My oldest daughter, Braelynn, wants a horse. She built out a
budget to chart out the expected costs. She created a work plan to save for the
horse. She even produced a four-page proposal, highlighting the benefits of
horse ownership and explaining why a horse would be good for our family. The
amount of work and planning she put into this was beyond impressive.
Despite her effort and enthusiasm, I still said “no.” Now, I
won’t go into detail about how Brae has turned friends and family against me in
her quest to procure a horse, including but not limited to enlisting my own
mother to clip out horse ads for her from the classifieds (yes, my mom is one
of 17 people in Anchorage who still get the paper). But I will say she and her
siblings, determined to be reasonable and cooperative I’m sure, came up with a
compromise: a dog. While I did think they were going in the right direction at least
in the size of the desired pet size, I explained to them we didn’t need anything
else peeing and pooping everywhere as their new brother does a fine job of that
on his own. Again, I said “no.”
I figured the conversation would come up again, but at least
for the moment I thought I had put it to rest until I came home the other day
and found Braelynn with leashes on the two middle kids, walking/trotting them
around the house like ponies. I asked her what she was doing and she said she
was improvising: if I wasn’t going let her have a horse, she would “train” my
own children for dressage, which I think is some kinda horse dancing or something.
Given the fact she had a string tied around my son and
daughter’s necks, I took this to be somewhat of a thinly veiled threat (don’t worry,
she has since developed harnesses for them). But I also wondered to myself,
when do we as adults lose this undying sense of resilience and improvisation? At what point do we allow ourselves to be relegated to that proverbial box? Braelynn
would rather have a real horse for sure, but she was determined to still employ
the horse training drills she had learned on Youtube and keep up her horse whisperer
skills despite not actually having access to a horse. Even when things don’t go
their way, kids have a wonderful way of dipping into their creativity and
making the most of it. They might be disappointed, but they don’t let that
quench their desire and passions. Someone once said something about childlike
faith … I think there’s a lot we can learn from those kids.
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