Worms and the Shameless Fairy Princess

"I may have worms in my bottom," Meryl said as she looked deeply into the shocked eyes of her mild-mannered, originally South African Prep (Kindergarten) teacher. (The phrase was pronounced "Aye my hev wums een moy bo-tome," for my American friends who haven't heard Meryl's beautifully perfect Australian accent recently) In our parent-teacher-student conferences, we had already discussed strengths and were moving on to areas in her life that need attention or improvement. Meryl had been working on concentration and focus and needed to give her teacher serious hope that her habitual imaginative distraction was not her fault, so she articulated what she had gathered by eaves-dropping on a recent conversation between Greg and I. I recommended to Greg that we de-worm her as a last hope of tying her imagination to reality enough for her to get herself dressed, fed, and shod in the morning, with reasonably fresh breath, on a really fantastically focused morning.

The honesty and shamelessness with which Meryl shocked me are the norm here. My friends relate many facts of motherhood in conversation without any of the extra meaning, that is, modesty or shame, that might be assigned to the same topics in Texas. For instance, recently when my kids had lice, I felt compelled to let the other mums know, since Meryl is quite affectionate, and probably shared the city of critters on her head with many of her friends as she smothered them with love and cuddles. I was so torn about telling the mums, because in Texas, lice means something negative about your kid, your parenting, and your family's hygiene, and maybe even your family's social status. Whether I am in Texas or in a foreign country, I would rather risk loss than break a principle in which I believe. In the end, my honesty won out over my fear of losing friends, and I told my new friends about the civilization under siege at our house.

I needn't have worried. As soon as I told my shameful secret, the other mums kindly and reassuringly stepped closer and began to commiserate. They told me all about their battles with lice and when their kids had it, and how to beat it with or without chemicals. They were like generals in a war on a covert enemy, planning surprise attacks, and sharing strategies and intelligence. They also preemptively warned me about thread worms (pin worms), how they affect concentration and sleep, and how to get rid of them; because here in Oz, having lice means you have bugs in your hair, having threadworms means there are worms in your "bum"; and poetry and music seem to own the exclusive copyrights on extra meaning. Simplicity in communication is beautiful to live.

I love Aussie honesty and straightforwardness, and when it stares me down through the thick lashes and deep, pensive, black eyes of my middle, most sensitive girl, I realize how very far away I am from what had been home, and how glad and torn I feel about living here. I am happy for my girls to lose shame as a cultural norm, but not quite ready for their only tie to my homeland to be me. Slowly but surely, my children are ceasing to be Americans in their thinking and manner and are beginning to be Aussies. The process is startling and intriguing to watch, and my conflicted feelings of joy and loss about their transformation give me insight into what my father must have experienced as he watched Jonathan and I grow up, children of a different culture in a new homeland. We were Indian flavored Americans, and I believe that my children are becoming American flavored Aussies.

Dust is settling now as Meryl's sixth birthday has passed us for the first and last time. At six, Meryl, the Fairy Princess, is thoughtful and sensitive and deep. She asks hard questions about faith and God and life. She has introduced the concept of romance to her prep class and has three boys that want to marry her at school, although I suspect that she is stringing them along as a sort of living collection. (At home she says she "could only marry Colby," her best friend from Texas.) She over-uses superlatives (like her mother), and the words "I" and "never" (again-- familiar). She is beautiful, but learning that true beauty is developed on the inside as kindness. She is a born story-teller, and her imagination takes her to places that only exist in the magic of her mind, places that less sensitive souls would call lies. She is unique and ethereal and happy, full of dreams and usually covered in glitter and lip gloss.

I hope Greg and I will be able to train and encourage and protect her for whatever destiny God holds for her. I hope we will be able to live out and thus teach her Christian values like redemption, sacrifice, and truth, and American values like rugged independence, to add to the cultural beauty of collaboration and community trust that I find so refreshing here in Oz. I know that one day she will clothe herself and brush her own teeth, and when she does, she will know the truth about the tooth fairy and Father Christmas. When she outgrows old dreams, I hope her creativity produces new sorts of big dreams keep her company on her journey. We may not always live in Australia; she may end up an American, an Australian, an Ameristralian, or an Auserican. Whatever her eventual nationality, I hope that the gorgeous Australian fragrance of honesty and shamelessness, the one that made her confess the perceived source of her distraction to her teacher, will hang about thoughtful, sensitive, imaginative Meryl, wherever she goes.