"I Already Know That!" aka My Left-Brained Child

“I already know that!” my five-year-old huffs from the backseat.

What she already knows, I don’t remember.

It’s Saturday morning and not quite sunny outside. Even though we’ve been in the car for about ten minutes my skin prickles with goosebumps.

We are driving back from basketball where she is the poorest player among her cohort of 4-6 year olds. While other kids dribbled, she zigzagged across their paths to half court in semi control of her ball. That is, when it wasn’t bouncing off the tip of her sneakers and sending her scrambling across the scuffed floor to fetch it as others made their way to half court without incident.

Still, she soldiered on. And I was proud of that.

Every time she made it back to the line she searched for my eyes in the lineup of plastic folding chairs clustered at half court.

And about 50% of the time when she made a shot, she searched for me, for approval.

And yet, tell her that “canary” is another type of “yellow,” or that the moon’s glow comes from the sun, and she’ll bite your head off in indignation.

That is Fin. If Tea is my “heart-led child,” Fin is my “mind-led child.” It’s not as poetic, I know.

She’s brilliant in the traditional ways young girls with endless imagination and uncanny empathy are.

She is unusually lucky at poker, she draws whimsical dragons, horses, dinosaurs, all with the same smiley face and impossibly pen-point-tiny, button nose.

When she was a baby people would stop my husband in Costco to tell him she was beautiful (not just adults, kids, like 10 year olds). And adults would regularly whisper as we passed, “did you see that little girl? She’s beautiful!”

All this to say that as reluctant as she is to learn from others, and as magnetic as she is, she’s also extremely insecure.

I mean she won’t even make eye contact with some girls in her class who are her friends, whom she describes to me as her friends.

On Thursday I was picking her up from daycare and a girl about 2 years older than her, a friend, wanted to give her a hug goodbye. She did so grudgingly, looking behind her as she clasped her arms loosely around the girls waist. And when the girl said, “bye Fin!” she looked at the ground and waved, barely uttering a “goodbye,” under her breath.

Now this next-level of shyness has interesting consequences for a five-year-old.

At playgrounds it means girls who approach and want to play with her, sometimes turn their perceived rejection into meanness, saying something cruel to her for no reason.

In class the boy she now has a crush on (who I’m pretty sure returned her affection initially), has moved on.

And most of all, it keeps her stuck in her own story about how other kids are not that interested in her.

And yet, and yet, try to tell her anything about anything, try to pump up her confidence even, and she’ll cross her arms and say either, “why do you think I don’t know that?” or “I know that!”

We pull into the driveway.

“Fin,” I say, as softly as a mom on five hours of sleep who’s been up since the butt crack of dawn, can.

“Even if 90% of what someone says is something you know, if 10% is new, you lose your chance to learn that 10% when you say you already know something,” I inhale deeply and find her soft brown eyes, in the rearview mirror. “You know what I mean?”

She looks at me, and quietly nods.

For the rest of the day my husband, other daughter and I probably said things she knows about 10+ times. But she kept quiet, looking out the window thoughtfully.

That is until dinner when Tea said, “Mommy, blue and red make purple!”

Fin huffed. “I already know that!” she said.

Baby steps.