Let Her Be

My daughter decided to try ballroom dance for her first year at junior high.  They had a competition last night against other schools.  She had been very excited about it…until she realized it conflicted with another event she had been looking forward to.  We found out the night before that the etiquette dinner with her youth group from church would be on the same night.  She came home from school on the day of the competition talking about how she didn’t want to go to the ballroom event because she didn’t want to miss the dinner.  She went on and on about how much she didn’t want to go, complaining about why didn’t I tell her about the dinner sooner (I didn’t know), how she was going to email her teacher and tell her she wasn’t going, etc.  What I would have done in the past, pretty recent past at that, was to feel like it was my job to fix the problem by getting her to stop feeling how she was feeling.  But I’ve had some insights lately into this particular daughter.  She feels everything intensely.  She has since she was a little girl.  Her joy and love reach incredible places, but so do her anxiety and frustration.  The bottom line is that there is just too much emotion to contain it all within herself.  She needs to get it out.  That usually manifests itself like it did with the ballroom competition.  She needed to talk about how she was feeling and express her disappointment and frustration at not being able to do both things.  Other people might not feel as strongly as she does, so a few comments about being disappointed are all they need to make.  Not her.  She needs to vent and vent well.  The more I step back and let her be, the better the situation becomes.  I can just be there to listen and validate how she feels rather than attempting to get her to stop feeling the way she does.

When it was time to get ready, she calmly went upstairs and got dressed, enjoyed getting a fancy hairstyle and makeup on, and talked excitedly for the whole drive to the school.  I didn’t need to fix it.  I didn’t need to convince her to feel differently.  I just needed to let her be.

When I’m able to do that, I usually end up feeling such a surge of love for her and pride at her strong spirit.  She’s pretty amazing, and I know that she will do great things with her passion.