My daughter’s name is “Luna”.
Yes, like the moon. I wanted her to be named “Lune” in the first place, but my mum thought it’d be a bit too easy to make fun of her growing up in France. So we settled for ‘Luna’.
Interestingly, growing up, she imagined that story that she was the ‘Princess of the moon’…
Let’s face it, no matter all the feminist talk around, girls dream they are princesses at some point or an other. Can’t fight nature.
Boys love superheroes, girls love princesses. Believe it or not, that’s my simple observation from being a boy, raising a girl and seeing the ones of my family.
Her twist on the story is that she’d be the one of the moon. A story amongst others.
But then she befriended the moon in her mind, created illusions of playing hide and seek with her. Thanks to this friendship, she develop a great interest for space exploration, science, biology, physics, understanding things…
The story became her.
She developed a personal connection with the moon. Maybe it’s a proxy for a perfect realm, a perfect person, an ideal. Probably like it was for many generations before. A symbol of achievement:
“Reaching for the moon”.
Only problem is… Once we reached it, we lost the spirit…
“Ok, it’s done, now what?”
We should always aim for something further, the moon, the planets, then the stars and so on… That’s what we do as human beings.
So tonight I told my daughter that if she wanted to be the “Princess of the moon” for real then she’d simply need to study science hard, to be able to build a spaceship to land on the moon and create a sustainable home there…
…Then plant a flag and declare independence…
Then proclaiming the “Wonderful kingdom of the Moon” and becoming for real the “Princess of the moon”.
So tomorrow we’ll try to think of some ways we can make that happen.
Good nite Luna.
