Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

Emerging from the Shell—a Little

This Shy Girl Has a Moment of Bravery

I am not a mom who storms in and yells at people every time I feel like my kid has been wronged. Believe me, there are times when I have thought that maybe so-and-so’s mother and I need to have a little “chat,” but I always talk myself down. So far, any problems my daughter has had with other children were better handled by the kids themselves. My daughter, as much as I want to protect her, needs to learn to fight her own battles.

However, there are times when I wonder if that’s just an excuse I tell myself. The truth is, I can be painfully shy, and sometimes, the thought of taking an issue up with another parent twists my insides into a knot. Even if I knew the parent well, having a convo about how their child sometimes acts like a turd to my child would get my anxiety going. And OMG it would be so much worse if the parent were a stranger! I start telling myself that it’s better if my daughter handles it, that it’ll better prepare her for when she has issues with others as an adult.

Right about the time I start having those thoughts, I also start to feel like I’ve just chickened out, and I start to feel like a bad parent. Why can’t I do this for my child?

Years ago when my daughter was a toddler, a good friend who suffered from social anxiety in high school and I were talking about my shyness and how, unlike hers, it never went away. “Once you have to talk to people for your kid, you’ll get over it,” she assured me. I knew me well enough that I didn’t believe her.

But, just a few hours ago, a funny thing happened. After a summer practice, my daughter got into the car in tears because she thought her coach was upset with her. After asking questions to get the full story, I put the car in park, walked in, and had a few words with the coach myself. I didn’t yell. I didn’t get confrontational. I started off by asking the coach a few questions of my own to get even more clarity, and explained how my daughter was feeling and why. By the end, my daughter felt better, I felt better, and I hope the coach had a better understanding of my daughter’s situation, too.

It seems that when it was an issue that my daughter couldn’t resolve, I did step up. I don’t know why I couldn’t all of those other times, and it doesn’t matter. I didn’t write this to speculate on whether some angel all those other times had been telling me to hold back and let my daughter handle it. I wrote this post for one reason only: I wanted to share my win.