Entry #8

On Your First Birthday

You are one year old today. I have spent the last year getting to know you. You’re pretty neat.

When I come home from work, you often sit on my knee and we dance to rowdy gangster rap together. But only if you want to.

Yes you are a cool kid. But you scare me too.

You could walk before you were ten months old. And I don’t mean that halfway baby walk/crawl that over-competitive parents like to label as walking to help illustrate how advanced their child is when compared with others. When I say “walking,” I mean the real deal.

(But I guess in a way I’m still like those zealous parents because I do think you are advanced. Not so much in ability or maturity for your age. You are advanced in your degree of stubbornness. You are a powerfully stubborn child.)

Nobody decided to show you how to walk. In fact, we kind of discouraged it. But you never liked to crawl and it was immediately obvious that you had decided crawling was for suckers– you were determined to move about upright on both feet. You would always push yourself up from the floor, or pull yourself up on something or someone and try to hold your balance while standing. The only crawling you ever did was to get to places where you could practice walking. I don’t know why you decided that walking was what you wanted, but trust me, you decided. We saw it in your eyes. You could not be deterred.

Your stubbornness is near super-human.

If you decide you are feeding yourself, no one has a hope of helping you eat. If you decide you do not want to be held, you summon extraordinary baby powers and fight and struggle and trash about violently until you get your way.

Your stubbornness is going to make you a monster to teach, because you are the type of learner that only learns when they want to, not when they are told to. This, I think, might be the cause of some friction between us further on down the line.

But I also think that if you can use it right, this astonishing degree of stubbornness will be a great asset.