My Small but Mighty Teacher What my six-year-old is quietly teaching me about growing up.

I have a 2 year old and a 6 year old who is going on 13. Well into my forties, I am finding myself going down a path of change as rapid as adolescence in some ways, albeit with more gifts and much more sophisticated frontal cortex in place. There are many skills that I have honed over the years, including self reflection with opportunity to make sound, frontal cortex-evaluated courses of action. I like to think for the most part, that I am a much more developed, more sophisticated adult. Prior, in my adolescence, there were mostly feelings without the ability to rage or cry or throw a tantrum freely. Adolescence in some ways, I look upon as a time in life where our natural inclinations may be stifled in much more obtuse a way than they previously had in what is termed “early childhood”. But do we ever “grow up?”.  What does “growing up” mean, anyway? Its possible we all hold different definitions. I would be offering my most authentic answer to this question if I relayed the truth, that to “grow up” for me changed every few years, and at minimum, about every decade.  

At 5 years old, 30 looked ancient. For me it was almost unimaginable. I knew the number 30 existed, but I had no concept of how long away in the future that really was. All of my experience in life was limited and although it was “my lifetime”, I never had any other concept that it being “all those years” that I had lived fully.  By fully, I mean that my emotion and my body were so tightly connected, it was almost impossible to know where one truly ended and the other began. At six, 40 was not even worth contemplating for very long. I had no relationship to begin to understand what 19 meant, let alone forty five or fifty. My grandparents were in their late sixties, then seventies and that seemed properly ancient to my limited understanding.  Even the concept of illness was something I had been spared, with the exception of peripheral family examples. But my inner most world, my parents and siblings were all relatively healthy. 

My first major death was an uncle who passed from liver failure likely secondary to alcoholism. On my 11th birthday, I was again informed that my paternal grandfather had passed away. I was aware that he had prostate cancer. Cancer was a big word I had not experienced up close. It only looked to me in my young mind, like an old, frail male who couldn’t see me because of his glaucoma, lying down on a floor mattress in a house – minimally supplied. His right eye was obliterated by the hues of white and light blue that waved into one another. It was on a gated compound – a building in the hills of Bamenda Cameroon. When I try hard to recall his face, his frail body, I think he had a pillow under his head but I can not be totally sure. He didn’t seem to be in any discomfort. The walls around us were as bare as the cement floor beneath us without rugs. And this was evidence of wealth in a place that from adult eyes, feels as though it has been almost forgotten. There were no other furnishings in the room. There had been a general agreement that no one really knew how old he was or that I did not need to know and the answer would not actually be provided. When I had asked him in the past, his answer was translated to me from Nkwen. I was told he said “one hundred” followed by a hollow chuckle. I still did not know how far from the truth that was but I suspected given his enjoyment, that he was not. 

The eyes of a 7 or 8 year old are vastly different in perspective, I think. Or – they were for me. Each year brought on enough change, enough moments of being present, enough moments of being swamped and covered in emotions that a very short life time (considering) had really felt like it had taken all of my years. It wasn’t that I was not looking forward to growing up. I just didn’t see the point often, in thinking beyond the moment, or the next few days, let alone years. Why is it worth pondering, now at almost 50, how my childhood brain metabolized the world around me?  
 

Now, I have a young, curious, emphatic, emotional, bright and beautiful six year old girl of my own. Like me, she is the first girl. Unlike me, she is the first child. I call her “small but mighty” with a voice that can easily surpass mine and with less effort. I want to be as present as I can for her 6th year. This is the year where the wiring gets set, and connections in her brain seem to solidify, if I understand my therapist correctly. This is the year that all of those connections we have worked to bring about – like her sense of safety, autonomy, self come together and begin to cement. Last night, when she was taking second to her two year old brother who has required significantly more attention on a daily basis, she got very quiet. As I try to remember to do every night, I said her name, and told her that I loved her. She responded that she loved me too. It was a response that I could tell, came from well rode pathways, early habits formed. She was also perceptibly a little distant. I didn’t know if this distance I felt was all from my sense of disconnection and separation from her throughout the day. But I could have sworn, that seeping into that gentle, empty pause was her own sense of autonomy and contemplation that filled it.  What does that mean? Perhaps no more than moments like this offer me opportunities to recognize that she is growing away and apart from my spouse and I. She is always becoming, just as I am. And she is starting to guard close to her, her thoughts. I asked her if she was okay and stroked her head. She responded that she was fine. I reviewed her words. “Yes, I’m okay”. I scanned them for stress, for strain, for sadness, for fear. I couldn’t be totally sure but all I could read was the presence of autonomy. And it makes me want to mark the moment.  

As I’m growing up, and coming into this grown up that I never knew I could be, because I am the mother of someone I am only just getting to know, I want to taste each moment of change with her and do each moment the best that I can do it. I think of my world at age 6. I was still so new. And I felt I was all in, all-feeling, inexorably committed.  At almost 50, I can’t really even explain to her how life will feel as she goes through it. Even if there is only the peripheral experience of death in the extended family and she and her brother remain healthy, I am at a loss to describe what changes I have known. My sense of certainty has lessened profoundly.  I am in awe of the experience I get to have. It moves so slowly I barely have a second to myself, and it moves so quickly that I may very well miss it by not stopping to notice the small daily gifts. As much as I am a student of life, I have an opportunity to have a very profound teacher show up in my little girl. I would be remiss to presume I had grand answers. In recovery, we are told to “take the cotton out of our ears and put it in our mouths” and to listen. I want more than ever to make every moment I can – to be present and to listen. Undoubtedly, my small but mighty teacher has much to show me, if I am a willing student. What a gift this opportunity to raise a child is. And what a gift to be given lessons from her that I can integrate and incorporate into my own growing up. I’m one grateful momma.