I Caught Myself Coaching Her To Blend

It was in the car outside, before they went in, and it took about six seconds and she has been thinking about it for a fortnight.

She said: maybe not the whole thing about the fish this time, love.

Her daughter is nine. The fish thing is a story she tells, at length, with actions, and it is about a fish, and it is honestly not that interesting, and she tells it to absolutely everybody, and she is the only child in that hall who does anything like that.

She is not odd. She is just entirely herself in a room where nobody else is doing that, and other children have started to notice, in the way children do, which is not cruel yet and is heading somewhere.

So her mother said, in the car, maybe not the whole thing about the fish.

And her daughter said okay, cheerfully, and went in, and told a much shorter version to one person, and had a completely fine morning.

And her mother sat through the whole service and did not hear a word of it, because she was trying to work out what she had just done.

Because there is a version of that sentence that is love. There genuinely is. You do not send a nine year old into a room without any read on it at all, and giving a child a sense of how a room works is part of the job.

And there is another version of the same six seconds, and in that one a woman began, without meaning to, teaching her daughter that the way she is is a thing to be managed.

And she cannot tell which one it was. That is what has been going round for a fortnight.

You know that car.

Maybe your child is loud, or intense, or singular in some way you have never been able to explain to anybody. Maybe you have said the equivalent of maybe not the whole thing about the fish. Maybe you said it eleven years ago and you have watched what came after.

There is no villain here. Every parent in that car park is doing some version of the same arithmetic and almost none of them talk about it.

The question the passage asks back

Here is a question, and it is asked in a passage about how a body works, and it is almost funny.

If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?1 Corinthians 12:17

If the whole body were an eye.

He is not making a point about tolerance. He is not saying the odd ones should be graciously included. He is asking what a body would be if everything in it were the same, and the answer is: it would not work at all. It would be a lump with excellent vision and no other capacity.

That is a much stronger claim than tolerance. It makes the difference necessary rather than permitted.

You are raising somebody the body actually needs, and difference is not a thing to be smoothed off her. That is what the question in 1 Corinthians 12:17 does by making uniformity absurd rather than merely limiting (1 Corinthians 12:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who divides to every man severally as He will, which means what is singular in your daughter was assigned rather than accidental.

Both versions of the sentence were real

Now let me help with the fortnight, because you have been trying to sort one moment into good or bad and it will not go.

It was both. Nearly all parenting is.

The part of you that spoke was reading a room and protecting a nine year old from something you can see coming and she cannot, and that is a real job and you would be negligent not to do it.

And the sentence also carried, underneath, a message about her. She will not have heard it that way this time. If it is said forty more times over four years, she will.

That is the actual distinction, and it is not about the one sentence in the car. It is about whether that sentence is the only kind she ever gets.

You have not damaged your daughter, and one careful sentence in a car park is not the thing that shapes a child. Scripture says charity suffereth long, and is kind (1 Corinthians 13:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in every one of the nine years you have spent loving that girl, and He was in the car and He was not appalled.

And this page will not tell you what to say to her

Let me be plain, because you would take an instruction if I gave you one and I am not going to.

Nothing here tells you to stop giving your daughter any read on a room. Nothing here tells you to let her tell the whole fish story to everybody forever regardless of what it costs her. Nothing here has met your child or that hall.

You know things about her that no page can know.

You are not being handed a rule for your own household. The word says train up a child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6), and read the phrase, which is the way he should go, particular to the child, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives that kind of wisdom to a parent over years and in specifics.