I've Got This

I fell asleep writing (or trying to write) this post last night. And when my husband woke me up to move to my bed and set an alarm so today wouldn't fall apart, my waking up words were, "I've got this," meaning I knew what I was writing. And I would be able to write it. Except that, in order for today not to fall apart, I really needed to go to bed.
 
Before I fell asleep, my daughter, who is preparing for her bat mitzvah, held up her folder of things she's studying, as if to say, "Write about this." Which, I think, is what sparked my "I've got this." On a day to day basis, there are countless things my children need to do or know with which I can't help them at all. It appears that I have forgotten most of math and a great many of the historical facts I ever learned, and everything except the broad strokes of science. Yet, when it came to my daughter's bat mitzvah prep, for at least one night, I reached back into my own childhood, and felt completely qualified to help her. I guess that, while some things either disappear from our bag of tricks, or perhaps never made it into the bag in the first place, others are very much there, and remain, even if we aren't quite aware they are in there.
 
I'm not honestly sure if she considered my help helpful. After all, there were places where I diverged from the sound file the cantor made her. But sometimes, what we do is more about what we are doing than about what it actually does. Whether or not my help was helpful to her, it reminded me of the set of skills that I have acquired along the way, some of which have actually hung on. The same set of skills that caused me to pick up a French book a few days ago with the belief that I have enough French reading comprehension left to understand it. (The jury's still out on that one--I'm doing okay, but am just a page or two in).
 
The point is, each of us has a whole bunch of knowledge and experience to use and share--it's just a question of stepping forward with that knowledge, of being able to say, "I've got this." And more often than not, we'll find out that we really do.

Have it, that is.