Dancer called me today; a friend of hers from the neighborhood invited her to go to a tap class. I said sure, if she could find a pair of tap shoes. (Oddly enough for a non-tapping family, we have a lot of tap shoes hanging around!) I'd meet her to pay for the class. Dancer's always kind of wanted to learn to tap. This was local, inexpensive, and she had companionship. Worth a try.

Little Guy and I arrived just as the class was starting. The guy teaching the class is a pro, and those kids were moving fast! Someone told me the other girls had taken the class all last year. I couldn't mentally map half the sequences at half the speed (and let's just forget about trying to make my body do them!) It didn't seem to phase Dancer a bit. She just tapped away -- no problem. Where did all that coordination come from? Don't look over here.

Sometimes the other-ness of my children is mindbending. How can this graceful child possibly have sprung from the same gene pool as me? Of course she did, and of course my kids are similar to me and to each other in many ways. Figuring out the she's-like-me or she's-not-like-me thing is complex. It's kind of like looking at a coin: one side has a likeness, and one side doesn't. Same coin, different perspective.You have to have the whole coin for it to have value.

Which means, I guess, that we have to value the parts of our kids that leave us mystified as much as the parts with which we resonate.