Earlier this year I wrote about how my daughter Zoe is a big dreamer. She is always full of big, impossible ideas, and I honestly don’t know how to handle it. At some point, I need her to have a reality check. I love that she believes in herself and explores all sorts of possibilities, but I need her to develop some logic, and I need her to understand that dreams take work… and skills… and sometimes education. It’s so hard to have to constantly crush her dreams. She thinks she’s the best at everything - the best singer, the best actor, the fastest runner, the most talented artist, and more. And if anyone outshines her in any way (which happens all the time because, let me be honest, she is quite mediocre like the rest of her family) she gets extremely jealous and angry. She can’t understand why she isn’t chosen for everything and why she isn’t always proclaimed the winner of all, and she goes into a rage over it.
It’s exhausting and a little scary.
We are only a few short hours into winter break, and I’m already overwhelmed with her big ideas.
This morning on the way to school she informed me that she wanted to start an acapella group, and she asked me if I could help her advertise for and hold auditions. Then she outlined everything she was looking for in the group and listed all the venues and events they would perform at.
After school she asked me if I could find a publisher for her book.
Then she told me about her new invention that she wants to create to keep cats out of our back yard. Zoe has an issue with cats because, when she was little, she kept telling us that there was an evil cat in her grandma’s garage. We constantly reassured her that there was no cat in grandma’s garage. After a few weeks of her going on and on about the evil cat, Scotty found a starving, feral cat living in his mom’s garage. Zoe has had trust issues and a fear of cats ever since. She gets really upset whenever she sees a cat in our backyard, and she can never just let it be. She used to scream until one of us would go outside and scare the cat away. Now she has developed some independence, and after she screams, she opens the window and barks until the cat runs away. It doesn’t matter the hour of the day, so my apologies to my backyard neighbors who have to hear my daughter barking out the window at 6:00 a.m. Then again, it is their cat, so maybe they have it coming.
Oh, but the dream… Zoe wants to build some sort of extension to our fence to keep cats from coming in our backyard. She insists she needs velcro and basswood. How does this child know what basswood is? This afternoon she wouldn’t stop talking about it, and she wanted us to drop everything and go shopping for basswood.
(That’s the other thing, she thinks she has unlimited funding for all her big ideas).
Then in the evening, she started making things (I don’t even know what she made - I just know there was a lot of paper involved) that she wants to take around the neighborhood and deliver to people. She has a messenger bag that she has designated specifically for this task, and she has put together a disguise to wear. She’s drawing a map of everywhere she needs to deliver.
And those are just today’s things. Other dreams of late - she wants to get a dirt bike, she has designed costumes for her dance class, she wants to pitch a new school club to the principal (she, of course, will be president of said club), she rewrote the nativity story with her own dialogue and gave us all parts and made us rehearse it, she wants a violin, and she wants to get a job at a ski resort.
I think we’re in for a long winter break with crushed dreams aplenty.
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