Sometimes we as teachers-parents-grandparents get so keyed up about building the right conditions for our youths, we forget that relationships and accomplishments and life are all kind of mercurial entities. They are less science and more art. Things work when they work and they don’t work when they don’t. Sometimes we are so busy making plans for building community that we fail to make room for, well . . . building community. Or as my friend and yours, Jonathan Haidt (2024) asserts:
Gradually, from trial and error, and with direct feedback from playmates . . . students become ready to take on the greater social complexity of middle school. It’s not homework that gets them ready, nor is it classes on handling their emotions. Such adult-led lessons may provide useful information, but information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. [Play does.] . . . Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. (p. 53)
The scary part is when you leave things up to chance, when you allow young people to play without dictating the rules, when you push the baby bird out of the proverbial nest, things don’t always end happily.
But that’s kinda the point.
So I write these words in honor of all of the sports games my children have lost, all of the play/musical roles my youngest has not gotten, all of the student councils and homecoming courts they have not been elected to, the social occasions to which they were not invited. I write these words in honor of the teacher that inadvertently spoke too harshly to the wrong group of children, to my husband who lost his mind the other night because my son bounced the ball too loud, to the time that gosh-durn IXL assignment never ended and my son kept making silly mistakes to the point of tears. I write these words to commemorate all the job offers I did not receive, the grants that failed to win funding, the manuscripts that returned “rejected” without even the opportunity to revise.
Coming of age has been to me, in some way, an accumulation of unmet expectations. A cold-water-in-the-face shock of “wait this isn’t fair!” and “what- you mean I’m not all that special?!” The first time I was served a big old heap of injustice was in the fifth grade when Mrs. Newsom called my spelling wrong in the spelling bee that was actually correct; the whole class stood up for me and she kind of lost it screaming at me. I was stunned. Later I felt the pain again serving spaghetti and getting screamed at by an irrational parent about their perfect child my first year of teaching. In my charmed life even then at the age of 21, I had a shortage of skills to deal with such crises. I didn’t know what to do with anything except 100% approval and appreciation of my awesomeness.
Losing knocks us out of our self-centered illusions of supreme greatness, and helps us work the muscle of putting ourselves out there again and again.
It helps us shakily assert through tears after disappointing news about a role in a play or team: “I still like [insert thing you just failed at].” We jut our chins out stubbornly and slowly, a kernel of self respect grows, one that insists, even when the world says otherwise,“I am good and I have much to offer.”
A few summers ago, my youngest pushed through some disappointment for a summer theater program when she was assigned to be in the jellyfish ensemble with much younger children. “I think they maybe need me to kind of babysit them,” she decided. Her attitude flipped from sadness to mother-bear purpose: reminding them to enter on stage right instead of stage left, helping them tie their shoes so they wouldn’t trip as they exited. “Maybe this is why you are in that position,” I encouraged her.
A few days later she told me a story about a little girl that came up to her to tell her that her mom recently died. She wasn’t sure if she heard her right, but she instinctively hugged her close.
Did she see this was the winning?
The camp was only two weeks. The curtains soon closed. The lines are now forgotten, and no one remembers that she didn’t get a single line except for she and I.
We always have our eyes on the wrong balls. We think we keep striking out, but oftentimes we are making home run after home run in the place God has placed us. I believe some of us in this life have the combo of sky-high-hopes and very-real-limitations that results in God having to put us in our place a lot. But that is, quite undoubtedly, the best place to be.