Progress

The first progress report came today.  When I was younger, progress reports and report cards were always good days.  Days where I knew, just knew, that the neat rows of good grades would show my parents just how very much I was worth loving.  They loved me regardless, of course.  Their love was and is still not, offered with contingencies.  But I never had any trouble building my own,  So this first one came, tucked in an unassuming envelope in the already tattered pre-school folder and it just felt so. loaded.  Heavy with expectations and beginnings and way back whens and memories.  All of it so unexpected and maybe not so unexpected.  It was slightly paralyzing to open, as if the misstep of preschool feet could bring the whole castle crashing down.

Such a heavy burden carried by the little smattering of pre-school can-do's, almost can-do's and somedays.  So many expectations, regrets, pride, pressure and illusions wrapped up in a slip of paper carried by an angel in a pink backpack.  Her future and my past swirling together like two of her water colors, drifting together until the two hues collide and inevitably become one.

I don't need a report on progress.  I don't need a paper to tell me my baby still needs to feel the weight of her mother next to her before she falls asleep.  That she is cautious and reserved in who she chooses to unleash her lovely, lovely light upon.  That once she does choose to love and trust that it comes in willful, passionate torrents of ideas and songs and games.  That she is just as fierce in her convictions as her mama but her emotions still run free like a cresting river settling over those she loves while her mother has learned how to temper her tides.  That she is at times hiding shyness and softness behind stern eyes and quivering lips.

She will learn to read, she will learn to write.  She will inevitably begin to quiet, to sit, to be still, to observe, listen.  Despite every desperate step to prevent it, she will at some point believe that approval is necessary and comes tied to appearances, grades and scores.  She will test her self worth as a woman time and time again against such measures, such endless, endless measures.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that 'to be yourself in a world that is trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment'.  She will try so hard at times to be something other than what she was created to be.  Progress is ultimately finding your way back to your most honest self.

My little girl's preschool progress report is not a measure of who she is and who she will be.  Above all, she is loved.  And the greatest test of her self worth will be her ability to accept and give love.  Without reservation, or judgement.  Nobody is going to deliver that to her in a manila envelope.