Beginning this afternoon, Sarah has an after school program on Thursdays for the next four weeks, so that will be an extra hour for me to work. She is taking beginning knitting of all things!!! She signed up for cooking, actually, and knitting was her second choice. She was devastated to be placed into knitting, but her teacher was able to talk her into it. Mrs. Putney is a saint, really. Twenty-one kids in the class and I suspect that each, in his or her own way, is a real handful. Here’s how it all played out.
With Sarah we are always trying to get her to be more flexible—and sometimes we don’t have much luck. In this case, she only put down knitting because she was convinced that she had to put down a second choice simply because the form asked for one. We could not talk her out of it. She could NOT permit herself to write down only cooking. Then, when she received the letter from school that stated she had been placed in knitting, she was beside herself with anger, disbelief, and despair. Despite the second choice, she had actually placed all her eggs in the cooking pot.
And she was sure they would force her to stay, just because she had signed up. I kept asking her if that could possibly—even remotely—be the reality. Through her sniffles she agreed that it could not, but then she wailed, “But it still feels like that!”
At midnight, when she called me in because her legs hurt (growing pains), she insisted that she would not go. Had not wanted to learn to knit, didn’t want to learn to knit, never would want to learn to knit. For us as parents, this caused a real dilemma:
1.Would we make her go anyway, so that she could learn that you can still have fun even when everything isn’t exactly as you planned? or
2. Would we let her skip it, to show her that it’s ok to change your mind about things (and no one can force you)? And if so, would we be teaching Beginning Quitting instead of Beginning Knitting?
We reluctantly decided to go with Choice 2 (we couldn’t imagine, for one thing, how we’d get her there in the first place when she was so deadset against it), but then Mrs. Putney came to the rescue. When she saw our note a few weeks before class stating Sarah would not be joining the group after all, she came up with her own plan. She actually took the time to walk Sarah to the office to show her the list of other children in the class. Fortunately, some of her old buddies from kindergarten were on the list, so she relaxed and decided to go. She is already talking about making a blanket for the dog.
So what will we do the next time a Knittin’ or Quittin’ Scenario pops up? I hope we will remember to take a deep breath, stay the course, ask for help, and look for another approach.
