My daughter is JUST LIKE ME!

Blogged on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 by Rachael. Filed in Blog365, Essays, Philosophical, Photos.

Actually, this is not entirely true. My eight-year-old girl - dark-haired, poised, open, fragile - is really not very much like me most of the time. I used to think that we were just alike, she and I, and then one day I realized I thought so because she was my DAUGHTER. The only girl. I guess I assumed that simply because she was female, we would be exactly the same.

Sure, in some ways we’re the same. We both love books. I introduced her to Tolkien last year, and she got her very own copy of The Hobbit from her biological dad for Christmas. She’s still working on it, but it’s good progress for an eight-year-old, I think. We both love the library. However - I come home with giant stacks of books, and she usually picks one or two.

WHAT THE HECK, GIRL?! Obviously her eyes aren’t bigger than her stomach (like me). Maybe she’s onto something.

I love tomatoes, she hates them. I love dark chocolate, she prefers milk chocolate. My favorite color is orange. Hers is pink, except when it’s purple. She’s always loved playing with dolls; I was always offended that people kept giving me dolls for birthdays and Christmas when I was her age.

We both love to be alone. We deal with stress by either crying right away, or abruptly leaving the scene of the crisis to process it in private. We don’t always say what we want to, because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. We have trouble saying no even when we KNOW we shouldn’t say yes.

I’m mouthy and argumentative; she just wants to please you. I like to cuddle, and she’s fine with a quick hug and a little kiss. We both talk way past the time when we should have just shut up, and we both are clueless as to the point that time passed us by. We both laugh too loud, too inappropriately, and sometimes we snort when we giggle. We say out loud that boys are silly, but secretly we think they are pretty awesome.

And now, we both have BLACK EMO GLASSES, because that’s how we roll, yo, and also we are united in the age at which we needed vision help. Eight years old, hello glasses!

Her appointment was two days ago, and the glasses were done this morning. I’m not kidding, they were THAT quick. I took her in before school so we could pick them up and have them fitted. She was so excited! I had suggested to her that she should get black frames like me, partly because I thought she might like the solidarity of she and I having something the same, and partly because she has state insurance and usually the options are pretty limited; but since I just had that insurance for a little while in the winter, I knew that there would be at least one pair of black plastic frames she could get.

They fit her pixie-like face almost effortlessly. I was so impressed with how lovely they look on her, and how much more grown-up you can see that she is. We took her home for a little while to get used to them - she wandered through the house exclaiming, “EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A CARTOON!” and “I CAN SEE EVERYTHING!!”

It took me a long time to get used to my lenses at eight, but it took her no time at all. So I took her back to school and that was that. Her favorite part of the day, she told me later, was that when she entered her classroom at about 9:30am (half hour past school start), everyone hollered her name.

I was never popular at eight. She’s already so much more awesome than me. ;) But I’m pretty sure the fantastically fabulous emo frames are helping.