The first few days of this year I went to a restaurant at the mall. I was with Sophie, the little girl I had the joy of christening 13 years ago.
Further down the aisle, at a table, were two ladies with a little boy of about 10. I didn’t get a good look at him, his back was turned. The two appeared to be his mother and grandmother.
The grandmother was mostly on the phone and the mother was lecturing the child. I think they were there for about an hour, during which time the mother talked on and on. Even when he ate, she wouldn’t give him a break. I hope the little boy has formed a defense mechanism and stops listening to everything, otherwise I can only imagine how exhausting it can be for a kid to have its parent pouring normative words over and over. The child was silent, head down like a snowdrop.
Sophie and I imagined what countries we’d like to go to, played some lexical family games, and had some fun, we even fell silent, she reminded me how to do calculus with radicals, then we talked about movies we liked, our favorite actors.
I really enjoyed the conversation with her, and at the same time I was annoyed at what was going on at the next table. I wonder if anyone ever enjoyed the match theory.
A few nights later, I watched a movie on Netflix about a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The doctor’s mother impressed me in this movie. The woman, who hadn’t had the chance to even learn to read, raised her two boys to trust themselves, their minds, and their creativity, sent them to school and instilled in them a respect for reading, music, art, and personal discipline. Whenever one of her boys lost confidence in himself, she would say to him, dutifully, “You have everything you need in your mind. And you have even more than the others.”
I hope that little kid at the mall meets people in his life who will listen to him, ask him questions and debate together, build his confidence, let him try and make mistakes. Because he has everything he needs in his head too. And probably even more than his mother would think.