A Girl
I know a girl. She is in fact my niece - the daughter of my sister. Let’s say her her name is Erin. Erin is seven, just. She has been at school now for two and a half years. Much like many children, sometimes she likes it, school that is, sometimes she will do almost anything not to go. I’m the same as an adult - my school is my job. Somethings persist throughout the ages.
The age of seven is, from my observations at least, a cusp of sorts between a freer (usually) young childhood and a more ‘conformist’ older childhood. All this ahead of adolescence, of course.
Whilst Erin professes a love of K-Pop Demon Hunters, leg warmers (!) and nail polish, she also secretly whispers to me in our quieter moments together, that she does in fact still watch and enjoy Peppa Pig. How to manage these, for the first time in a conscious life, manage the internal conflict between (at least) two selves. The first go around this particular buoy that is really the theme of all our lives to one extent or another. Mother and lover, worker and poet, athlete and waiter, dog-lover and cat-lover (the most difficult of all?), meat-eater and environmentalist, peace-lover and soldier, extremely creative and extremely lazy. I could go on, though I’m positive you understand what I mean by now.
These glimpses of adolescence glanced through building castles out of blocks, talking about and searching for fairies, carrying a beloved cat soft toy to each and every family occasion, interspersed with talk of ‘boyfriends’, ‘cool’ and ‘not cool’ things. These come with a growing sense that we now (at seven) exist in A world, not necessarily OUR world. Up until this point our world had been a reasonably safe and known dwelling place. That now other people’s opinions can hurt us, that they have them at all and worst of the worst, can persuade others to their point of view with relative ease (we are all so easily persuaded - we are human). That an accepted point of view might well be against yours and the visceral and all-consuming fear of destruction that comes with this - a gift from our ancestors, ancestors, long before K-Pop, of that I am certain - begins to creepingly have us adjust ourselves to conformity. To jettison a long-term love of Madness (particularly their Baggy Trousers) in favour of the Demon Hunters that everyone else (seems) to favour. All this at seven years young.
Tears, I know, will come, perhaps even more secret excuses not to want to go to school. Pain, definitely, which then ripples to pain in those who love you and want to protect you from everything whilst simultaneously wishing, for you, everything. We live contradictions every minute of every hour of our lives, and it is hard. At any age. Perhaps the stakes rationally increase as we age, but those first tussles with it, the contradictions of life, now that, that is a thing to ponder and wonder at how we might best guide our seven year olds (and perhaps our own internal seven year olds) through this great theme and great challenge of a whole life.
07Feb26