comfort zone
I am the first to admit I am a terrible chicken. I think I alluded to it a couple of posts ago but I thought I'd elaborate now that it's official: my daughter J has been accepted to the gifted class at a new school, and has made the bittersweet decision to accept it. What this means is a whole new set of social challenges and expectations, situations to adapt to. Of course, when I talk about these things I'm talking not about her, but about me.
My daughter has had the great good fortune to inherit one of her father's best traits, which I will call gregariousness. He has always had the ability to enter a room and instantly become the best friend of everyone in it. There are downsides to this characteristic to which he also succumbed when he was older, and we're all crossing our fingers that that does not come to pass for her, but for now I'm pleased that she has that trait. I've never had it so I know what it's like to go through life without it.
Well, let me amend that statement a little bit. I guess for me, the difference is that at this point, now that I've developed skills and confidence in my chosen profession, I have no trouble walking into a work-type situation and brazening my way through. I still have a very hard time in social situations: parties in which I know nobody except the host are my absolute nightmare. I'm definitely a one-on-one type social being. Which has served to make my social circle extremely small -- one could call it a social dot, more than a circle in fact -- but that's a post for another day and ignites a whole other set of anxieties.
J, however, is in grade five, and will be transitioning to a new school in grade six, just before her eleventh birthday. School at that stage is not like a job, where you can have a modicum of social interaction with your coworkers, but the majority of your social life is conducted elsewhere. Elementary school is kind of an equal mix of social and "professional," or in this case academic association. J has always mostly come home from school and been pretty solitary, spending her evenings with me or her grandparents, doing homework, watching tv, playing various electronic games, doing extracurricular activities. It's only been in the past year or so that she's started having social interactions with her friends from school, outside school time. Especially now that we live across the street from the park and several of her buddies live around the corner.
At this point, I don't really doubt that she'll be able to maintain those extracurricular social contacts, even though she's moving to a school that is basically across town. I mean it's only a 10-minute drive, but it might as well be across town. It's a bit of a pisser to me really, since I've spent a lot of time and energy working to reside in the neighbourhood where she goes to school, and now this. Oh well, I keep telling myself it's only for 2 years.
Which is the other bright side to this whole thing, and probably was a point that helped J make the decision to make the change. She will come back to the neighbourhood and go to the same high school as the kids she's been going to school with all this time. In grade eight, they'll all be small fish swimming in a big pond, and they'll need to watch each other's backs. She was reassured by this notion I think -- not because she's anxious about high school, far from it, but because she does have a few buddies at her "old" school and doesn't want to lose them entirely.
I suppose I might be having a wee bit of that "my baby my baby" syndrome too, since the reality is that from here on out, she's going to need and want me around less and less. So although I tell myself I'm anxious about trying to find a niche in a new surrounding, I probably will find myself barely involved in anything going on at her new school anyway. It's been a couple of years since I've had time or energy to be on the PAC for example, and she's perfectly capable of advocating for herself. I will make myself known to her teachers and administrators, but probably won't need to do much more than that.
This comfort zone thing is bigger than I knew!
My daughter has had the great good fortune to inherit one of her father's best traits, which I will call gregariousness. He has always had the ability to enter a room and instantly become the best friend of everyone in it. There are downsides to this characteristic to which he also succumbed when he was older, and we're all crossing our fingers that that does not come to pass for her, but for now I'm pleased that she has that trait. I've never had it so I know what it's like to go through life without it.
Well, let me amend that statement a little bit. I guess for me, the difference is that at this point, now that I've developed skills and confidence in my chosen profession, I have no trouble walking into a work-type situation and brazening my way through. I still have a very hard time in social situations: parties in which I know nobody except the host are my absolute nightmare. I'm definitely a one-on-one type social being. Which has served to make my social circle extremely small -- one could call it a social dot, more than a circle in fact -- but that's a post for another day and ignites a whole other set of anxieties.
J, however, is in grade five, and will be transitioning to a new school in grade six, just before her eleventh birthday. School at that stage is not like a job, where you can have a modicum of social interaction with your coworkers, but the majority of your social life is conducted elsewhere. Elementary school is kind of an equal mix of social and "professional," or in this case academic association. J has always mostly come home from school and been pretty solitary, spending her evenings with me or her grandparents, doing homework, watching tv, playing various electronic games, doing extracurricular activities. It's only been in the past year or so that she's started having social interactions with her friends from school, outside school time. Especially now that we live across the street from the park and several of her buddies live around the corner.
At this point, I don't really doubt that she'll be able to maintain those extracurricular social contacts, even though she's moving to a school that is basically across town. I mean it's only a 10-minute drive, but it might as well be across town. It's a bit of a pisser to me really, since I've spent a lot of time and energy working to reside in the neighbourhood where she goes to school, and now this. Oh well, I keep telling myself it's only for 2 years.
Which is the other bright side to this whole thing, and probably was a point that helped J make the decision to make the change. She will come back to the neighbourhood and go to the same high school as the kids she's been going to school with all this time. In grade eight, they'll all be small fish swimming in a big pond, and they'll need to watch each other's backs. She was reassured by this notion I think -- not because she's anxious about high school, far from it, but because she does have a few buddies at her "old" school and doesn't want to lose them entirely.
I suppose I might be having a wee bit of that "my baby my baby" syndrome too, since the reality is that from here on out, she's going to need and want me around less and less. So although I tell myself I'm anxious about trying to find a niche in a new surrounding, I probably will find myself barely involved in anything going on at her new school anyway. It's been a couple of years since I've had time or energy to be on the PAC for example, and she's perfectly capable of advocating for herself. I will make myself known to her teachers and administrators, but probably won't need to do much more than that.
This comfort zone thing is bigger than I knew!
posted by infobabe | 10:09 a.m.
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