School of Dad, Part 4: The First Embarrassment

Ellie told me not to sing in front of her friends.

She is five. She said it with the measured gravity of someone who has thought about this and decided it needed saying — not unkindly, the way she is not unkind, but with the clear assessment of a person who has identified a risk and is managing it.

I had been singing while carrying her bag to the after-school club. I was not singing dramatically. I was singing quietly, the way I sometimes sing quietly while doing ordinary tasks. She has heard me do this for her entire life and never found it notable.

There were other children present.

"Dad," she said. "Please don't sing."

I stopped singing.

The distance that is starting to form

This is, I understand, the beginning of a developmental phase that will accelerate significantly over the next decade. The phase in which the parent, who has been a constant and uncomplicated presence, begins to acquire embarrassment properties. In which what the parent does and who the parent is becomes visible and assessable in a social context that the child cares about.

I was prepared for this intellectually. I have known it was coming. The distance between the five-year-old who will sing with you in the car and the eleven-year-old who will not acknowledge you at the school gate is a documented developmental trajectory that I have been aware of since before she was born.

I was still, when she asked me not to sing, surprised by the small specific feeling of it.

What I want to say about the feeling

Not grief. Not hurt — she was not being unkind and I would not want her to have felt she had to be kinder in a situation that required managing a social dynamic she is newly and legitimately navigating.

It was something more like recognition. The recognition of the shape of things — the hinge I wrote about at the start of school, the movement between stages that is visible only at the transition. She has been mine, entirely, without qualification. She is beginning the very slow process of becoming more fully her own. The not-singing is a data point in that process.

I am an older father. I have written about the heightened awareness of time, the tendency to notice what is temporary because I have enough context to know that it is. The five-year-old who is embarrassed by the singing is temporary in a different way from the five-year-old who sang with me — this phase will end too, and become whatever comes after, and I will be standing at a different gate watching a different version of her manage a different social context.

What happened afterwards

Her friends went to their club. She turned back to me with the expression of someone who has completed a task and is back to the previous context.

"Dad," she said. "Can we get a snack?"

We got a snack. I did not sing on the way.

Later, at home, she sang something herself — a song from nursery that she has been singing for two years, in the kitchen, while drawing. Not for me. Just singing.

I did not mention the earlier conversation. She did not mention it either.

The singing, apparently, was about context. It was not about the singing.

This seems important. I am still thinking about it.