Good to be a quitter?

So I have this major beef with quitters. Really. I can’t stand the thought of it. My parents always let me quit whatever activity I was in with very little resistance and I grew up not being really great at much of anything. Now, I realize that that’s not that unusual, but I really wish I had stuck it out with something. My distaste for quitting before the end has made it hard for me to handle it when Hannah Jae doesn’t follow through on a project. I get that she is only 5, but she’s a rock brilliant 5 and I don’t want her to develop the habit of quitting when times get tough at such a young age.

But today I had a breakthrough. I saw the light, you might say. We are studying the Maya and one of our projects was to weave a poncho on a home made loom. Hannah Jane was crazy excited about this and she started out wit a bang. But after about 5 minutes her work began to get sloppy, and 20 minutes she had really mangled the whole thing. She said, “Ca I quit?” and I gave her the usual, “If that’s the kind of person you want to be, I suppose.” Horrible, right? But this time she didn’t fall prey to my usual guilt trip. She said, “That’s the kind of kid I am today. I quit. I’ll finish tomorrow.”

As my insides twisted up into knots of quitter rage I had a moment of clarity. “Aren’t you glad you’re not a Maya mother? They had to waeve all of the clothes for their whole family and it takes a long time, doesn’t it?” Her eyes lit up. “Yeah! That wouldn’tbe much fun. I like to be able to weave when I want to, but I also llike to be able to quit when I want to too. I guess they didn’t have much free time, huh?” THe conversation went on to cover why some societies just got by while others developed calendars and musical instruments and great art.

So for today, I am content to quit with Hannah Jane if it means we get a good discussion out of it all. She teaches me far more than I teach her, and it ain’t easy to teach this old dog a new trick like acceptance. And in the end, she did go back to it – a thing which I never did as a child. Perhaps weaving a Mayan poncho is a thing best done in little spurts of working and quitting.