My Daughter’s Not A Mini-Me. She’s Better.
My daughter’s the stronger, braver version of me.
“Better. Stronger. Faster.”
That’s part of the opening narration for The Six Million Dollar Man, but it’s also exactly how I’d describe my 12-year-old daughter. Some of my friends think she’s a mini-me, but I know better: She’s me version 2.0‚ if not version 2000. She’s the Windows 10 to my 3.0; the iPhone 11 to my text-only BlackBerry.
I was a fearful kid, full of swirling emotions, conflicting thoughts, constant second-guessing, and fantasies. I did great in school, but I wasn’t good at sports and hated gym class. Whenever the teacher said we’d be playing volleyball, I hid under the bench in the locker room.
I was a reader and a writer. In my room, I wrote wild adventures for myself, where I could comfortably explore strange new worlds on starships, imagine scoring home runs when the stakes were high, and envision a world where I’d astound people with my pitch-perfect singing voice and charm boys with the beauty of my character and sly wit. I lived a rich life in those pages — all scrawled in my own handwriting.
Then I grew up (well, the jury’s still out on that one). Now I have an excellent husband and two glorious children. One of them is my daughter. To my surprise and amazement, she has all of my swirling crazy emotions and the same relentless rush of thoughts and words and obsessions. But she doesn’t have all those fears that kept me buried in notebooks instead of out there in the world.
At 12, Juliet has done things I’ve never done before in my life.
I have never, ever scored any kind of goal in any sport. I was a skinny little thing with flimsy arms and no belief in myself. But I’ve seen my daughter run bases and sail into home plate, then high-five her teammates upon her return to the dugout.
I watch her do it, and I am thrilled.
She may have all the same worries that I had. (Will the kids make fun of me? Will I miss the ball? Will my teammates get mad?) But then she steps up to the plate anyway, swings that bat, hits that ball, and runs with the pure joy of someone untethered by fear and doubt.
My daughter goes to musical theater camp in the summer, where she sings and dance for a packed audience. She auditions in front of everyone, something I stopped doing after I cracked up laughing on stage in a sixth-grade play. Then, she rehearses the routines until her performance is perfect. When she didn’t get a role as big as she’d hoped, she asked for a solo — and got it.
I cannot imagine the courage it took to do that.
When she sang out her lines, and then, without missing a beat, stepped back into sync with the cast dancing behind her, it took my breath away.
In short, I am in awe of my daughter.
She asked to be the goalie at soccer, the pitcher at softball.
When she gets romantically interested in someone, she says so, rather than pining away in silence for weeks and months as I did.
She doesn’t assume she can’t do something just because it’s outside her comfort zone, as I did at her age. She isn’t fearless, but she doesn’t let her fears stop her, and that astonishes me.
It took me years to figure out that being afraid of something means you should just do it, but she has it nailed — at 12!
Her life is already different as a result. I could not be prouder.
Want to know another thing she’s done that I haven’t? She once high-fived Bradley Cooper! Remind me to add that to my bucket list.
