Coffee with Mimi

Children were not put on this earth to be convenient.

If nature had wanted them quiet, orderly, and permanently reasonable, it would have skipped childhood altogether and issued them directly at forty-two with a mortgage and lower-back pain.

Instead, we get questions at inconvenient times, sofa cushions turned into architecture, fierce opinions about things nobody else knew were controversial, and urgent reports about beetles, clouds, sticks, buttons, and the exact unfairness of bedtime.

And underneath all that glorious chaos, something important is happening.

A mind is testing the world.
A personality is taking shape.
A future adult is learning what happens when curiosity meets resistance.

So perhaps the goal is not to make children easier to manage.

Perhaps it is to pay attention to what is trying to emerge — imagination, courage, persistence, humour, independence — and give it somewhere useful to go.

Preferably somewhere that does not involve permanent marker.

And if, in the process, the grown-ups manage to finish their coffee, civilization may yet survive.