I don't get it

The other twin, my dreaming daughter, has always been a little of a struggle for me. From the day she was born, I knew I would be tested with her. When my vet twin, at 6 months, would sit still and listen to my directions, the dreamer twin would stick out her tongue, tuck her hands under her armpits and cry. Whatever I would tell her, she would do the complete opposite.

I call her the dreamer twin because she wants to grow up, go to Eygpt and dig up bones. I bought her a book about Eygpt when she was eight and since then, the stories of the Pharoahs and pyramids enchanted her and accelerated her imagination to envision a world of her and archeology. Funny thing is, her math and science marks...well for better terminology, SUCK.

I have a friend whose wife went into the anthropology field. He told me she didn't finish her degree. It was a highly competitive field and very gruelling. Day in and day out of painstaking measurements and research while fighting in what seemed to be predominately a man's world. I listened attentively and pondered his comments and then thought about my daughter. She is a dreamer and I wondered, do I break her well-manufactured bubble now or let her learn for herself?

She would often come to me with her homework, be it math, science, history, English (ok, pretty much the entire curriculum) and say, "Mamma, I don't get it." I would scold her and say, "Did you even try?" The minute the going got tough, she would give up and seek help. "You give up too easy. Read the examples and go from there," I would say, but she came back, like a boomerang. She would not relent. "I still don't get it," as she curled up beside me. While I held her imaginary hand, we would conquer and complete the question together, without seeing the light in her eyes.

This phrase infuriated me from the time she could speak her first words. I swear, when she was born, she must have heard me say, "I don't get it" when the doctor said I delivered twin girls (whereas the ultrasound showed a girl and a boy). Since then, she had adopted this phrase--and for me, it was one royal COP-OUT.

I sat her down last night and had a heart to heart with her. I chose my words carefully. Growing up with a father who told me that I would not amount to anything unless I studied around the clock was not the motivating, "I have a dream" speech I wished to impart on my daughter. Instead, I sat down with her and smiled. She stared at me, speechless, as I sat smiling at her. "What do you want to be when you grow up," I asked. She thought it was a trick question. "I don't get it," she replied and I was about to bang my head against the wall. But I kept my composure.

"You know I want to become an archeologist." Instead of telling her everything my friend told me about the path to archeology and the years spent trying to attain this goal, I turned to her and said, "Yes. You can be anything you see yourself being. But you have to WANT it. Really bad." She nodded her head profusely. "Then you have to stop saying, I don't get it. You have to think out of the box and stare at what confuses you until you see something you understand."

I said this to her as kindly as possible despite our history of angry door slamming and room departures, hair-pulling attempts towards clarity and ridiculous arguments stemming from allegations that her teachers were wrong and she was always right. Again, she nodded and I could see she was internally debating whether I was naturally calm or drugged out of my mind. "Do you really think I can do it? Do you believe in me?" I almost fell out of my chair. How could she think this way? Why would she think otherwise? And then I realized... I had never said it, never said it out loud--that I believed in her abilities and potential.

I looked her square in the eyes and responded with a firm YES. She got up and I thought it was to come over for a hug but instead, she walked past me, with determination in her eyes. That evening, she worked for two hours straight and not once asked me for any help--although I lingered in the hallway, just outside her door.

I call her my dreamer twin in contrast to my vet twin which connotes the idea that one has her future decided while the other is still finding her way. I realized to dream is better than not dreaming at all.

And today, as she approached me with wide, shining eyes, and handed over her math test that she studied for the night before, with a huge 92% marking on the first page, I knew I needed to keep her bubble intact.


"The finest gift you can give anyone is encouragement. Yet, almost no one gets the encouragement they need to grow to their full potential. If everyone received the encouragement they need to grow, the genius in most everyone would blossom and the world would produce abundance beyond the wildest dreams. We would have more than one Einstein, Edison, Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, Dr. Salk and other great minds in a century." Sidney Madwed