She's Not Me After All

I think parents are always looking for a little bit of themselves in their children.  "She has my eyes!" "He looks just like me when I was that age." "She's her father's daughter." "His hair is just like mine, poor kid."  I do it with my girls all the time.  Ellie has my bone structure, Lexi my sensitivity.  And Vicki...well, Vicki is the most like me.  I see myself in every part of her.  She has my hair, my eyes, my love for music, my sense of humor, my optimism, my voracious devouring of books.  Apparently we also share the same awkward run.

Yesterday, though, she told me about something that happened in school that made me glad she's not just a mini-me after all.

Apparently this generation's New Kids on the Block is a band called One Direction.  I only know who they are because I happen to be friends with a great number of middle-schoolers on Facebook.  In our house, we listen to what the girls sometimes call "old people music".  Some of it is, but not everything.  Our kids are exposed to a multitude of music genres, old and new, but contemporary pop is definitely not one of them.

I guess yesterday in Vicki's band class, a girl was wearing a One Direction t-shirt.  Although my daughter can identify all four Beatles at a glance and tell you which musical any given song is from, she had no idea who was on this girl's shirt.  Now, if it had been me in band class that day, I would have just kept my mouth shut, but Vicki innocently said, "Who's on your shirt?"  After feigning shock, the girl told her. At this point, if it had been me, I would have laughed like an idiot and said something super intelligent like, "Oh, right, duh!  I totally love them!  I...just...didn't recognize them...'cause your shirt was wrinkled...and...yeah."  Vicki, on the other hand, said, "Oh.  I don't know any of their songs." At which point every girl in the room went into heart failure and then expressed their deepest sympathies to Vicki, who I'm sure they now all assume must clearly be repressed.

I would have died of humiliation on the spot.

Vicki thought it was absolutely hilarious and will probably now ask the same question to every other One Direction shirt-wearer in the school.

She is not like me, because she doesn't care at all what other people think of her.  She is proud, strong, and confident in who she is, and she doesn't let anyone take that away from her.  I wish I could have been like that at her age.  Dang, I wish I was like that now.  I don't know where she got that confidence from, but I'm so thankful she has it.

I love this kid so much, and I'm glad she's her and not me.