It sounds a bit cliché, considering she is Polynesian, but I have always said that Ana Lia is Moana – the ocean calls to her. She wanted to visit Hawaii long before she should have even known where Hawaii was. She would spend hours in the waters of the Pacific and the San Francisco Bay, where the water is usually in the low 60s. When I would tell them it was time to go home after seven hours in the frigid water, she would often respond with, “But we just got here!”

In an unsurprising development, she started asking to take surf lessons when she was about five years old, and we lived in San Francisco. Most of the places I found in the Bay Area had a lower age limit of seven years, and the lessons were early on Saturday mornings, almost an hour and a half away. As much as I loved my daughter, I was not willing to leave our house at 5am on Saturday just so she could get to a surf lesson.

However, only a few years later, we found ourselves in Los Angeles – less than 30 minutes from a beach and with an abundance of companies offering surf lessons. We decided to go with Santa Monica Surf School, and anticipation built as the day got closer for her first lesson. Her question every morning was: how many days?? When the big day finally came, it did not disappoint. 

The company provided a board and a wetsuit, and she felt like an official surfer. Her lesson started out on the beach as she learned how to go from lying on the board to standing on it without the challenge of the water. After some solid practice on the sand, she headed into the waves. She took to it almost immediately. She would stand up, and then fall off. She might fall off three more times, but then get one wave that she could stand through, and joy radiated from her face. She was home.

As we were preparing for her second lesson, she asked me, “Do you think my teacher will be a girl?” Even though I didn’t know, I told her we could pray for that if she wanted to. Excitingly, when we arrived for her lesson, an Argentinian woman named Flor was her instructor. Ana Lia was overjoyed. Flor told Ana Lia all the different places she had surfed around the world and offered to show Ana Lia how to do some tricks on her surfboard, since she already knew how to stand. 

I watched from shore as Ana Lia easily stood on the board over and over again. She would reach down and touch the waves as she sailed toward the sand, and Flor soon had her turning different directions while standing up. Again, it was so clear that this was the place she was meant to be.

As the lesson progressed, I noticed that when she would catch the smaller waves, she would be able to do all of her tricks and make it all the way to the beach. However, when she caught the bigger waves, they flipped her over every time. Flor would have her work on a small wave – success. Ana Lia would try to tackle a big wave – wipe out. I didn’t see her catch a single large wave during that lesson.

After her 90 minutes of pure joy, they headed back toward the sand with the board in tow; Ana Lia wishing they could stay in the water until after the sun went down. Flor began telling me what a great job Ana Lia had done, and then she said something that should not have surprised me, “All Ana Lia wanted to do was ride the big waves. I tried to get her to do the small ones so it was a bit easier, but she only repeated, ‘I want the big waves!’” While I shouldn’t have been surprised, it caught me off guard because every big wave she tried had swept her right off the board.

Ana Lia has always been the kind of person to work at something until she could do it well. One day, she decided that she was going to learn to make over-easy eggs; so the kids and I ate multiple eggs a day as she practiced until she figured it out. My best friend brought trompos from Mexico on her latest visit, and Ana Lia played with that toy for hours mastering exactly how to throw it. And here she was, on the waves, determined to take on the biggest ones until she figured out how to stand up. She actively searches for the challenges and then gives her whole heart to overcoming them.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned from my tenacious daughter: perseverance. I love watching her sit and stare at a stack of materials to figure out what she is going to make with them and then slowly assemble her project. I know that she is about to pour her heart into a goal when she sits down to her desk, inserts her headphones, and turns her music on. She enters a world of creation discovery all her own and then stays there for hours while her brain delves deep into discovery of next steps. I am enthralled by her processes.

In addition to perseverance, she has taught me courage. In the same way that she doesn’t allow fear of being wiped out to keep her from the big waves, she doesn’t let fear of failure or mistakes hold her back from trying and trying again. I am much more likely to avoid something if I’m going to be bad at it because I consistently allow perfect to be the enemy of good. Her example and encouragement helped me learn to crochet and draw – neither of which are my natural talents.

So often as parents, we expect to shape and mold our children into “who they are supposed to be,” but they already are those people. We only need to guide them on a journey to build their character on their way to discovering that for themselves.