Folks, we have a maverick in our midst.
I have long since suspected trouble was round the corner, but wasn’t quite sure how it would be released onto the world.
I am raising a strong woman. That’s a phrase I have uttered with increasing desperation many times over the last four years. Each time the breaths get deeper, the teeth are gritted a little harder, but the need to convince myself that this is a Good Thing becomes a bit more urgent.
I never knew when my beautiful Bella Bay’s personality would really start to take shape but I was nervous for that moment. And then that moment has, it seems, coincided with a period of house arrest...
She has been a tricky customer since birth. Literally. She entered the world screaming - the most blessed of sounds to any parent - but she didn’t stop. For 45 minutes. The midwife’s breezy ‘Oh she’s got a good set of lungs on her!’ turned to amusement, then surprise, then, I think, mild irritation. And I never got to find out the real thoughts of the mother in the bed opposite ours on the post-labour ward because she asked to be moved halfway through the night.
Friends with daughters tell me it’s just girls - they’re more complex than boys. More emotional. More vocal. Either way I don’t mind admitting that when I was expecting Xander I was secretly willing him to be a boy. A nice straight-forward boy.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore my daughter. She is sparky and funny and sweet and gentle. She’s also stubborn and complicated and hyper sensitive. My mum never tires of saying she reminds her of me. Which I don’t think is intended as a subtle guilt trip but either way I end up apologising.
Of the three kids, I was most worried about Bella getting through the lockdown unscathed. She only turned four in February and she understood less about it. She misses her friends. She misses having little girls to play with. Henry is happy as long as there’s someone to kick a football at, or hold the wood he wants to saw, or read him endless stories, but Bella needs a more nuanced approach to her play. She needs someone to care about the babies she is tucking into the cot, or the unicorn artwork she has produced or the outfit she has chosen. (Yes yes, the cliches.... Despite my attempts to resist, we have unwittingly subscribed to all the gender stereotypes.)
So it was with a greater dose of trepidation that I've been interacting with Bellsy recently. But - and I say this with slight hesitation - I think this time at home is actually helping her find her feet. Work out who she is. Every day she says or does something that surprises us, that shows the sort of person she is becoming, and it’s so wonderful to watch.
Yesterday we decided to go on one of our favourite walks, one we haven’t done since this all started because you have to drive to the next village which was against the rules. But we wanted something familiar at the end of a hard week, so we told the kids we were going up to Chipperfield Woods for a good stomp. Bella wasn’t sure. She gets tired legs. It all sounded like hard work. So I suggested she pack a few snacks for the walk.
Over the next 30 minutes she’d helped herself to the following and popped them into her little floral rucksack. (Which she wore all day, ready for the off.)
Two cartons of apple juice, four mini packets of chocolate buttons, a tupperware of oat cakes (which she couldn’t fit into the tupperware she’d chosen so she just crumbled them in her fist and poured them in), some dried apricots added to the oat cake mix, two slices of bread (one crust) and two rice cakes - all loose so once we embarked on our walk that afternoon they were, of course, stale - and a dozen mini breadsticks. (She’s a carbs girl.)
But it was the way she approached it. She didn’t need help, no sir. She had a little step and a perfectly solid worktop to stand on. She knew what she required and worked out where everything was.
Later, she disappeared for long enough for me to start wondering if she was up to no good. She reappeared having clearly found my make-up. After the request for red lips earlier in the week she’d upped the ante and gone full Child Beauty Pageant. I loved her so hard for it.
She knew what she wanted and she went for it.
Her favourite refrain from the last few weeks has been ‘Well I’m in charge today!’ whenever we ask her to do - or not do - something. If she were in charge she would, from what I can work out, play on her tablet all day and not eat vegetables. Those seem to be the two biggest sticking points. She has taken to responding with that particular phrase every single time we speak recently. Sometimes with an accompanying jab in the ribs. (When she points she does so with a real aggression and almost always makes contact so you need lightning-quick reactions.)
But all this time together has allowed us to really spend some time observing her. And we’ve both noticed she’s suddenly coming into her own, morphing into the next stage of her personality, working out who she is now she’s a very big and grown up four.
For a while now I have been worried that the defiant side of her nature would win out. The angry, stubborn, shouty side. And I wasn’t at all sure I was equipped to deal with that in the best way, to help her navigate the world from that standpoint.
So it is some relief to see that it is her softer side that's coming to the fore. There’s more whispering secrets in our ears, more declarations of major life decisions she’s reached ("we’re getting a puppy when Xander is four or five"), starting every statement with ‘apparently’ and proclaiming ‘heaven’s alive!’ when she’s surprised.
In our desperate search for silver linings in the clouds of the last few weeks, one of the nicest has to be getting to know Bella a bit better. To watch her independence blossom, to laugh at her outrageous statements, her grown up language and exaggerated facial expressions.
I’ve always been glad I appear to be raising a strong woman but I thought the pleasure would be retrospective, once we had found our way through the next 15 years or so. But not anymore. Today I’m excited.
For now at least.
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