Having a tween niece stay over with you can be a thought-provoking experience. First of all, the very realisation that your nephews and nieces are no longer small children is enough to trigger contemplative spells wondering what you’ve been doing in the time the world changed so much. Secondly, adapting to this new type of creature encapsulated by the term ‘tween’ causes self-consciousness of the kind you last felt on the college campus. You keep checking your words, wondering if they have the same meaning in the tween’s vocab or if there’s some new connotation no one told you about. You struggle with the realisation that the plans you made for them with their last-known interests in mind are now hopelessly boring. You try to keep up with them while still being the watchful guardian, it’s a fine balance between being authoritative and avoiding being ‘uncool’.
But as you rush through your day’s routine, trying to be as robotically precise as possible, you notice the pleasant languor your tween ward tends to slip into – this languorous dreamy state has taken the place of the playful mood that demanded your energetic participation in silly games at the most inconvenient times. You are selfishly glad for the change, of course, and yet you miss the old times. The tween seems to live in an alternate reality – her priorities are as ephemeral as they are urgent, her joys lie in the beauty of the world around us – yet she has begun to wonder what she is doing with her life. If you’re lucky, she will say this aloud, allowing you a chance to renew your connection with this new person that has taken the place of the little bubbly child who used to look up at you with innocent admiration. She’s now a bunch of contradictions, but aren’t we all? Except we have learned to hide our vagueness beneath a veneer of sophisticated grownup-ness. She’ll get there too, eventually, but for now a fresh journey of discovery, creativity, enchanting crossroads, and philosophical questions is hers to experience, and for us to watch in wonder.
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