Setting Limits, part one

I am reading a book I borrowed from the library, Setting Limits with your Strong Willed Child (you will see it in my side bar under Setting Limits with your Pain in the Ass Kid. Same thing). The writer recommends that the first step in coming to grips with your strong-willed child is coming to grips with the fact that your image of what you would like your child to be, and what your child is actually like, will never meet. Give up the image, the fantasy, grieve if you have to, but the sooner you can really give it up, the better.

Arabella will never be the child sitting in the corner with a book, more interested in reading than in playing outside, the way I was as a kid. I will never be able to dress her the way I would like, or even see her try on outfits I suggest. She will never be compliant or easy to get along with. She will never be gentle or quietly attentive. I don't think she will be able to come into my studio until she is quite a bit older, like maybe 10 by which point she will probably think art is lame, so the fantasies I had of working with her next to me in the studio will probably never come true.

What Arabella is, however, is quite wonderful in a different way. She is wild and inquisitive, curious and inventive. She is unselfconsciously beautiful and strong. She is stubborn (I often say she isn't a Scorpio, she was actually born under the sign of MULE), but also determined and self-reliant. She is loud, so I never have to worry about her not being able to make herself heard. She is playful and humorous. She is dramatic. She tries to do all the things I do, except reading and sitting still.

Sometimes I think it is the ways she is like me that make me more insane than the ways she is different.