her strange wisdom. She made that painting in the top photos a few days ago, and when I remarked that she doesn't tend to include a lot of detail when she paints, she said, "I figure painting is about color. If you want detail, why not just draw?" Huh. I think I paid fifty thousand dollars for an MFA that amounted to not much more than that breezy insight. (That's her self-made pincushion--found it sitting on my sewing table this morning.)
And Earth Hour--flash-wrecked photos of which you see here (though we got artsier, with candles and whatnot, as the hour ticked on)--thrilled her to no end, this girl who told me on the walk to school that once I buy a bicycle (which she's a bit afraid I'll fall off of, since "older people" sometimes forget how to ride if it's been "like fifteen years"), we'll be able to save "energy, as in gas, and our own energy, too," and who recently burst into tears when she heard about the death penalty. Such a clearly wrong act, perpetrated by the good guys, simply did not compute.
How will she stay this happy if she is also this smart, this intimate with the world and its complicated workings? How will she stay cheerful and sane? Right now I can say this: despite everything--even, maybe, despite me--I think she will. I believe she will.