Discovering Your Child's Unacknowledged Talents

Discovering Your Child's Hidden Talents

A friend of mine from grade school, whom I'd kinda kept in contact with, visited us last summer. When she was here, she had her then 2 1/2 year old with her.

After dinner one night, I got out an old board puzzle from my kids' toddler days and sat on the floor with her little girl, playing with it. My friend asked me what I was doing.

I looked at her, confused.

She elaborated. "She can't do a puzzle, she's too little."

"That's funny," I said. "She's just finished this one."

My friend was shocked and acted the rest of the trip as if I had stepped over some invisible boundary.

Today, she called me from California.

To be honest, I was pretty surprised to hear from her.

She said she wanted to tell me how that trip affected her and her daughter's life since I'd seen her. She never talked like that to me before.

Actually, I'd let the whole thing go and couldn't figure out what she was talking about at first.

On the plane ride home, she said, she found two more puzzles plus the one her daughter had done at my house in her traveling bag (I was sneaky).

She realized that from cherishing my own children, I cherished all children. She felt hurt that I knew more of her own child's abilities than she did.

And from that day, she took steps to change that. No one would ever know more about her daughter than she did. She was a single mom (and still is) but that was no reason for her little girl to be in day care all the time.

She told me that trip made her realize what she was missing....her own daughter's life.

Since then, she has cut back on the hours from her job. She makes enough as a single mom to make ends meet and cuts back on the needless extras.

The cutback in hours allows her to spend much more time with her daughter. She never realized how great it was to have everyone stare at her when she and her now 3 year old walked out of the library with 20 books! Almost all of them about her daughter's favorite animal, turtles. She said before this change, she never even knew if her daughter had a favorite animal. She said she just wanted to say thank you.

She now has new eyes. Not the eyes of a working mother...she now has the chance to see life again through the eyes of a child. This sure made me feel good. And to think, all this time had passed and I thought she was mad at me :) Well, anyhow.

She told me she didn't know how long she was going to try teaching her daughter being a single parent, but hey...we all know how addictive doing a great thing for our kids can be.