I’m a woman and a writer…that means words are my forte and my foreplay. Talking is bonding. Nothing reels me in like communication.

And while I know, due to many, many magazine subscriptions, that ‘communication is key’ in adult relationships, for some reason I never made the connection that communication is also the key to being close to my children.

My daughter, Sophie, taught me this. She is a very wise and silly five year old.

I know, I know. Gag. Treacle. “I learn from my children”…I hate those sort of cliches. (And this is not even the first time I’ve indulged in syrupy I-believe-the-children-are-our-future crap – I did the same thing in an earlier post about my daughter, Lola.) While most of the learning is a top-down, adult-to-child sort of affair in my house, every once in a while, my girls say or do something simple and profound that stops me in my smug tracks.

At daycare, my eldest daughter has been struggling to find a way to get along with another girl. Sophie is smart, sensitive, fragile and emotional. If you blink at her the wrong way, she cries great, gulping, heart-wrenching, body-wracking sobs of earnest pain.

Naturally, my delicate, screaming flower is attracted to people with big, dominant personalities. (Alas, I am her and she is me.) At daycare, she and another young girl have been engaged in some sort of five-year-old pissing match. Sophie has been losing. And we have both been distraught about it.

I called the daycare, I went in and spoke to the staff, and I was convinced that this other child was brutalizing my baby. The daycare leader agreed that the other child was a bit domineering, but that Sophie’s reactions were out of proportion to the slights she was receiving.

This I could totally believe. See paragraph #5, re: blinking.

So I sat down with Sophie and we talked. We talked and we talked and we talked. She told me every detail of every grevious injury, real and/or imagined. She told me every detail of every day of her life since she was born approximately three hundred years ago.

Now, every night, after I tuck her sister into bed, I get under the covers with Sophie, and we talk. We talk about her day, what happened at daycare and in the world, who said what to whom, who scratched whom, who thought about scratching, who walked in front of the swing and got a kick in the head for her troubles, what bugs got squished, what rocks are in her pocket and should not go through the washing machine, what Barack Obama should do next, and that yes, Michelle Obama’s arms are fabulous and she has the right to bare them. My god, people.

At the end of our first night of one-on-one Mama/daughter talking – and this first night lasted six weeks because the child had things to say - Sophie wrapped her arms around me, pressed her cheek against mine, and said to me “Mama, I love it when we talk about everything.”

Me too, baby. Me too.

This is the lesson I learned from a wise and silly five year old: If you want to like your kids, and be close to them, talk to them. And by talk, I mean listen.

Happy Mama Monday.