Contradictions

Here on our utopian street where the weather is always perfect and nobody grows older except the children, we are lucky enough to have a neighbor who is so committed to teaching his children to skate that he builds an ice rink in his lawn every winter.

This afternoon, I took the girls over. While I was wrestling Jemma into her snowsuit and laughing while she called herself "Pink. Marsh. Mallow" over and over, Annie lectured me about her skates. How they are hockey skates. How the blades are really, really sharp. How we don't walk on the cement with them. I was only half-listening, worried about how I was going to manage two small beings on a hard, slippery surface.

I needn't have worried. Jemma, it turns out, benefits from her runtiness and low center of gravity. Basically, she toddles around the rink kicking a puck or throwing little snowballs she's made and she hardly ever falls down. When we started skating, Annie was holding on for dear life to a little patio table our neighbors use as something for the kids to push. At most, she was ice-marching in place; I had to pull the table slowly across the ice. We did this for 15 or 20 minutes, then went inside to play.

Later, just before it was time to go, Annie insisted on "skating" one more time before we went back home to make dinner. And this time, she actually skated. She refused to hold on to anything. Instead, she slid and marched and teetered and balanced and, yes, skated her way back and forth over and over again. I cheered for her. When she fell (numerous times), I asked her if she was OK. Over and over again, she just laughed, got back up, and skittered off in another direction. Second time ever on the ice, and she's a pro.

I am so proud to see stubborness, bravery, and determination at work in positive ways in her life because so often I dwell on the times when it's just the opposite. She is still afraid of so many things: scary characters in books and movies; the vacuum, the coffee grinder, the food processor, automatic flush toilets, the car wash - in short, anything noisy; flushing the toilet; blood, even the most miniscule amount. Within the last week, she's cried over such things as the toilet seat being too cold, the water being too hot to wash her hands, having to eat an orange rather than a purple vitamin, me leaving the house, and Sid the Science Kid being a re-run. CRIED.

So today, when she was bravely propelling herself across that ice, unprompted, unafraid of falling, I wished so much that I had a video camera to capture her accomplishment. I want to play it for her during those not-so-brave times, remind her: Look. See what you can do? And even though I still kind of hate winter, before it is over, I want to dig out my old ice skates from the basement and skate with my little girl around that rink.