Wisdom of the Ages
People agonize a lot about how hard it is to choose the right partner, but I recently discover that we instinctively choose the right one for us. A little girl taught me this lesson.
Nadine is a 5-year old girl born to Filipino parents in Geneva, Switzerland which is a melting pot of expats from around the world. She is fair skinned, has dark brown eyes and hair with a light built. She is rather small for her age, you would think her anorexic, but she drinks at least three glasses of milk everyday and has a healthy appetite, so she doesnt really qualify. She has her mom’s (my sister) doe eyes, button nose and squarish jawline. Being the first child and the only granddaughter has made her the center of attention and very precocious. On her father’s side, she is one of the many grandchildren and not the only girl, but she possesses a charm that particularly attracts attention.
Even in preschool, she has her teachers and classmates fawning over the smallest thing she does. Everyone notices the tiniest thing about her–a new skirt, a new haircut, a new earring. She basks in all this attention.
I fetch her after class. It takes around five minutes for her teachers and classmates to say goodbyes to each other. Her small class is a mixture of kids from all races, americans, europeans and asians. I ask her who her friends are in class and she points to two kids more or less her own size. The first friend is Ciara, 3 years old girl, british, brunette, who copies Nadine’s clothes, haircut and stuffs. Her mom, a children’s books writer, says that Ciara talks everytime about Nadine at home.
The second friend is Samia, a 3 year old boy, of Honduran-European mixed parentage. She shyly whispers to me that Samia is her boyfriend in school. Of course, I was her boyfriend at home, her cousin is her boyfriend in the Philippines, and she has another boyfriend in the supermarket. I am surprised that she would have crushes at such an early age, she must have gotten the notion from her teenage cousins.
I grab her class picture and I look at the other boys in class, some of whom are better looking than Samia. I ask her if she likes the other boys, too. She says that she doesnt like some boys because they werent nice. Samia, on the other hand, plays with her often and defends her. One time, Nadine came in class with her new short hair. Cushal said she looked like a boy, but Samia, quick on the uptake, replied that he thought her hair looks nice.
And so I realize that when we were young we chose wisely. We chose those who were nice to us, made us better persons, those with whom we got along. We didnt choose the goodlooking, sexy persons. We didnt choose based on physical appearances. It didnt matter who had the best clothes, who had the newest shoes, or the stylish haircut. I think its media and our elders that pollute our minds with all those commercials and silly teenybopper, misguided shows on young love where they pair up the cutest guys and gals. Suddenly, it becomes a matter of who looks great together, who are as tall as or as fair as the other.
Didnt we all have a favorite boyband member because he was the cutest? The producers and managers all played up a certain celebrity because of a physical trait. It is sad to think that this is so when we should be learning from our elders and we should be teaching our kids the right things.
We were much, much wiser when we were kids.
