LOL, kids.

[conuly]

Eva had put off the writing part of her homework a really long time, and finally it bumped up against bedtime and it had to be done. The assignment was to write five or more sentences about a happy or sad memory, and she was raging around the house, screaming that she HAD no happy memories NOR any sad memories, they were all just MIDDLE memories and that wasn't RIGHT and NO Mommy couldn't just write her a note she HAD to do it and she could NOT go to bed until she DID it.

Finally, in a brief lull, I was able to get her over to me and I laid it down for her.

"Look, here's what we do. I will dictate five sentences to you. You will write them down. We will simply lie, and your teacher will neither know nor care. All right?"

So we began. I got as far as "This is a story about the time I...." with the intention of letting her pick the scenario when she changed it to "Once I went ice skating" and then proceeded to do the entire assignment herself, sentence by sentence, only stopping to ask for the occasional spelling help. After she was done, having dictated each sentence before she wrote it, she stopped and said "You know, it's a lot easier when I talk about it first!"

Yes, and it's not like the rest of us tried to tell her that at any point during her tirade either!

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh, do I ever relate to her difficulty there. For ordinary children, there may be little or no difficulty about picking out discrete memories to categorize as either 'happy' or 'sad', and little or no concern about whether or not it's RIGHT, but to the highly sensitive and introspective child, things are not so cut-and-dried. Where does one even start, to categorize one's own personal memories according to someone else's either-or pigeonholes? Suppose the memories of the times you were happiest are so bittersweet in retrospect that thinking of them makes you cry?

"We will simply lie, and your teacher will neither know nor care."

YES. *wild applause* Very likely it was that statement that freed her from the hopeless downward spiral of trying to sort out all her feelings about all her memories into the designated categories, and made her realize that all that was called for was five little sentences, that didn't have to be Ultimately True.

Trying to tell anybody anything when they're in the midst of a tirade is generally futile. But - without knowing the child at all - I surmise that it wasn't really "talking about it" that made the big difference at all, but rather the 'permission' to not tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth about her feelings regarding her memories. Consider what an impossible task that would be for even the most introspective and philosophical adults - if that's what she thought was being required of her, no wonder she freaked out.