Yesterday we blew off school and crashed the homeschool event at a local circus school. I’ve never been there before but I’ve always wanted to check it out. Seriously, it was so cool – for three hours, the kids got to bounce on trampolines, practice juggling, walk the tight rope, hang from hoops, swing on a trapeze bar and more!  I loved the instructors too – they were all very kind and supportive. They encouraged the kids to do as much as they felt comfortable with and never pressured them to try more.

I hoped that River would have a great time, and even though she’s generally not a morning person, she did quite well. There were one or two outbursts, but each time she managed to recover quickly and enjoy herself. I laughed with the other parents about her feistiness and silently prayed that she wouldn’t have a total meltdown at any point.

Check out this picture of my little girl hanging from a trapeze bar 9 or 10 feet in the air – isn’t that fantastic? I snuck into the room to grab this picture. It was awesome – with the instructor pulling the ropes, she literally soared up from the ground to the bar. She could fly!! I wish this picture had captured the look on her face. It was totally priceless – 90% joy and 10% terror. Though she decided not to swing upside-down from the bar or try standing on it,  you could see that just going up was a total thrill. She was having a great time.

Until the end.

The second last activity for the kids was to do summersaults in a straight line down the gym – no problem. Then the instructor spilt the kids into two lines – one line for the kids that could do cartwheels and one line for the ones that couldn’t. River made a beeline for the cartwheel line. Uh oh.

Now, my daughter thinks she can do cartwheels. If you ask her to do one, she’ll carefully puts her hands down on the ground and then awkwardly jump from one side to the other, and the whole attempt is completely adorable and hilarious and I love to watch her as she works so passionately to master her technique. Cute? Yes. A cartwheel? No.

The instructor knew she was in the wrong line and called her back. She refused. He tried again. She wouldn’t budge. So he tried again. She stamped her foot angrily. From the parent’s viewing section, I watched the whole scene play out, begging her under my breath to just go over and not make a scene. Then the instructor asked her to show him a cartwheel. She did a summersault. Again, he told her to show him a cartwheel. So she did her clumsy attempt at a cartwheel and he sent her back to the other line, defeated. Then he pulled out a giant mat for the kids to jump over. River refused to join in. She was far too upset.

Soon after, the instructor pulled out the juggling balls for the last activity of the day. I could see that River was still very unhappy. When I saw her just barely holding back tears, I went over to the group and told her it was time to go home. She broke down and cried as I carried her from the gym, and as we sat in the parents area, she cried even harder.

Finally I calmed her down enough to get her and Harbour dressed and into the car. Then I asked what had happened.

“Well, it’s a long story.” she told me as I pulled out of the parking spot. “My teacher talked funny. And I couldn’t understand him. I thought he wanted to know if we could do a summersault and I can do a summersault and I showed him but he really wanted me to do a cartwheel and I didn’t even understand what he was saying.”

I stopped the car for a sec. “You mean, you just didn’t understand what he was saying because of his accent? Sweetie, he’s from another country and that’s why he says things a bit differently. Sometimes it can be hard to understand when people talk with an accent. That’s okay, it happens.”

And then she totally broke down and wept. A horrible-gasping-hiccuping kind of cry that just broke my heart into little pieces.

Because she had really tried. Because she had thought she was doing what she was supposed to. She didn’t understand her teacher and she didn’t understand what she was doing wrong. And she had felt embarrassed and completely confused.

This wasn’t the cry of a little kid who had fallen down or dropped a treat on the ground – it was the very grown-up cry of someone dealing with emotions of humiliation and bewilderment. I had a hard time keeping back my own tears. I just got out of the car and went back and hugged her, and after a minute she tearfully pleaded, “Just drive mom. Just drive away from here.” and she just wept as we drove.

Ugh. As I drove on, I listened to her cries and I was totally at a loss. How could I make her understand that it was okay? That it had all been a misunderstanding? That it wasn’t her fault, or his? How could I make her understand how unbelievably proud I had been, watching her in the gym? That she was so brave to try new things with new people in a new place? How could I help her to forget the embarrassment and to remember that, for a brief moment, she could fly?

Making the decision to have a child, it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body. ~ Elizabeth Stone