When They Grow Up by Trish Smith

Every now and then one of my kids will say something and it will suddenly hit me – oh my goodness, she’s going to be a lawyer/lobbyist/diplomat/paediatric nurse/climate change specialist/Nobel prize winning economist (OK, I was kidding about the last one) – and I’ll picture her, twenty-odd years from now, graduating from with her PhD in something that means she is really, really smart and perhaps not at all related to me after all. 

Caitlin, at the age of four, confronted two 12 year old boys on the beach who had started stomping on the sandcastle she’d lovingly laboured over all morning.  She marched right up to them and told them that they should apologise for what they did, for destroying something that was precious to her (precious to us, actually – I still get twinges in my lower back from a morning spent digging wet sand with a tiny spade), and that they ought to be very ashamed of themselves.  She went into this battle by herself (she ran right up to them, I was in the middle of eating my sandwich and had to sprint up out of my deck chair to catch up with her) and she stood up to those boys, all four foot nothing of her, and you should have seen those boys hanging their heads in shame.  She was half their size, but in that moment she towered above them.  It was my proudest moment, and yet one more reason to question her genealogy. 

Maddie, almost nine, is immersed in Tim Flannery’s book “We Are The Weather Makers.”   I think it was the Christmas holiday screening of ‘Happy Feet’ that finally did it – she’d been concerned that something bad was happening to the planet, and this movie spelt it out for her in nice, easily-digestible chunks.  Caitlin pressed her for further clarification about the meaning of ‘global warming’ and Maddie said it had something to do with too many cars and not enough icebergs for the polar bears (“How come polar bears need cars?”)  I bought her the book, hoping that it would give her some clear answers, but I think it actually might be freaking her out a little bit – she’s got more questions that she had before, and she’s developing worry-lines on her forehead.  Hmmm, those she gets from me.

So I have on my hands a couple of budding young activists.  Caitlin’s going to be some kind of Human Rights Advocate while Maddie will set up camp in a laboratory somewhere, perhaps in Antarctica, and try to figure out how to stop the icebergs from melting so she can rock up to Parliament House and demand to speak to the Environment Minister. 

Next week I’ll tell you about Caitlin and the lunch-money racket she’s running amongst the new kindergarten kids.

Trish Smith (2007)

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