“Mom, I am glad I am one of a kind. I am unique.”

first day smiles

This week my girls headed back to school.  After all the drama and tears of the past couple years, I was prepared to be putting my older daughter on the bus with a lump in my throat, worrying about all the “what ifs” that came true in the past – kids teasing her for playing hockey or liking science, girls refusing to sit with her at lunch because she wasn’t girly enough, boys refusing to play with her because she is a girl, and on and on.  Imagine the relief I felt then when, the day before school started up again, she told me she was excited about the new year and said, “Mom, I am glad I am one of a kind.  I am unique.”

Where had this newfound strength come from?  This is the same girl who just a couple months ago was shyly snuggled next to me on a park bench saying she was afraid to approach the other kids because they might not accept her.  This is the same girl who cried after school on a regular basis because of how the other kids were treating her.  Somehow, seemingly overnight, she had changed.  After putting her on the bus and watching her eagerly wave good-bye to me, I had time to sit alone and think about it all.  Slowly, the pieces of the puzzle started to drift together.  She gained confidence in herself and an appreciation for her uniqueness because of the strength of others, because people spoke up when they saw her being her. 

At the start of the summer, she was still feeling very down about herself and hesitant to try to form relationships with other kids.  When we went to Ukraine, she stayed glued to my side at first.  We would sit at the playground and watch the other kids running around.  I would urge her to introduce herself, but she would bury her head under my arm and say, “what if they are mean to me?  What if they don’t like me? What if they are like the kids at school?”  

Thankfully, there was another person there.  My husband’s cousin quietly praised her.  She invited her to go places and then bragged about her to others.  That little nudge was enough to get my daughter off the park bench.  If a cool medical school student thought she was not all bad, maybe the kids at the park might be ok with her.  They were.  Of course, not all of them clicked with her, but a group did, and the ones who didn’t just left her alone.  The ones who did, the boys who bucked tradition and ran around playing with the little blond girl, gave her the next nudge of confidence.

This is what support looks like.

The adults we have been lucky enough to surround our daughters with are incredible.  Instead of calling her weird or ignoring her, they have been very vocal cheerleaders for her.  That is critically important because praise coming just from me, her mom, doesn’t mean as much as praise from other people.  My praise is important and necessary, but not the same.  I can rave about the virtues of being a geek and cover the fridge with Simon Pegg quotes until I am blue in the face, but that is just laying a foundation.  The powerful building up comes from others.  When someone else says she is amazing BECAUSE she loves science or BECAUSE she plays hockey, that is powerful.  When someone invites her to their wedding and praises her crazy dance skills, that is powerful. When someone sends her a video like this one and tells her she should stay true to herself because that is what will make her happy as an adult, that is powerful. 

As adults and as parents, we often want to heap praise on our own kids.  Of course we do.  They are our perfect babies.  It is important to also recognize the value of praise from other people, though, too.  We must be those other people.  We must remember to recognize the good in other children in addition our own.  Just by simply saying, “I like the way you do that,” we might be the person nudging them a little out of self doubt and onto the playground.

To all the people nudging my daughter, thank you.  Really.  Truly.  Sincerely.  Please stay in her life and watch her grow as a result.

"Star Trek is awesome, and I am awesome, so I love Star Trek."

We just got through two birthdays - first William Shatner's then Leonard Nimoy's.  For my four year old daughter, these were days of celebration.  She dressed up, baked brownies, and carried around her Cpt Kirk and Spock dolls as honored kings for a day.


I encouraged the celebrations for two reasons.  First, I believe life has enough serious stuff naturally built into it, so we should take every opportunity to focus on the positive, happy stuff.  Second, I love the messages in Star Trek and think my daughter will grow up to be a better person because of it.  I know some people think Star Trek is just a geeky sci fi show, or that it is boring compared to Star Wars because it isn't all fighting and special effects.  The boring factor is kinda what I like, though.  Instead of numbing the brain with explosion after explosion and building a story around visual effects and computer generated enemies, the show focuses on telling a story, examining philosophy and psychology and dreaming of a future with less conflict instead of more.  I want my daughters to be thinkers and dreamers, and Star Trek encourages that.   Cpt. Kirk and Mr. Spock fly through space in the future, a future my daughter longs for.  She looks forward to some day doing more, exploring more.  They have cool gadgets, so she starts talking about how she will make some and talks about what they are used for and compares them to technology around her.  We have discussions about how people make decisions by comparing Spock's cold logic to Dr McCoy's heated gut decisions.  What other show encourages a four year old to examine decision making that way?

One of the coolest lessons of Star Trek, I think, is the multicultural side of it.  Lots of different kinds of people and aliens are all living together, sometimes struggling with cultural differences, but working hard at sharing the universe.  They are always emphasizing peace and the need for peace and that peace is the end goal.  Peace and understanding - what better goals are there for a little girl?  Chekov, who the girls say talks funny even though he has the same accent as their father, lives with Scotty who has another accent and is friends with the Iowa boy Kirk who is best friends with the Vulcan Spock who sometimes clashes with but in the end is friends with the southerner McCoy.  Then there is the strong portrayal of women (even if they rarely wear pants). In the original series, Uhura and Nurse Chapel were the lead females.  They worked alongside the guys.  They didn't deny being feminine, but they also didn't deny being strong and intelligent.  Pretty good role models, I think.  Except for Chekov being extremely and hilariously Russian, the other characters were people first and ethnicities second.  That is how I want my girls to view the world.  In the show Trek Nation, Nichelle Nichols explained it perfectly when she told the story of meeting Dr Martin Luther King, Jr:



Simon Pegg, the actor who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the most recent Star Trek movie, further explained the additional benefits of being geek very clearly:

So I hope my girls grow up to be geeks, and I will continue to encourage them to explore strange new worlds and civilizations, to dream of a peaceful future, to seek ways to understand other cultures instead of fear them, and to be true to themselves without forcing their beliefs on others (the struggle of Kirk in many episodes and Picard's struggle with the prime directive as well).