In Sleeping Beauty the King and Queen invite all the fairies in the kingdom (except one of course with disastrous consequences..) to bestow gifts of beauty and character apon their new daughter the princess Aurora and whenever I read it it strikes me they massively missed the point.
None of that stuff matters.. they should have given her a thicker skin.
People with thicker skins seem to sail through life
and it’s the one thing I wish I could give to my daughter.
She comes home form school mortified that people have even noticed her.
She won’t have her photo taken and we’re not allowed to praise her or say she looks pretty because the attention – good or bad – is simply too much. At home we can work around this but school it’s out of my hands.
To a lesser degree I know how she feels. If I had had a thicker skin I would have sailed through the numerous school and location changes we endured as a family when I was little. Instead I have painful stark memories of standing in new classrooms surrounded by staring people I didn’t know, remember feeling raw and exposed.
In one of our moves, I was forced to leave a small village school with only 30 pupils in total (and a cherished best friend) to be taken 200 miles away and thrown in to an inner city school of 1000. I can distinctly remember my legs almost buckling under me as I walked in on my first day and the scrutinising expressions on the other children’s faces.
I still wince at the memory.
Compare this with what most of our children have gone through and it’s a drop in the ocean – each and every one of their numerous losses and changes having stripped another layer of security and sense of self from them making it just that bit harder to face all the challenges that growing up brings.
I wish I could give them all thicker skins.
