Learning to Fail

Well it has happened again. My daughter is yet again successful at something she is doing. Don't get me wrong, I love that she is so great at everything that she tries. But, at some point she is going to try something new and she will fail miserably. No one can be perfect at everything. This will not be easy when the time comes and she will not go down silently. She already expects perfection from herself and hates to make even a small mistake and no matter how hard my husband and I try, we can not teach her the concept of how to not be a sore loser. There is a reason for all of this though. She has seemed to take all the best traits from my husband and I. She gets the tenacity to try and be perfect from me. I hate doing anything half-ass and always try to be as close to perfect as possible. Nearly thirty years of life have made me realize that total perfection is impossible, so maybe in 23 more years she will wise up to this. Unfortunately, she gets the need to win from both of us. This has been a very interesting point in our marriage. Both of us hate to lose at anything including driving distance times and especially board games. I think that we are the only couple that will play the game of life "best 2 out of 3", then "3 out of 5" and so on, just because the one who is losing doesn't want to quit until they are ahead. Rummy 500 turns into Rummy 1,000,000 with us, because whoever is losing at 500 wants to keep going and the competitive spirit of the other is always up to the challenge. This has also translated to the bedroom and no one wants to admit that they are absolutely exhausted, so after 7 years of marriage we still quite often have all nighters. One of these days one of us is probably going to croak from the exertion, but what a way to go! But back to the point. Everyone I know tries desperately to teach their children to succeed and I am trying desperately to teach my child to fail. The need to succeed has just been born naturally into her, so failure is going to be a much harder thing for her to learn. I decided that the best way would be to find and activity that she is bad at and force her to keep doing it, until she learns how to accept failure gracefully. This is easier said than done. She is great at school, so that is out. She is an excellent artist with a great natural ability for six, so scratch that. She succeeded at tap, jazz and ballet, even though she was so clumsy at first. She just seemed to grow right into it. Soccer is definitely a no go and the same goes for basketball, she's great at them both. She is doing awesome at swimming and up until tonight I though that t-ball might be it. She wasn't all that into it and had only hit one foul ball all season being coach pitched. Granted, she hit it off the tee awesome every time, but eventually they take the tee away, so I thought that I had finally found the one thing I could use to teach that we can't always be great at everything. That dream was shattered by the three for three batting that she did tonight. Somehow it just all of a sudden clicked for her and she hit the ball coach pitched each and every time at bat. One the way to the car she exclaimed, "I love t-ball!" So much for that idea. Maybe that nagging sensation of needing to succeed and be perfect finally got to her tonight and she just couldn't not hit the ball. So here we go again, on my journey to find the one activity that she doesn't do well. This is proving to be harder than I thought. My husband and I are like day and night where our talents are concerned. I am artistic, an avid reader, great at music and English, History, and languages. He is athletic, very coordinated, great at sports and Math and Science. Somehow, she seems to have inherited both of our talents, except for maybe music. She has never tried that yet, but I have her signed up for violin lessons starting next week. Maybe she will be tone deaf like her father and I will finally have a tool to use to teach her to accept defeat. Or maybe she will be ultra talented with a great ear like me and I will have to look for yet another thing that she might possible be bad at. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

The Roads I Used to Know

Yesterday, on the way home from my doctor's appointment, I decided to "take the road less traveled" so to speak. I took the back roads home and turned onto roads that I hadn't taken since before my oldest daughter was born almost seven years ago. I was probably wasting more gas and money than I should have been, but time to reflect is something that I truly believe is priceless. I had a lot of time to reflect, while I was driving and I used that time to the fullest. I thought a lot about who I was the last time I traveled these particular roads and the person I have become, since I traveled them. I am definitely not the same person that I was all those years ago. Since then, I have become a wife, a mother, seen three deployments, lost friends to the war, and even lost a child. I have watched my father's health decline and realized the true meaning of mortality. I have made many mistakes, but have always learned from them and become a better person because of them. I went from a weak young woman, who thought very little of herself, to a stronger older woman, who is confident in herself and her abilities. I have met myself along the way and learned to love myself. I have especially learned to love my faults and embrace my failings. I have learned that everything happens for a reason, though it may take forever to figure out what the reason is. I have learned that every mistake we make, helps us become who we need to be. I have learned that God is not playing tricks on us or merely moving us around like pieces in a giant chess game. He lets us choose our own paths and make our own mistakes, so we can grow to become the person we need to be to survive whatever may come later on down the road. He picks us up and dries our tears, knowing full well that we are probably going to do something just as stupid, if not more stupid again. I have learned that anything is possible and anything can happen. I have learned that even when we do everything right and by the book, things do not always have the perfect outcome. Most importantly, I have learned to let everything in life become a learning experience to make me grow wiser. So even though I will be filling my gas tank sooner than anticipated and griping that I wasted gas with the prices rising higher every minute, I took myself on a journey that all of us need to make every once in a while. We all need to take the time to occasionally visit the roads we used to know.