It's 2018, I'm six years old, and the whole world has lessons for me to learn. Many of the lessons are scripted, some are hidden in the laugh tracks of the Richie Rich sitcoms that stream on Netflix, and others are seemingly unintentional.
This week, while hanging at the pool with my dad and the Clark girls, I went to lean on the pool chair while slipping on my flip flop. Who designed these pool chair death traps anyway? Did somebody have an extra bag of large rubber bands lying around and a metal chair frame and decide that one could complete the other? I leaned my entire body weight on the seat of the chair, I mean, I just sat in it, so I know it can hold my weight, but, the joke was on me because the seat is no seat at all, but a series of elastic straps. When my butt distributes its weight across the straps, it holds my body up, but when my tiny hand leans in, it finds its way right through the straps and I fell headlong right into the edge of the table.
Oh, I wasn't going to let the world know that I had been beaten by a poolside chair. I quickly shot up, looked around to count the number of observers who may have caught my bobbled balancing act and then made a bolt lock eye contact with my dad. He didn't realize that the pain behind my eyebrow had already started throbbing, but he knew by my look that I was holding something back. He intuitively picked me up and whispered, its ok, even though it wasn't. We walked to the car, drove quickly home, and by the time we hit the drive a goose egg bump was closing my left eye and by morning...I had a shiner!
I was mortified. I didn't want to go to church the next day nor horse camp that was to begin the day after that because I didn't want anybody to see me and think I looked weird. My parents tried every trick in the book: they tried to teach me that beauty was only skin deep, that it didn't matter what others thought and they even pointed to the lessons of a recently watched American Girl movie: our true friends will support us when we need them most.
Truth is, at six years old, a little of each of those lessons all came to fruition in the next couple days, so it would be easy to congratulate them on their prediction of my future, but in all honesty, it was the lesson that they didn't teach me that taught me the most. You see, my dad has learned to be one heck of a cook and my mom taught me to ride a bike. It is 2018, and roles don't seem to matter the way they did a hundred years ago when my parents were kids. There is no one size fits all solution to any of life's problems, and I know that because my parents are just regular hard working people who get as much wrong as they get right, but above all, no matter what role they are playing in the production of the day, they never waiver when it comes to loving me.
That is the lesson, the one that nobody planned, the one that hasn't been said, but is behind it all: I am worth loving. At the end of the day, that is what made it ok to go to horse camp with a black eye, as nervous as I was that the world would laugh at me, I know two trust worthy characters who have learned to stretch outside their own comforts to show me that I am worth the effort, and I believe them.
Today was the first day of horse camp, it took some courage, but just like in the American Girl movie, I told my best friend about my eye and she showed me she cared.
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