September 5, 2007 | Filed under: Thinky

Hiking that weekend I saw a two families (obviously traveling together) with school-aged children stop to play in a pool of water at the base of the waterfall. Two boys and a girl, obviously the youngest of the three, but only by a year or so. The boys jumped in the pool headlong and came up shivering and sputtering and laughing about how cold the water was. One of them spent his time bobbing up and down, trying to figure out if it was more comfortable to be mostly submerged or half in/half out of the water. The other made a game of swimming to the waterfall, where the water was coldest, staying there for as long as he could stand it, then swimming back to the warmer side of the natural pool.

The little girl, however, despite being clad in her swimsuit, barely got wet. She hung out around the edges of the pool, squatting down to examine various rocks and poke at the sand with a stick. She watched the boys play, but didn’t join them.

I watched the three of them, the stark dichotomy between boys and girl: her quiet, self-contained play; theirs boisterous and exuberant. I willed her to jump in the pool, to exhibit the same sense of adventure and fearlessness as the boys, to be loud and splashy and undisturbed by the fact that to do so might be lack decorum or be disruptive. I wanted her to be more aggressive, more physical, more vocal. I wanted her to be comfortable with her body. I wanted these things for her, because a lifetime ago, that would have been me playing quietly on the edge of the pool, not willing to take the leap in. I wanted her to not have to wait until she is in college to feel empowered to speak and act assertively, to not feel constrained by what others feel is “appropriate” behavior for a girl.

It’s taken me days to realize that perhaps I needn’t have worried — that not joining the boys’ games did not signify a failing on her part. Rather, in eschewing the boys’ play and instead doing her own thing, she demonstrated that she’d already achieved that level of self-assuredness I sought for her — the ability to make and trust her own decisions — without really trying.