A letter from Dad, for my little girl.
My dear daughter,
I want to say something to you, and it is a little bit of an apology.
When you were small, I sat with you and tried to teach you your letters, your shapes, your colors, and your first numbers. I wanted so much for you to do well. But lately I have been thinking, and I wonder if I started some of it too early.
I say this because of what I am seeing now. There were things I tried to teach you before that were so hard for you. We would sit together and you would look at me, and I could see it was not making sense yet. But now those same things are easy for you. They come to you like they were always there. And it makes me ask myself a quiet question: was I putting the cart in front of the horse?
Do you remember how hard it was to read a small word like cat or bat? We tried and tried. It felt like a wall. But time passed, and now you read those words with no trouble at all. You read much harder words too, with just a little help from me. I did not do that. You did that. Time did that.
It was the same with numbers. Teaching you that 1 plus 1 made 2 felt so hard back then. And now? Now I show you one small example, and you are off. You add, you subtract, and you even do division after watching me do only a few. I sit there and I am just so proud of you I can hardly say it.
You are in kindergarten, but you are reading at a third grade level. On your math test you scored near the very top. I am not writing this to brag. I am writing it because it taught me something.
I also have to be honest about the hard parts. There were times I got frustrated. There were times I raised my voice. There may even have been times I was firm with you in a way that felt heavy to your little heart. I need you to know what was underneath all of it: love. Every bit of it came from love, and from wanting the best for you. I did not want you to sit in a classroom one day, struggling, while the other children found it easy. That fear pushed me.
But here is the truth I have to sit with. I only know you. I do not know the other children, or how hard it was for them, or what their mornings looked like. So when I compared, I was really only guessing. I wish I had understood that sooner.
Here is the lesson, and it is mine, not yours: be patient, and trust the right time. A child is not a machine that you fill up faster by pushing harder. Things open up when they are ready to open up. My job was not to rush you. My job was to be beside you and wait.
And you have already changed me. Watching you thrive makes me so proud — but the bigger gift is what you taught me. I do not push your brother and your sister the way I pushed you. Please do not hear that as me being soft on them and hard on you, or loving them more. It is not that at all. It is that you taught me to give a little wiggle room, to let a child grow into a thing in their own time. The two of them are learning easier because of what I learned from you first. You went ahead and made the path gentler for them. That is a quiet, beautiful thing you did without even knowing it.
So why am I only a little bit sorry, and not fully sorry? Because I will be honest with you, the way I always will be. A part of me felt I had to try. I worried that if I did nothing, you might struggle later in both reading and math, and I did not want that for you. I will never truly know if I was right. I can only guess. That is the hard part of being a parent — you make your best choice with love, and then you wait to see.
If I pushed too soon, or too hard, forgive me. I was only ever trying to help you fly.
Love,
— Dad
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