Contemplating the weasel
This morning, Dutch, Skipper, and I were walking to the bus stop, and I was absent-mindedly singing "Pop Goes the Weasel" when Dutch fiercely interrupted me to say "Mom! The weasel doesn't go pop! There IS NO WEASEL!" and to sing to me her version of the song (a clean-up-time variation that must have come from daycare).
I staunchly defended my weasel by defaulting to the brilliant and effective argument I've been using a lot lately (a variant on "because I said so") - "I am 33. You are 5. Because I am older, I must know more than you know, and I know that there IS A WEASEL!"
Lately, Dutch has been very adamant about what's true and what is not, what's right and what is not. She clings to her arguments tenaciously, squeezing her eyes shut against mounting evidence, and eventually gets more and more desperate as she realizes that she's got it wrong and can't figure out how to back down without feeling humiliated. I think she's trying to establish her identity, and she seems to have identified inflexibility as a way to create a strong personhood.
Plenty of adults continue to make this mistake all their lives, and I am certainly guilty of making it a lot. It's hard to help her find ways to be open to information without feeling overwhelmed and unstable, to dwell in the gray areas a little longer without getting stuck in them; it seems like one of the big challenges of being human.
I staunchly defended my weasel by defaulting to the brilliant and effective argument I've been using a lot lately (a variant on "because I said so") - "I am 33. You are 5. Because I am older, I must know more than you know, and I know that there IS A WEASEL!"
Lately, Dutch has been very adamant about what's true and what is not, what's right and what is not. She clings to her arguments tenaciously, squeezing her eyes shut against mounting evidence, and eventually gets more and more desperate as she realizes that she's got it wrong and can't figure out how to back down without feeling humiliated. I think she's trying to establish her identity, and she seems to have identified inflexibility as a way to create a strong personhood.
Plenty of adults continue to make this mistake all their lives, and I am certainly guilty of making it a lot. It's hard to help her find ways to be open to information without feeling overwhelmed and unstable, to dwell in the gray areas a little longer without getting stuck in them; it seems like one of the big challenges of being human.
Comments