Allison was given the assignment of writing a paper on Gabby Douglas for school. In class they switched papers and peer edited it for each other. They were given a specific form with items to check and give feed back on the paper they edited. Allison was sick this week and wasn’t able to get her paper edited, so her teacher suggested she have a parent edit it and fill out the review form. Ryan was out of town so she asked if I would edit it for her. In hind sight I should have had Matthew do it but I wasn’t smart enough to come up with that at the time. Allison has a lot of amazing strengths and talents. She is a very smart girl. She has been working really hard on her moodiness and responding to emotions on the same level as the person she is talking with (instead of always responding with a 10).
In general we have been getting along a lot better. So much better that I completely forgot that one of Allison’s many strengths is not taking constructive criticism well. Especially from her mother.
She left me in my room with her computer and the review sheet and I started editing. I followed the review sheet and highlighted, noted and marked whatever it told me to do. After about 5 minutes had passed Allison returned to get her paper. I told her I wasn’t done yet. She left and came back 5 minutes later. I still wasn’t done. She looked over my shoulder and asked what could be taking so long. When she saw that I had actually made edits to her paper (that she apparently thought was unimprovable) she show cased another one of her talents. She is pretty incredible at quick thinking and has a quick wit to match. Unfortunately, she sometimes uses this ability to ring someone up and down on a level that makes you feel like it was scripted for a movie if she feels wronged. Looking back now it was comical, at the time not so much. She was truly flabbergasted that I could have found anything wrong with her paper beyond an accidental grammar error. Allison also has an incredible way of pushing my buttons and one of my weaknesses is that I let her. We both started arguing and ended with me telling her to edit her own paper, her taking her computer and storming out and yelling, “All you had to do was put your name on the editing sheet-THAT IS IT- three seconds to do something and you screwed it all up!”
A few hours later she came and found me and with the enormous amount of grit and determination Allison has coursing through every cell in her body she swallowed her pride and told me, “I changed some of the things back and ignored most of your suggestions. BUT you actually did have some good corrections that I kept. Thank you for editing my paper. Oh, and sorry for yelling at you.”
I picked my jaw up off the floor and gave her a hug. Not to long ago this would have gone a totally different way and been dragged out for days. While I could have tweaked her apology a little, the fact that she apologized on her own without any prompting is a big step. Huge steps have been made.