Over the past few weeks, when I find myself awake late at night – listening to my husband’s deep, peaceful breaths – a particular story has been popping into my head.

Last summer, my daughter (who is normally pretty articulate for a 3-year-old) started speaking gibberish. Puzzled, I tried to figure out what she was saying and why she wasn’t “using her words.” After several frustrating conversations with her about speaking correctly, and after reading countless parenting blogs on the topic, I eventually chalked her nonsensical wordplay up to just being a kid – a phase she would soon abandon.  

Around this same time, she experienced a bout of separation anxiety at the school drop-off. My daughter is not a clingy child. She has never been fussy about meeting strangers, and she’s typically the first to introduce herself to both kids and adults. And yet, every morning, she clung to my extremities – scratching, screaming, sobbing, and snotting. We had a few mornings where I was reduced to tears, explaining how I had to get to work. As I’m sure you know, silly explanations like that rarely make an emotionally distraught daughter feel better. So, filled with the trifecta of parenting emotions – guilt, anxiety, and fear – I arrived at work, late and overwhelmed, every day for a month.

Until one day. On this day, we arrived late to school to find the class sitting crisscross (applesauce) on the Alphabet Rug. Fearing she would disrupt the others if we went through our normal distressful routine, I let her little hand lead me to the rug where we sat down with the rest of the kids. Her teacher was flashing up cards of well-known objects and emotions. He said the corresponding words in English, and then repeated the word in Japanese, which was then echoed by the 3-year-olds all around me. 

That “gibberish” she was speaking? Turns out it was Japanese. She’d been practicing it at home. 

And so it hit me. If I hadn’t let her guide me to the rug, I’d never have known what had been going on. The entire time I thought we’d been struggling with communication and with “gibberish,” she was really trying to perfect the art of speaking a language I just didn’t comprehend. So as I sat on the rug with her, I almost burst into tears because I finally got the message. My daughter only wanted me to pause for a moment and learn something with her, something she was excited about. She wanted me to see what she was seeing. She wanted to be the one setting the pace for once. So here in 2017 that is exactly what I hope to make happen. We will learn together. Explore together. Question together. Play together. And together we will dream. 

I will take the time to follow her lead. And I will do my best to learn her language.