Bored of the Board

My daughter has abandoned small childhood. This year she began fifth grade, which in her school is the first year of Middle School. Changing classes, lockers instead of cubbies, more homework, more tests and a uniform are all part of the deal.  Kids either struggle with this transition or embrace it.  Color her an embracer.

She started to wear a watch to make sure she got to class on time. With a precision I never had, she measures just how much television she can have before she concludes her homework.  The lowest grade she’s received on anything graded was an A minus, which she gleefully pointed out to the teacher, had been miscalculated originally as a B plus.  She has a class called Civilization, which is a combination of ancient history, social studies, historical fiction, writing and standard English.  Her teacher is a writer whose won some impressive things as an amateur. Once it was understood that writing was a shared pasttime, school got even better.

She writes vividly, though the punctuation is still wanting: stories of a mouse versus rat war at the Vatican (where the rat’s perfidy is uncovered by the press, no less); stories of Neandrathals learning how to use tools, featuring a surprising amount of dialogue, and so on.  The teacher adores her, encourages her, and the result is a kid anxious to tell you that human history is “no more than a speck upon the elephant’s butt” of time.  (I told you it was vivid).

Today we had the “first semester conference” which went predictably well. She was asked her goals for the year which involved “being a better friend to the new girls,” “stepping it up” a little in math, and “writing even better stories” in Civ. Oh and working on the Service Board (a position she won in a contested election by a landslide) organizing drives for local organizations and information sessions about Darfur. 

She’ll be playing in tennis tournaments in January and indoor lacrosse season starts in February. (There’s a place with an indoor turf field. Who knew?) She’s knocking the cover off the ball at every opportunity.

This is all wonderful, but would be easy to compartmentalize. We all want to dream our kids our good students. I have one. Self-motivated even. No, what scares me is how she’s progressed in her social life.  She attends an all-girl school, so it’s not like she runs into a lot of boys. So she signed herself up for the local ballroom dance class. Yes, she’s meeting boys there, boys forced by their mothers to wear ties and to learn how to fox trot. She claims not to enjoy it, but she plans the outfits carefully.

And then, there’s ice skating. There’s an ice rink in our neighborhood which is largely closed to the public. Except on Friday nights, when from 8:30 to 10:30 there’s a public skate. For $6 you can get in and rent skates and hang out. When she was smaller, she’d beg us to go as a family. There were a few other families there, we noticed, but lots of teens on dates and younger kids just learning to have social lives.

Four weeks ago, she started asking to go skating without us. She assured us all her friends went. I said okay, but only if she could confirm to my satisfaction that at least one friend I knew and trusted was going to be there the whole time. She duly organized it. That first night she could barely skate — it’s not what she does. But now, after four consecutive weeks of lobbying, finding a friend and going off, she’s pretty good. Fast, turning on edges and skating in circles.

I know though that she’s not there to learn how to skate.  She’s there because that’s where the 11 to 15 year old boys hang. Some of them she knows from dance, some from church. But she’s shy and doesn’t get to know them too well. So she’s taking her first, deeply tentative steps, into dealing with the opposite sex.

I show up early, of course, to make sure nothing untoward is going on, and it’s not. She’s even happy to see me. Thrilled with independence and incipient hormones, she’ll often stay up for a while after coming home to read. I consider it helpful that she still asks to be tucked in. Don’t know that I’ll survive this.

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