So Xena was in the middle of a swim play date with a friend's daughter when she emerged from the water to tell me very casually that one of her hair clips had fallen in the water. (I had put clips so her hair wouldn't fall in front of her swim goggles and obscure her view.)
"Actually I can see it here!" She looked down and exclaimed.
"Then get it." I said.
"I can't."
"Of course you can. It's just like when coach drops his watch in the pool and asks you to get it."
"But that's near the steps, where the water is not so deep."
"Well, why don't you try?" She had been doing better in her swimming lessons lately and I knew she could go underwater without panicking.
So she made a half-hearted attempt that lasted a total of 4.5 seconds before casually gliding off to a corner of the pool to play with her friend.
It infuriated me.
It was not about the hair clips. The clips were actually very old, from the time she was a toddler who liked Hello Kitty. They must have cost hardly a dollar. But what made me mad was the callous indifference she showed towards losing one of them. And how casual she was about it. Hair clip fell in the pool? Ah, no big deal. We'll just buy another one. Or not. Whatever.
It made me mad. Flippin' mad. I know it may sound ridiculous and over the top to some, but I have an acute (over)sensitivity towards Xena's generation taking things for granted, not caring enough about stuff and generally just being entitled brats who get everything they want. So I spend a LOT of time reading up on the topic and doing all I can do prevent her from becoming the kind of kid that I really cannot stand. I have long discussions about privilege, and failure, and the importance of trying and learning from mistakes, and not giving up. It's not easy for kids to grasp all this, and you need to reinforce it again and again through words and actions, in as many ways as you can find. In fact, one of the rare times I let her watch a video was to show her the sheer grit that this Kazakh boy showed. He simply refused to give up. (Watch it -- his attitude could seriously teach us adults a thing or two.)
Anyway, back to the hair clip story. Instantaneously turning into a cruel dragon, I broke up the party in the corner of the pool. I told Xena calmly but firmly that she had lost her clip and it was her responsibility to get it back, or at least try to get it back. Both girls understood the gravity of the situation, and so did my friend (who, incidentally, is not at all the kind who would judge me for being such a hardass on Xena, so this made my task easier).
"It's our mission to find the clip!" Xena declared.
Oh wow.
"Yes, it's your mission." I agreed.
Both of them got to work. They struggled for a long time to spot it, with no results. At some point, they thought they had spotted it, but it turned out to be a leaf. It did not help that the clip was blue and so was the floor of the pool. Finally, they saw it! Xena had been right about the coach's watch though. Much as she tried, she wasn't able to dive deep enough to grab the clip with her hands.
She treaded water, staring at the clip. I could almost see the gears in her head turning.
The one thing I repeat to her (perhaps ad nauseum) is that whenever she confronts a problem, she needs to use: (A) her brain to get ideas and (B) resources to solve it. Many times, I have seen her take the brain + resources approach and solve problems. Her brain was telling her that she needed a resource, some kind of a tool to fish the clip out. All of us scanned the area around the pool. There was nothing, and no adults in the pool she could approach for help. We mommies were not dressed to jump into the pool to be the resources. I wished for a magnet and a pole and some string to fashion a fishing magnet or something, but modern swimming pools are generally not equipped with such items.
Next, she tried to pick it up using her toes. The pool was deep so she still had to go fully underwater to attempt this. For about 10 minutes. I kept encouraging her to try again and again. But the clip lay flat on the floor and refused to get wedged between her toes. I could also see she was exhausted from the multiple times she had gone underwater to retrieve it. By now, I had also realised that this little incident had gone past what I had intended it to be -- a simple attempt to at least look for a lost item before giving up. It had grown and taken a life of its own; it had become an event, an adventure of enormous proportions. I doubted myself several times -- maybe I had gone too far about such a trivial matter. But then I just decided to go with the flow. There was no backing out now.
I asked her to take a break to give her lungs some rest. She got out of the water and took a break before going back in. Again, multiple failed attempts. She then decided that swishing the water above the clip with her legs made it inch towards the edge of the pool. So she decided to do that. It took a loooong time before the clip reached the edge. However, the depth of the water was the same at the edge and much as she tried, she still couldn't retrieve it with her toes. She was successful in grabbing it once, but it slipped and fell back down the next second.
By now, I was ready to pack up. We would never retrieve the clip and it would just have to be a learning point for Xena. That sometimes hard work and determination do not result in success, that sometimes our magical brain+resources formula doesn't give results, and that is okay. We just need to learn from our failures and move on. (In fact, sometimes I sneakily manufacture failures and disappointments for her so she will learn to take them in her stride and not crumble at the first failure she faces in adulthood.)
"It's okay, Xena. You tried hard. Well done. Let's stop the search now. You can continue your play date. Clip shaayad nahin aayega." I told her.
"AAYEGA, Mama." She said, emphatically, and dived back in.
"I don't know if I should be impressed by her speaking to me in Hindi (she rarely does) or by her determination not to give up." I joked to my friend.
"Right now I'm impressed by everything she's doing." My friend declared, quite seriously. (She's extremely fond of Xena. She's also the one who told me I have to document the whole thing on the blog.)
After another 10 minutes of trying and many, many failed attempts, Xena emerged triumphant. "FOUND IT!" She had managed to pick the clip up with her toes and quickly transfer it underwater to her hand. She raised it up in the air, like a prized trophy. It was a prized trophy. I told her I was super proud of her patience and her determination.
I did feel slightly bad that because of my insistence, she'd had to use up more than half of her precious play date time on this mission. So on the way back, we had a short debrief and I told her again how proud of her I was. We discussed the Kazakh boy again.
Here are the clips, reunited at last. I cannot get myself to put them back in her accessories drawer. I will store them safely in a special place forever. They are all mine now, along with today's memories -- of a little girl who refused to give up, even after Mama did.
