Songs from a Wise Little Girl
My daughter has often been more mature than her age might tell you.
My little girl is engaged to be married. Even as I write these words I can hardly believe them. No, it’s not because I’m worried about her choice in a fiancé, though to be honest, I don’t know him well…yet. But I know my daughter, and she’s not one who would settle for second best. In fact, Rose has always been judicious and wise beyond her years. Even as a little girl she seemed more mature, more observant, and more sensitive than others her age.
I remember her coming home from kindergarten one day, emotionally drained from having mediated a disagreement between two of her friends. “Kaitlyn and Emily were mad at each other,” she explained, “because Kaitlyn said something about Emily’s hair that made her cry. I went back and forth between them all day until finally Kaitlyn said she was sorry.”
“Is everything okay now?” I asked.
“I think so,” Rose sighed, “except I’m going to have to spend tomorrow making sure everyone tells Emily how pretty her hair is.”
I always thought my daughter would make a good negotiator.
Not long after that, her older brother had his Cub Scout meeting at our house. The five-year old Rose acted as if the boys were all her personal guests, bringing them refreshments, listening intently to their conversations and laughing at all their jokes even when she didn’t understand them. Later, as each boy made his departure, she held the door open and called after them, “Goodnight Toby! Goodnight Jacob! Thank you for coming, boys! Come see us again!”
As the last cub was leaving the den and Rose was saying her final goodbyes, my wife and I closed the front door with my daughter still calling out greetings to her brother’s friends. Once the door was shut, our daughter looked up at us with the broadest smile I have ever seen on a young child and announced, “I like boys!”
Yep, she was older than her years for sure.
Being a mature kindergartner sometimes took its toll. One day we had the family packed into the minivan and were headed somewhere when, from the back seat, Rose let out a burdened sigh.
“What is it, Darlin’?” I asked sympathetically.
“Oh,” she began her wistful reply, “It’s just that my life can be so hard.”
Oh the burdens of childhood.
In 1999 when my wife and I announced to our children that we were leaving our home in the Pacific Northwest to resettle in Atlanta, my kids were not pleased to say goodbye to their friends and all that was familiar to them. Out of spite, my oldest son immediately went to his Civil War computer game and burned Atlanta. But six-year old Rose voiced her feelings honestly and deliberately, vocalizing what she saw as both the negatives and the positives in the move.
"I don't want to leave my friends," she admitted. "But I can write to them, and I'll make some new friends. Plus, we'll get to see things that we never saw before. But," she added, "I still don't want to go." Optimism combined with unfiltered honesty; I love that.
As our daughter got older, her maturity showed itself in different ways. She was born in mid-November, exactly two years and 364 days after her brother, and often we celebrated both of their birthdays together. On her eleventh birthday and his fourteenth, my wife was describing to our kids her experience with twice being pregnant the exact same months. There was a lull in the conversation and my wife and I could see the wheels in Rose’s head turning. Then, after apparently doing some quick mental math, her eyes started to gleam as she announced to us, “You two really like Valentine’s Day, don’t you?”
Busted.
While other pre-teen girls were starting to gossip and backstab and generally allow drama to rule their lives, she did her best to avoid it. Unfortunately that sometimes led to misunderstandings with her friends when she refused to be drawn into their over-the-top theatrics. Instead, Rose put her insight and observational skills into songwriting. Unbeknownst to her (until recently), I have kept home recordings of songs she made up while still in elementary school. I won’t reveal any of those here, but by the time she was 16 years old she had written a CD’s worth of original songs, which included these lyrics about her conflicting feelings for a young man she cared about:
"Through awkward conversation, through stubbornness and doubt,
I think we'll learn frustration and learn to live without.
Fairytale ending or happy love song,
We would be perfect even if wrong.
Another sometime, we'll find good intention,
Another sometime, we'll find our redemption."
Amazing.
Now, at the age of 28 my daughter continues to amaze me. Her friends appreciate her genuineness as well as her ability to make people feel comfortable around her. A marketing professional, I am told by her co-workers that she speaks her mind in company meetings, challenging the wisdom of unproductive projects, but at the same time always offering solutions and praising those who also spend more time ironing out problems than complaining. She is the same in her personal relationships, and more than one unsuspecting young man has experienced my daughter’s effervescent and approachable personality only to be blindsided by her uncompromising demand for honesty and principled behavior. I am thrilled to know there is a man in her life who appreciates that about her and is willing to take up the gauntlet she has thrown down. In fact, she acts the same toward me, and is unafraid to share her opinion even when it differs from mine. And though she might vehemently disagree with me or her mother, she is rarely disrespectful. She loves us unconditionally and knows how much she is loved, and she understands that love covers a lot of real and perceived mistakes. I think she understood this even at the age of 16 when she wrote this chorus:
“All that we have,
All that we are,
Is all that there is,
All there is, anyway.”
With all that I am, I love all that my daughter is. That little girl will never cease to wow me.
© Nick Walker 2019
You can hear the 16-year-old version of my daughter singing the above songs by clicking here.
