When She Grows Up…

 

 

When we are pregnant, we can’t wait till the baby is out. We need to learn if it’s a boy or a girl. Once we know that, we need to know what the baby is like. We were caught in the 4D trap. We did one of those 4D ultrasounds that told us very little of our baby girl because she decided to nap behind the placenta. Then , by looking at her in these ultrasounds we kept imagining what her personality would be like. ‘Oh, if she’s hiding, she will be shy’. Or: ‘She will surely be a quiet kid as she doesn’t move too much in my belly’!  None of these predictions turned out to be true. My girl has always been a social butterfly that could never be still for very long. The only truth out of the 4D and the many ultrasounds was that the baby would come with a lot of hair. And that she did.

 
Once the baby is out, the anxiety about the future does not cease, it ever grows.

We further speculated what the color or her eyes and hair would be. Nothing could prepare me to have a blond girl with hazel eyes! A blond girl, really? So not me!!! She was born with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes and that remained true until she was about 9 months.

 Then we start imagining what her personality would be like and who she would look alike. She looks a lot like her daddy but has my eye expression and eyebrows and curly hair. She’s stubborn, clumsy, argumentative, romantic and a people-pleaser like mommy; extrovert, confident, athletic and moody like papaya and competitive and determined like both.

As she started school we began to imagine what sort of profession she would have.

When she was very young, she used to say that when she grew up she wanted to be a mermaid. She quickly changed to cowgirl and stuck with cowgirl almost until her Kindergarten graduation when she changed to doctor. Most recently, she has been saying she wants to be a Scientist.

 

This week was her first week back to school. Miss B is now a First Grader! She’s so proud and as well she should! Miss B has grown so much this past year! She knows how to tie her shoes, she knows how to log on to her computer and play her games, she reads most words, she can tell the time,  on regular watches, count her money and her math skills are amazing. She loves to learn and to use new words and takes us by surprise when she decides to explain the definition of “oasis”, “hieroglyphs” or use “in fact” or “actually” correctly.  She says she prefers her reading and writing classes and she loves reading, but I think she really is great at Math and Science. During Summer, whenever she saw a board she would write math sentences. She awed us last week by multiplying with her fingers as high as 7x7 and that was not memorized. When she got 8x8 wrong because she answered 62, she almost had a fit for making a mistake. She knows all about moon phases, the moon itself, coral reefs, night, day and gravity. The instructor at MOSI said that she was a “bright young lady” and that had taught the instructor herself some stuff during Science camp.

I am not concerned what profession she chooses as long as it is legal, right? I am not raising an olympian or a model or a scientist. I am raising a little girl to be fierce, determined, fair, honest, compassionate and confident. I want her to forget the fact that she’s a daughter of immigrants and a female. I want her to succeed believing she’s all she wants to be and nothing can stop her but herself. In sum, I want her to be successful and, most importantly, happy with the choice she’s made and proud of her heritage and her accomplishments.

 Similarly to what happened last year,  this first week of school left me a bit nostalgic. As I blogged a year before, can we stop having days and years? I do not want to see her grow!!!

She already told me the first day of school this year that she didn’t need me to take her to school. That she could very well take the bus to school on her  own from the very first day. Of course I wouldn’t let her. Of course I wanted to hold her hand while she lets me on the way to her class and take a bunch of pictures without her feeling embarrassed about it. I wanted to hand her to the teacher as the most precious treasure she really is to us. So I am holding on to all of that as long as I can!

Thinking about the day she was born and everything that has happened so far is a way of holding on I guess…