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.

Losing Sophie-Three Months Later

It has been three months now, since we lost Sophie. I would love to tell everyone, who just suffered a loss that the pain goes away, but it doesn't. It does get easier though. The first week was probably the hardest week of my life. As I said in my last blog, I came home to a house full of baby things that I just couldn't bear to put away and in all honesty, there are still things laying around right now. Waking up in the morning was the hardest part. As long as I was asleep, I didn't have to think about the fact that I came home from the hospital with empty arms. I think the first few days home were the closest to insanity that I have ever come and I never want to be in that place again. My husband has always spoiled me rotten and done anything that I asked, no matter how unreasonable. This is the man that went to every store in town that was open at 11:30 at night looking for cheeseballs and I wasn't even pregnant. In those first few days I bordered so close to the edge of insanity, that when I woke up in the morning, it took every ounce of sanity left not to beg my husband to bring Sophie back to me. I have never confessed this to him and I probably won't until he comes home from deployment, because I don't want him worrying. For some crazy reason, I would have moments where I actually believed if I pouted and threw enough of a fit, that he could do something to change what had happened. I think about those days and it still terrifies me that I came so close to losing my mind. Things gradually got easier. My husband had to go back to Iraq a week after the funeral and that basically left me as the single parent for our oldest daughter again. This was probably the best thing that could have ever happened. No matter how dark the days were, I still had a reason to get up in the morning. Someone had to dress, feed, do homework with and play with her and I was the only one available. I couldn't just "check out" of life, I had to keep living it. There was no other option. I thank God every moment of every day that he gave me a child to keep, before he took one away. I've often heard the phrase, "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" and I truly believe that. Despite taking care of our oldest, I still had some really bad days at first. Especially on school days. I would wake up in the morning, feed her breakfast, put her on the bus, then come back inside and go back to bed until it was time to get her off the bus in the afternoon. I felt like there was no reason to be awake, since I had no one to care for and nothing to do. I wasn't mentally able to take on any new tasks and anyone who knows me, understands how far from my personality that is. I am a born multi-tasker and over-extender. I try to do anything and everything that comes my way and then some. Losing Sophie had made me feel like such a failure that I was afraid to do anything at all, for fear of failing. I blamed myself for losing her and felt like a complete failure as a woman, because of it. As a stay at home mom and wife, I felt that my number one job was to produce and raise children and by losing Sophie, I had failed to do the one thing that was required of me. It is a really irrational thing to think. There was nothing that I did that caused what happened. It was just a fluke of nature. There was nothing I did, nothing I ate, nothing I didn't do that caused the esophageal atresia. All the doctors and coroner's report confirmed that, so there was no reason for me to feel that way. But I did and there are moments even now that I still do. I keep reading everything that I can find about Sophie's condition, just as a reassurance that it wasn't my fault. After the first month, I finally had my first day when I was able to get out of bed by noon. Some of you may think that sounds ridiculous, but for me it was a major milestone. Up until then, I was waking up at 7:30 in the morning, going back to bed at 8:30, not getting back up until 3:30 in the afternoon and going back to bed a 11:00 at night. I was sleeping my life away, so being awake those few extra hours from noon to 3:30 a big deal. I started boxing up the baby clothes and putting them away in hopes that someday I might be blessed enough to have another child to wear them. Slowly, I started to take interest in things that I liked to do again. I started reading books again, watching movies again, and started toying around with my model horse collecting hobby. Now, here I am three months later. I was finally able to visit Sophie's grave a week and a half ago. My oldest daughter and I took flowers, since the nice spring weather is finally here. I am becoming super-mom again and totally over-extending myself and loving every minute of it. I am running our oldest to soccer twice a week, tee-ball twice a week, swimming once a week, and volunteering at the school. She is going to add an instrument in the summer and is planning on four separate sports camps. I'm finally blogging, as you can see, and shopping like a maniac, although that is becoming a bit of a problem. I think to help cope with losing my child, I may be trying to accumulate things to fill the void she left behind. "Things" are not filling it though and I am spending money hand over fist, so I have been trying to avoid any store, including online ones. I'm like and alcoholic, trying to stay away from beer. I still have the occasional dark day, if there is nothing I need to get done. Especially on rainy days, I tend to stay in bed until noon. I am battling the fear of losing our oldest daughter and felt like a horrible person, because deep down I was relieved that she had to miss her field trip to the circus, because she was sick. What if she got lost, or stolen or killed? It was just so much safer for her to be here with me at home. I have moments of panic, watching her at swimming lessons. What if she falls off the edge, hits her head and no one can get to her in time? I have become such a pro at thinking up the worst case scenario, that I think maybe I should get a job working for national security. But I resist and fight these urges and never let my oldest daughter see these fears. I push her to try new things, no matter how scary they might be. I push myself to try new things too. Basically, healing has become a choice that I have made and not just something that happens. I still hurt in a way that I know I will never recover from. We are not supposed to outlive our children. It goes against the laws of nature. Nothing will bring her back and nothing will ease the pain of losing every special moment that was stolen from me when she left this world. But, I will not stop living my life. I will not stop loving the child that I still have with me and I will not stop being the best mother I can possibly be to her. I will not miss out on all the great and wonderful moments that life still has in store for me, just because it is hard to get out of bed in the morning and I will not feel guilty about living my life, even though my baby daughter is gone. I think that is what healing truly is. It is choosing to be alive and choosing to live life to it's fullest.