It's not about me.

Yesterday Skipper and I met up with another kid who's going to be attending the preschool program in the fall at the local school. The kid and her parents seemed like lovely people, but I found the meet-up very stressful. I mean, it's always a little stressful meeting new people, particularly in an artificial let's-build-a-relationship-so-we-can-maybe-share-childcare-and-provide-emergency-backup-for-eachother way, but this was particularly exhausting and demoralizing for me because of Skipper's behavior. She refused to interact with the other kid, who kept hopefully inviting her to play, and wouldn't talk or look anybody in the eye. She watched the other kid very carefully, glowering through the curtain of her hair, but that was all she offered.

This is totally normal for Skipper, and I'm confident that she will eventually warm up to this kid (who seems like exactly Skipper's cup of tea, actually). Skipper's behavior is not entirely out of the realm of normal for preschoolers I have met, but she's definitely toward the end of the shyness continuum, and I haven't really figured out a way to handle it. I don't mean helping her handle it - I have no idea how to do that, since nothing I have done so far has made her less shy, and I suspect it's pretty baked in - I just mean handling it myself. I feel like I should apologize for her antisocial behavior, or explain that she's always this way (not a sociopath, I swear!), but I really don't want to be APOLOGIZING for my child's personality, or making public generalizations about who she is. (In front of her, I mean. Obviously, I make public generalizations about her behind her back all the time!) I swing back and forth between these two opposing feelings, and end up feeling like I failed both to help this other family understand the context for her unwelcoming behavior AND to make her feel that it's okay to be shy and that there's nothing wrong with her.

I want to let my kids be themselves, but I also want other people to see them positively, or at least as the complicated, worth-getting-to-know people that they are. I think this tension will get more challenging for me over the next couple of years, as Duchess bounds toward adolescence and Skipper stays shy. I cannot keep up with the kind of strength of character that parenting seems to require, though I swear I'm building it as fast as I can.

Comments

tiffky doofky said…
It sounds like you're doing exactly the right things: giving Skipper space to be herself, processing your own reaction (internally and in writing), and reminding yourself that things will shift and change as time passes. What else can you do?

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