I Have a Friend Who........

The other night two things happened. Harper got a secret diary with a lock and wrote some personal things inside and she overheard Chris and I talking about our exes, not uncommon - old memories are ever present, but confusing as all hell to Harper, who has difficulty accepting that her parents are people, much less that they had lives before they were parents.

And then without missing a beat, Harper asks me if I had a boyfriend when I was her age. It was a seamless question, flowing naturally from conversation and understandable given our talk about previous loves. I said "Sure, one Nicky Kritikos, in second grade. Wanna see him on Facebook?"

And just like that, she got me talking about me and my second grade boyfriend. We looked at pictures; she seemed interested, intrigued, joining me jubilantly as we traipsed down memory lane, answering her innocent questions with funny reflections.

And then she asked, "Did you have a crush on him before he was your boyfriend?"

"I suppose so. I really can't remember." Then I blathered on about some other aspect of my seven-year-old romance, confident that she wouldn't have asked unless she was really interested.

And then she asked, "Did you talk to your mom about him?" Bat sense tingling, I finally emerged from my nostalgic revelry and looked at my daughter's face. Her head was slightly tilted, her mouth turned up at the corners and her eyes a little off in some way - not quite disingenuous, but not quite straight up. A quick breath in and I realized that I had just been taken in by my six-year-old. A crush. We've been talking about her the whole time. And she had me talking about myself for fully five minutes to see...... to see, I don't know what. Maybe, if she could trust me with it. To see if I had some meaningful experience that might help her with her current romantic dilemma.

I wasn't surprised at all by the news of a crush; it's that she had the presence of mind to approach the topic sideways - an almost, "I have a friend with a problem" approach. The girl is sophisticated and I obviously need to be more on my toes. I couldn't drag the name of her crush out of her and I stopped trying after a few names and a few laughs. I told her I'd let it go, that I would never look in her diary and she could always talk to me if she changed her mind. She's a tricky one, and one to watch, but I like the way she works.