I keep on waiting for CJ’s daycare teacher to tell us how CJ will never make it past middle school, that she’s beating up the other kids for lunch money, and that she spends naptime huddled in the corner, muttering to herself about the injustices of preschool and nursing a double Scotch neat.

But, no. At least, not yet.

For Halloween this year, CJ decided she wanted to be a cat. “Great!” I said to her, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which, for Halloween, isn’t all that much. Since she’s been into singing and dancing of late, I added, “Did you know that there’s a musical show about cats?”

Her eyes widened and we went to the computer, where we spent an hour going through YouTube videos with as much syrupy Andrew Lloyd Webber as I could take. Then I went to the library and got the video.

Since then, virtually every evening ends with her choice of three songs from the musical. In the picture below she mimics some of the singers in The Old Gumbie Cat song.

Perhaps more oddly, however, is what has become her favorite song. Initially, it had been Rum Tum Tugger, which in the T.S. Eliot poem was simply a cat with contrarian tendencies, but in the musical morphed into a hyper-sexualized tom cat. Now, however, it’s swung entirely the other way, to the maudlin hit “Memory”, which, oddly, is the only song in the musical that isn’t from Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

Hearing an almost-five-year-old singing wistfully of glory days gone by seems odd, but then a glance at our medicine cabinet and perhaps it’s not surprising at all. For folks not intimately familiar with 1970s standards, Memory contains lyrics like this:

Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again

Yes, we’re deep into her education on middlebrow culture.

Last week, CJ and I watched Star Wars, one of my favorite movies from my childhood, even though at the time I was somewhat older than CJ is now.

She loved it. When Princess Leia came on screen and I told CJ that she was a “princess”, CJ’s eyes lit up. And when Princess Leia stared down Darth Vader, and then smirked, CJ was smitten, and I knew I had made the right movie choice that night.

A few days later, on Thanksgiving Day, CJ got dressed in one of her prettier dresses in preparation for having a bunch of guests over for dinner. She was really excited, and she asked Becky to put her hair up….in buns on the side, just like Princess Leia. Becky did the best she could with the resources available to her (see the picture above).

I was extremely pleased that CJ seized on Princess Leia as a role model. In Star Wars, Leia exhibits courage, leadership and tenacity, not necessarily the traits most frequently portrayed by a princess in fiction.

However, while I’m anxious to show her The Empire Strikes Back (which I believe to be the best of the Star Wars saga), I may be slower to introduce her to Return of the Jedi, for obvious reasons.

Almost from their child’s birth, parents study their children to see which parts come from the mom, which come from the dad, and which characteristics come from seemingly no where to offer surprises both pleasant and unwelcomed. At least early on, it’s one of the joys of parenthood.

Much less enjoyable, at least in my case, however, is turning that lens the other direction. How does the parenting I’m practicing reflect what I received? What traits have I inherited, and how can I reinforce the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses?

Like a military re-fighting the last war, my parents cast a shadow over me as I think, “What would my dad do and how should I do it?”

I haven’t done a lot of analysis of my parents, and while I think most of my personality comes from my father rather than my mother, I can’t be sure. And while I love my parents, of course, I would like to avoid one particular minefield that has plagued my relationship with my father. And his relationship with his father before.

It’s in the back of my mind whenever I have to confront CJ about something, whenever she disobeys us or behaves insolently (which is virtually every hour of every day). It haunts me. Will I be able to avoid the fate that my father could not, even as he suffered the same from his father?

And she’s only 4.

I want CJ to benefit from my experience, to avoid my failures and to improve on my successes and achieve successes of her own.

But my control over that is both limited and, in some cases, unwanted. I have more control over and responsibility for the lessons I carry forward from my experience as my parents’ child. And that frightens me more.

In the last two weeks, CJ twice biked to daycare, with me jogging next to her. For a four-and-a-half-year-old, the 3.5-mile journey is not a trivial task, and each time I’ve praised her for the effort, and pointed out to her how other joggers and cyclists have also been impressed with her efforts.

We had planned to make the trip a third time the other morning, but when I woke her, she was reticent.

“I don’t want to bike to Roadrunners,” she said.

“Why not?” I said, in my most soothing and understanding tone, which, admittedly, isn’t that soothing.

“It’s too much hard work,” she said.

That just stunned me, and I left.

In the car on the way to daycare, I asked her again why she didn’t want to ride her bike to daycare. “It’s too much hard work,” she repeated.

This time, I was a better prepared.

“It’s because it’s hard, that’s why we do it,” I said, doing my best Kennedy impersonation, which, admittedly, isn’t that Kennedy-like.

Over the next two days, we talked about doing hard things, and today we gave it another go.

“Why do we do it?” I said, as she climbed the short hill just before reaching daycare.

“Because it’s hard!” she said.

I imagine that a lot of parenting is modeling behaviour that you would like to see emulated. Frankly, I’m just not that good of a person. I can and have tried, but I give up.

It’s kind of like when you’re dating. For a while, you’re on your best behaviour, because you like them and you want them to like you. But, eventually, you can’t keep up the act, and they see the “real” you.

The research says that in raising kids, you really can’t change much. You are the parent that you’re going to be, and you’ll raise the child that you’re going to raise. Don’t sweat it, because it’s not worth it. The kids are who they are, and, in the long run, you’re not going to change much, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

It’s so fatalistic. I feel like I’ve been bothering too much and for too long, and I need to just stop. I’m like the spouse who, after so many years of marriage, is ready to just let himself go and spend the rest of his years in sweat pants.

I’m just so tired of trying to be better.

And the weird thing is, even trying as much as I have, I don’t think I’ve been half the parent Becky is.

And, of course, I realize that I’ll still try. I may take a rest today, but I’ll be back at it tomorrow. Because that’s the parent that I am, and what I’m modeling is not being a great parent, but being a parent who tries. And that’s going to have to be enough.

I am not a birthday person, at least not when it comes to my birthday. It seems little more than marking time, a celebration that I haven’t died yet. While there might be something to that, it doesn’t seem like there’s enough there to actually throw a celebration.

I concede that others hold opposing and equally valid opinions on the subject matter.

The other night, Becky and I were lying in bed when I turned to her and said, “In just a few days, we’ll be 25% of the way home.”

Pause.

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“August 12th. We’ll be a quarter of the way done!”

“You mean she’ll be four and a half?”

“Yes! Isn’t that great?”

“You realize that when she turns 18, she’ll still be a senior in high school, right? Our circle of friends would likely really frown on us kicking her out of the house at that point.”

Well, of course, I didn’t mean that we would kick her out of the house on her emancipation day. I was just noting the passage of time. Obviously, child-rearing is a marathon with no finish line. For better or worse, there are also no grades and no scores. It’s not a game where you ever really know if you’re winning or not, and even if you were winning, well, just wait a while.

Perhaps I was noting this date because it’s one of the few tangible markers out there and I’m willing to grasp at most anything.

In an example of making explicit the implicit, during our first full day of our vacation to Norway, we bought a plastic tiara for CJ from the museum gift shop at the Akershus Castle in Oslo. She’s worn it every day since.

Now, of course, when I say “we” bought her the tiara, I mean “we” being the parent that isn’t “me.” I wasn’t pleased with the purchase. Can there be a more expensive place to buy a chunk of China-made plastic than a museum gift shop in Norway? Does she really need our encouragement to be more princess-like?

I know, I know. It’s a losing cause, and it’s not one worth fighting. Move along, move along.

The 1,000-foot climb to the top of the mountain on the island of Runde  in Norway features a steep, muddy and poorly-marked trail, with cold winds and a steady drizzle being the norm.

And CJ killed it.

Sure, there were some early, minor protestations as she began, but for the most part, she did a fair imitation of a good soldier. Had I understood at the outset the difficulty of the climb ahead of us, I probably would have tried to come up with an alternate activity for CJ. But my ignorance served us well. She was spurred on by finding creatures great (sheep and skua) and small (caterpillars, slugs) and by the encouragement of her mother.

The past year and a half has been full of CJ surprising us with what she is capable of. She could ice skate before turning 3, write her letters and numbers shortly afterwards. Now, at age 4, she can swim the length of a pool and ride a bike without training wheels, and her Chinese improves day-by-day. It tells me that she is generally capable of much more than what we expect of and ask from her, and I feel culpable for not providing the context for her to reach her potential. Then again, where is the line between demanding too much and not enough? Becky and I, of course, generally disagree on the location of that line and how to find it.

My job is to introduce her to the tools of an independent adult as early as possible, since the longer she has to experiment with those tools under the security of our roof, the better off she’ll be when she actually does strike it out on her own. Part of that toolset is to constantly challenge herself and to not be afraid of failure. And you can’t overcome fear of failure without having failed a few times, and better to fail early and learn how to deal with it, than to fail later without that understanding.

Don’t pick her up when she falls, teach her how to get up on her own. She’s not a baby any more.

At least, I don’t *think* she is. She’s growing, and it’s difficult for a parent to calibrate from one day to the next their reaction to their children’s falls to accommodate the growth of the child. Yesterday, when she fell off her bike, she needed to be picked up. But does she need it today?

I don’t do celebrations well. I handle rituals with equal clumsiness. Last month, I had to witness, for the second time, a celebratory ritual that I find devoid of meaning, and it’s almost certain that I will have to go again, for the third time, next year.

The pre-school graduation ceremony. A contrivance meant to celebrate some accomplishment? A ritual meant to mark a passage of some sort? Does anyone actually fail to leave pre-school? The past two years, CJ has participated in her daycare’s pre-school graduation ceremony, as the younger daycare children fete the “graduating” class.

CJ is an only child in a two-parent, upper-middle income, high SES family. She will, almost by definition, be doted over, her every passage marked. Already, more pictures have been taken of her than of Becky and I combined over our entire lifetimes. Pre-school graduation is an exercise akin to those sports leagues where every child, even the lowliest bench-warmer, gets an award.

As with a lot of things, Becky and I disagree on this.

I feel that our circumstances mean that CJ will be over-indulged and coddled. We don’t need to go out of our way to participate in fabricated events to celebrate her “achievement.” She already gets showered with praise and attention every day. She’s not the seventh child of nine that gets lost in a crowd of siblings. It’s the same reason I don’t buy her pink things and nurture an interest in princesses and ballerinas…she’s already predisposed to do that, I don’t need to encourage it.

As attentive, engaged parents of an only child, our challenge is not making sure that she’s sufficiently praised and honored…quite the opposite.