Learning ignorance
My daughter is in seventh grade, next year she will be in eighth. She tells me this means she will be the King of Middle School. She will go to a leadership camp and learn what it means to cultivate leadership qualities in order to be a good king for the underlings in sixth and seventh grade.
And then she will graduate middle school and it’s back to the bottom of the pecking order—the lowly freshmen of high school, a sudden and abrupt drop in social status. One minute you’re the prince—the next, a pauper. Just when you think you’ve learned everything there is to know comes the swift reminder you are only just beginning.
Out here in the real world, things operate similarly. Motherhood certainly took me through the same cruel pattern. After floundering sleeplessly, aimlessly, in a constant panicked state through the first few newborn months, I was led to believe I had mastery over this parenting thing. I could now interpret my newborn’s cries, I could predict within a half-hour margin of error when she would go down for her nap, and I was becoming expertly rote and precise at changing a diaper.
