>Nerd’s the Word

As the watery strains of early morning sun make their way through a crack in the curtains, I quietly open my 6-year-old daughter’s closet door and hunt down her cutest dress for school. Once I find it, I lay it out on her bed along with tights and a pair of Mary Janes. The movement stirs her from sleep — she opens her eyes and sits bolt upright in bed.

“G should be a vowel, not a consonant,” she announces clearly.

“Why do you say that?” I ask her.

“Because it makes the ‘guh’ sound and the ‘juh’ sound,” she says.

“Interesting,” I said. “Ready to go downstairs and have some breakfast?” She nods and hops out of bed.

“I just don’t understand why ‘y’ is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant, Mommy,” she said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as we walk downstairs hand in hand. I can’t help but smile. Some 6-year-old girls dream of horses, others of fairies. My daughter dreams about vowels and consonants. “Maybe we’ll get one after all,” I murmur to myself.

“Get what?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say quickly. “I’m just glad you like to use your brain.”

We all know dads who sign their sons up for Pee Wee Football at the tender age of 5, fervently hoping Junior will one day become the high school quarterback, and moms who spend hundreds of dollars on their 3-year-old daughter’s hair and clothing, dreaming of the day when she’ll blossom into a vivacious beauty with a cell phone that never stops ringing.

Around here, though, we’re praying for a nerd.

Our wish might sound odd, but it comes on the heels of 10 years and counting spent raising my teenage stepdaughters. I’ll admit I was beside myself with glee when our eldest emerged as a stunner in junior high. Almost immediately, she was voted captain of the cheerleading squad and received the all-around top student award from her teachers. Her younger sister followed close on her heels, a waifish beauty with clear blue eyes, translucent skin and the kind of cheekbones Hollywood starlets would kill for. At the time, Hubs and I were probably a little smug about the fact that both our girls seemed to have escaped the baby fat, pimples and all-around awkwardness that usher in the teen years for most of us.

But our smiles soon disappeared when the phone started ringing. And the boys started coming over. And the endless requests poured in to attend parties and dances and weekends away with friends. And the dramas began — so many dramas — over failed friendships and jealous boyfriends and other indecipherable teen intrigue. With two adolescent girls and two small children under one roof, it’s safe to say my husband and I haven’t slept through the night in at least five years.

Is it any wonder, then, that we’ve found ourselves talking in admiring tones about shy Clara, our friends’ 16-year-old daughter, who plays cello in her school orchestra, maintains a 4.0 GPA and is available to baby-sit any weekend night we need her? Or gentle 17-year-old Margaret, who spends all her free time volunteering at the nursing home and just won a full scholarship to Duke?

“I bet Margaret’s never missed curfew,” I told Hubs wistfully, after we ran into Margaret and her family at church. “She probably does things with her parents on the weekends, like order pizza in and have family movie night.”

Hubs heaved a deep sigh. “Family movie night,” he repeated sadly. “Remember those?”

“We’ll have them again when the little ones are older,” I said. “And you know, there’s a definite chance that Punky will be a nerd.”

We smiled hopefully at each other and I was reminded of my own teenage years, which probably created as many sleepless nights for my parents as the ones caused by both my girls combined. An image popped unbidden into my head, of my mother standing robed and wild-haired in the kitchen on one of many nights when I’d gotten caught breaking the rules yet again. She raised one finger and pointed at me darkly, saying in a low, otherworldly voice, “I have one thing to say to you and one thing only. I hope you have a daughter some day JUST LIKE YOU.”

Her words have echoed in my mind more than a few times over the years as I’ve felt my blood boil over missed curfews and questionable Facebook status updates. But I’m holding out hope now that my stepdaughters are nearly grown that I’ve served my time in the trenches.

Give us a nerd, God, I say in my mind as my 6-year-old and I come to the bottom of the stairs. Keep our youngest daughter’s nose in books and out of Cosmo Girl. Don’t make her too pretty, or bubbly, or… I shudder… popular. Haven’t her father and I been through enough?

“I picked out an extra-special outfit for you to wear to school today, Punky,” I tell her. “It’s make-up Picture Day, remember?”

“Yay!” she chirps. “Finally! I get to wear makeup!”

Oh hell.