Musings on Determination

So a few very short weeks ago, my daughter decided on the spur of the moment that she really needed a frog.  She found an old aquarium in the shed, got it cleaned up, and announced that she was saving up money.  I looked at her allowance jar, which was crammed full of crumpled dollar bills, and told her that she already had enough money.  Aquatic frogs are $2, food for them is $2 more, and she had money to spare.  Mission accomplished.

While we were at the store, she happened to spot a chameleon.  A new obsession was formed before we were even back out in the car.  Princess says, “MOM.  I want a chameleon.  Bad.”

I turn to her father, thinking, “what do I say?”  He is clearly looking at me and thinking the same.  I say, “well, maybe if you saved up money we could buy a terrarium for your birthday…?”  My husband nods, and I think, “Oh thank God we dodged a bullet.”  It had taken her a few months to put back fifty cents here and fifty cents there and finally have enough money to want to buy anything.  How long would it take before she wanted to buy a few candy bars, or a new book, and decided that saving up the money for a chameleon was just too much work?

But, no.  Princess was googling things like “what does a chameleon eat?” and “what does a chameleon live in?” and pretty soon “how to raise mealworms” and “good plants for a chameleon” and she was drawing up diagrams and randomly announcing things like “WE WILL NEED TO BUY MORE PLANTS” and “FLOWERS ARE OKAY”.  And one day a couple of different terrariums were in my Amazon shopping cart and she was announcing, “I’ll need the one that costs more than one hundred dollars I think.”

So I sat down and explained to her that even cutting her grandpa’s roses for five dollars every week, she would just barely make enough money to buy the chameleon, and there were limits to what her dad and I could afford to spend.  If she wanted that terrarium, she would need to make a little more money.  She said, “I want my Chameleon for the fourth of July.”

Oh, sweetheart.  Oh, you darling naive girl.  I explained to her that such a thing meant making a whole lot of money in just a few weeks.  ”Mom, have you ever needed to make a whole lot of money in just a few weeks?”

Oh, sure, I used to make and sell jewelry.  Once I wrote a book.

Princess very matter-of-factly replies that she doesn’t want to write a book, but I should see if any of my friends need new jewelry.  ”I’m good at making jewelry.”

This is true, she’s good at making jewelry.

So Princess started asking who needed jewelry, and in a few days she had $30 dollars.  Then she had $100.  I told my husband we should start thinking about how we were coming up with our share of the money.  ”If she wants it before her birthday she needs to figure out how to pay for it.”

God help us, I thought, she’s only eight.  But I guess we all need to learn hard lessons somehow.

Never mind.  By the end of two weeks she had enough orders to buy the Super-Mega-Terrarium-Of-Awesome-Proportions, we were just waiting for checks to come in.  Then she threw a curveball, and spent a third of her money on making Super Expensive Necklaces for her grandmothers.  Oh, Princess.  It wasn’t a big deal, she said, she could still make more money.

And she did.

I tell you that whole story to tell you something else:  no one told her that she was just eight.  She didn’t realize eight-year-old girls don’t buy themselves $50 dollar lizards that come needing $100 terrariums and another $100 in accouterments.   She set a goal for herself, and heaven provide for anyone that didn’t buck up and get in line.  (Including her mother, who had to take her to the bead store every morning and do the finishing on freak-ton of necklaces and address twenty envelopes and make payment arrangements and keep the books.  All of this as Priority One on Princess’s daily “to-do” lists, above even breakfast.*)  She set her goal, and then she looked at the world around her and tried to figure out what she had available so she could meet it.

She didn’t look at the world around her before setting her goal.

She didn’t ask anyone’s opinion of if her goal even made sense.

See, I realize there are times I did things backwards.  I asked people if my goals made sense, then I looked at the world around me, and I decided I needed different goals.  I didn’t ask myself how much my goals mattered and then mangle reality to my will.

I’ve decided that I’m going to hold off on explaining to Princess that she’s still a little kid and sometimes she can’t make the world give her what she wants.  May that be true, sometimes?  I suppose it must, eventually,  it is when she wants to sneak out of bed and get chocolate ice cream, or when she wants to force her brother to wear a princess outfit so she can be Iron Man for once.  I mean, it’s true as often as it needs to be.  But about the other stuff, the stuff that has to do with her dreams, does it need to be true?  I’m guessing if I don’t kill her optimism it will be less often than I think, even if it’s more often than she wants.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t want to break her.

I need to figure out how it is that she does it.

 

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*There are limits.  I did eat breakfast first.