Big Girls Don't Cry

When Luke was born Maya decided that she didn’t want to be a big girl, she wanted to be a big baby. She wanted to be swaddled like a baby, to drink from her sippy cup like it was a bottle and to cry like a baby. I knew she had adjusted to Luke’s permanence when she announced one day that she wasn’t a big baby anymore. Now if you even mention the word baby around her she gets so offended. She also started 3-year old pre-school this year and babies don’t go to school.


I think she was excited to start school because she got a pink Hello Kitty backpack to take with her. I was excited because Andy had been to pre-school there and I knew she would love it too. Her class memorizes a poem each month. Andy came home with his first poem when he was in that class two years ago and wanted to start working on it right away. Maya however, pretended to not know what a poem even was when she brought her paper home. I explained it to her and tried to have her repeat the lines after me. “Maya, say apple, apple after me.” She said, “Oh, I like apples.” I said, “Okay, say apple, apple.” Instead she starts to sing up, down, up down…and this continues until I give up for the day. She was so all over the place. The next week on Tuesday, I told her teacher when I picked her up from class how fun it was to watch the differences between her and Andy. They each had such a different approach about class. The next class, Thursday morning she told me that she thought it was funny that I told her that Maya had trouble focusing on the poem because she had stood in front of her class and had recited the whole thing that morning. I was astonished because she had never reviewed it once with me. We never made it past that first failed attempt. When she got in the car I asked her to share her poem with me. “What poem mom?” “The one you said for your class today.” “Oh, up and up and …..” She still won’t share that poem with us. I guess a big girl has to have a few things just for herself.