Saturday, March 22, 2008

Distressed

A nice day, on the whole --- beautiful weather, rowing to watch, etc: the sore throat I've not mentioned is still there, but...

And then, out of the blue, having sat on my lap reading, and then gone away to write something by herself, Boo comes up in tears: she insisted that she can't read, she can't write, it's all pretend!
In tears.
And I'm battling tears wanting to help, to take away whatever has caused this, not wanting to call it nonsense, though that surely is what it is. I don't want to demean her by calling it that when she so clearly feels incapable.

Much hugging and talking later, and mainly through LOML's intervention (LOML having been gone for the original discussion), Boo is now writing again. I'll try her on a little reading book tomorrow, when, I hope, all this will have blown over....


There's an old song, from the musical Salad Days: "We don't understand our children".... I was hoping for say another six or seven years before that happened!

Yours, confused,
N.

2 comments:

awareness said...

There's a Sesame Street book which tackles the same distress. If I can remember it......Grover has the same dilemma. You may want to see if you can find it to read to Boo. :)

There's nothing more distressful than not having the magic to take away the hurts.

BreadBox said...

Awareness: it is interesting: almost every academic I know suffers from something very similar: we call it "fear of success" or "academic syndrome": one day they are going to discover that I'm not as good as they think that I am....

N.