This morning was one of those times where you send your kids off to school, turn to the sink to wash the breakfast dishes, and think to yourself, “Will she grow up and forget what I just said, or use it as ammunition against me in twenty years?”
I found the homework assignment wadded up in eight-year-old Annie’s cubby in our laundry room, hidden under a pile of books. I’d gone into the room to start a load of sheets, or maybe to grab a box of fruit roll ups from the pantry, or more likely, to try to do both before the waffles popped up in the toaster. I noticed the haphazard mess of books and papers and autopilot kicked in. I started straightening, piling the books up neatly. When I found the math paper, I flattened it out and was surprised that it was covered in red Xs and marked with a “B-.”
Without fully engaging my brain, I carried it back to the kitchen. “What’s this?” I asked with more bite in my voice than I felt. “Were you hiding it?”
While her older brother is no stranger to redoing math assignments when he brings them home, and her younger brother has enforced “read with Mommy time” (because he needs it), Annie only knows how to make As.
“I have no idea what a convex polygon is!!!!”
“Why don’t you ask your teacher?”
“I tried. She told me to look it up.”
“Then ask for help.”
“But she’ll think I’m dumb! I hate math! You think I’m dumb too!”
At this point, a wiser parent would have done something else. But I’m not a quick thinker when the kids are due to be out the door in five minutes and they still have to both eat and have family prayer. Tears darkened her green t-shirt.
“You may be smart Annie, but it’s totally dumb not to be willing to ask for help.”
She whimpered through our scriptures (the wisdom of Solomon) and the prayer, then grabbed her bag and walked out the door as I tried to apologize, lamely telling her to “Have a good day.”
A few minutes later I loaded her little sister in the minivan to take her to preschool. As I drove past the bus stop, Annie refused to look at me, and stared ahead, earbuds in her ears, trying not to cry.
It’s not that I think I told her something untrue (that she needs to learn to ask for help), but my mistake was that I did it at the wrong time, in the wrong place (in front of the whole family) and with zero sensitivity.
So how do I help a very bright eight-year-old girl not hate math? How do I know the difference between when is she crying to manipulate and when is she crying because she hurts? Why is it that every mother-daughter relationship has to be so complicated? How do I help her know that it’s not the B- that matters, but the fact that she’s hiding her grades? And most importantly, how do I help her know that the best way to get smart is to make mistakes and be willing to admit what you don’t know?
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