Confidence

That panicky feeling took over. The rendezvous point for my daughter in middle school was her former elementary school. My younger daughter was out there waiting, but where was her sister? We circled back in the car to her middle school, to the park where she often waits for a while with other friends who walk from the middle school to the elementary school. Not there. Ugh!

What to do? Breathe. “Let’s head up toward home, there is only one street she can follow,” I say to my younger daughter who is sensing my panic. We start up the street, a couple blocks and no sign of her. Then, I see her, a block or so away, jacket strung across her backpack (it was a chilly day), that familiar gait of her long legs. Relief!

I pull over, she smiles. I breathe.

“Mom, I feel so good about myself, I knew where I was going. Are you mad?”

“No! I was worried about you! I am so glad you are safe.”

“Mom, I knew how to get home, I knew I could do it.”

Confidence to know where we are going, is it something learned or is it something with which we are born? Sometimes I think it is the small things that remind us of who and what is within us. Throughout most of her life, I had never heard my daughter sound that confident. She espouses a lot of “knowing” I think mostly to annoy her younger sister. But that place of speaking out with your whole voice, that voice of confidence, I was pleasantly surprised to hear it coming from her.

Knowing is confidence. Sometimes we don’t trust what we know. That still small voice in us says something, and we say “sshhhhh, I don’t want to hear that.” Or we hear the override from the world which tells us we don’t know what we think we know. Those tween years, that’s when the inside voice begins to lose its power. This was a good day for my daughters and I. We all got to see the strength of the inside voice that knows. Here’s to hoping my daughter can hang on to her own voice as the voices of friends and others begin to gain volume in her world.