Making The Cut

I have started to write this post, which was originally titled "Life Experiences vs. Parenting", about five times this summer.  Suddenly, after yesterday, the title changed and the urge to write increased drastically.

There have been so many times this summer that I have thought about how my daughter, Megan, learns from life, and how we are really just guides. We are here to live as models of how to respond to the things that come at you in life.  Life throws us good and bad and everything in between, and we are here "bobbing and weaving" through it. 

Yesterday was a hard day.  Yesterday was, in my rose-colored glasses world, going to be yet another chance to show how hard work pays off for my daughter.  Yesterday was, instead, yet another example of how hard work is great, but we are really not in control of anything except our own responses to the things life throws at us.

See, I am still learning.  Lots.

Megan is 12.  She is going into seventh grade.  It is a time in life where her wings are spreading, but her feet aren't firmly under her.  She has stretched this summer, and I am so proud of that.  She worked and worked and worked for a spot in her music school's top guitar ensemble and earned her place.  But then took quite a blow when she learned that they decided to take everyone that tried out.  She is sensitive to the world around her and was acutely aware that, somehow, the "everyone gets the prize" mentality diminishes the value of the "prize" that we are working for.

Yesterday, we saw life from the other side.  Megan has been training for a year to be ready to compete on her school's volleyball team.  She's been to countless clinics, takes a volleyball to her friends' houses, the lake, and the pool to make opportunities for practice.  Team tryouts were last night.  Let me tell you, if you have not had the "pleasure" of sitting through a two hour period on the sidelines as someone compares your child to 35 others...AGONY!

Things started off rough, but she ended strong.  We went home with directions to check the website in about an hour for posted results.  This time, she didn't make the cut.  Everyone didn't get the prize.  I watched her check and recheck the list, hoping somehow there was a typo and one of those student numbers was hers.  Ouch.  Big time.

Do you remember a time you worked crazy-hard but didn't make the cut? Or a time you worked crazy-hard, only to find out that everyone got the prize? Both of them truly stink.  As I parent through these events, I can only think of times when, as an educator, I have placed my students or their parents on the other end of either of these life experiences.  I wish those times didn't exist, but they do.

The bottom line is that we are not in control of anything except our own responses to the things that happen in our lives.  We are not in control of the teacher, coach, supervisor, etc who makes decisions about who to take and why to take them.  We are not in control of the friend or student who chooses to work hard every day for a goal, maybe harder than us, or to just slide by and see what happens.

We must make decisions based on our heart, our goals, our plans, our vision for our life.  That's the life experience I have to model for Megan.  I have to help show her that I work hard on the things that matter to me.  My achievements are NOT measured by how others respond to me.  They MUST be measured by my own yardstick.  My own pride.  My own vision for where and who I want to be.  That's the only thing I can control.  She will ALWAYS make my cut, but the only thing that truly matters is if she makes her own. If she can walk away proud of her work in her own heart, that's the real "cut".