2003-08-19 - 8:29 p.m.
Note: My brain was out to lunch yesterday while I was typing. I should have said a minyan was TEN men. I know that. I�ve known that for as long as I can remember. Sigh.
WHO IS SHE?
With many children, but particularly with young teenagers, there comes a moment when a parent looks at this person the parent has known since the person was born and says, �Who IS she?� For lucky parents, that question is followed by �and how did she get to be so terrific?� Day-Hay provided me with such a moment last Friday night.
All summer has been a summer of growing for her�primarily emotionally because she remains quite small. Pulled up to her full height, she is at most 4'10" and, if she has very wet clothes, she is eighty pounds. Her spirit and presence have always been a bit bigger than the outer wrapper but her confidence generally has hidden out, perhaps somewhere down in her left sock, perhaps in the toe of her left sock. But all this year she has been coming into her own and this summer she is actually bursting on the scene.
She has spent the summer working as a counselor-in-training (CIT) for the local Y day camp. She�s gone to the day camp for at least a week, and usually much more than a week, each summer since she was five. This year, at thirteen, she has helped staff the camp. Some CITs have worked primarily with five and six year olds but not Day-Hay. Some have worked primarily with seven to nine year old children who are at what Day-Hay says is her �favorite age for campers.� Day-Hay has done that one or two weeks.
But most of the time she has worked with the specialty camps: rock climbing (where she is one of very few people at camp who are belay-certified), gymnastics, dance, cheerleading, and diving. The campers in the specialty camps usually range in age all the way up to twelve or thirteen and several of them tower over here. Yet she has kept order when she had to. The fierceness of her and her sense of when to fade away and get someone else has stood her in good stead. So has her ability at all these specialties. Having more expertise has given her some authority.
She has turned out to be not only a leader but a wonderful second-in-command. Second-in-command requires many of the same skills as being the leader but it requires more finesse and more tact, two qualities not often in abundance in thirteen year old girls. It also requires an ability to stand up for yourself, something Day-Hay, a people-pleaser at heart, often finds difficult to do unless she is too angry to do it well.
But the real difference in Day-Hay has come elsewhere. After years of being the quiet girl in the back of the class and one of the people you could vote most-willing-to-just-blend-in-to-the crowd, Day-Hay has decided that sometimes it is okay to seek out opportunities to stand up and be noticed. This new attitude lead to her deciding to audition for our professional, local, children�s theater. Around here, we have known for a while that Day-Hay can act. What we did not know is that she could do it in front of people and enjoy doing it up in front. But Kat, who also auditioned, said that she had a wonderful audition and Day-Hay said she enjoyed it.
But even that was not what made me ask, �Who IS she?� No, what prompted that question was an act of boldness with an adult that she does not really know. The adult was not a stranger exactly. She knew who he was. He was the head of the theater department at Kat�s school but she has never had any real conversation with him and Day-Hay is often a bit shy with adults. We ran into him at a local theater but not at Kat�s school. �Mr. M.,� she announced. �I have two callbacks at Firststage and I will be at Nicolet in a year.�
I do not know exactly who she is and right now I am not sure she knows exactly either but I sure wonder how she got to be so terrific.
LAST YEAR:Talk About Frustration
TWO YEARS AGO: on vacation
IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM:
The Minyan Snatcher
You�ve Come a Long Way, Boys
I Am NOT Frodo
Needing God
Under the Stairs
previous - next
|
Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
