In Which It's Hard to Be the Best

I took a long break from blogging while traveling for the holidays, but now I'm back and I intend to start posting once or twice a week again. We'll see whether my goals to intentionally exercise and to devote time to writing my own fiction and being part of a critique group combined with my extra work because we're getting new carpet this month actually allow me to do so. At the least I'll be sure to carve out a regular time for blogging when the house is back in order sometime in February :).

On to today's subject. As you've probably picked up by now, Kittygirl's diabetes has not seemed to impact her schoolwork in the least. Ever since she started school, schoolwork has come relatively easily to her. She's not perfect at everything every time, but shes performs better in everything in elementary school than her brother did while expending less effort.

Don't take that last sentence above to mean Kittygirl doesn't care about school and is lazy. She loves school and always does her best work. The difference is that doing so isn't difficult for her in the way it is for her brother. He often takes at least three times longer to do his homework than his teachers intended for it to take, whereas it's not unusual for Kittygirl to complete her work in half the time the teacher thought it would take. Standardized tests were always really stressful for Squirrelboy and I remember both of us feeling stressed in his third grade year as he faced his first set of state tests. Kittygirl, on the other hand, is super excited about the tests coming up in the spring and wishes she could speed up time so she could go ahead and take them.

Kittygirl also excels in athletic endeavors more often than not. During the two seasons she played soccer, her coach said she was the best girl of her age he had ever coached. She was never the best in her ballet class, but she never struggled greatly to catch onto the steps either. She moved up to the intermediate class in gymnastics two months after starting in the beginning class.

For most of her life, most things have come really easily for Kittygirl. I have joked before that she got diabetes because otherwise parenting her would have been way too easy. However, this post isn't really about bragging on Kittygirl's great competence. It's about how that competence can actually be a weakness on occasion.

Every once in awhile, Kittygirl runs into something that actually challenges her. One example is the game Ticket to Ride, which Mr. Engineer loves to play and is very good at. Kittygirl has started playing it fairly often during the past six months. She's improving, but she's still not as good as her dad and she only sometimes equals her brother. This really bothers her. In fact, she'll sometimes throw a little fit and refuse to play because she "can never win." It doesn't occur to her that her skills are growing and she will eventually win a game, quite possibly in the near future. It just bothers her that she wasn't the best to begin with. The board below is a game my kids and one of their cousins played with Mr. Engineer on our Christmas travels. They all beat him, which is pretty astounding. However, Kittygirl was still upset because she didn't get first place and she "never wins anything," which is manifestly untrue.

Later during the same trip we went to a roller rink with cousins. The cousins have their own roller blades and are very good. Kittygirl has skated a few times at our local rink and is decent on regular skates, but she decided she wanted to rent roller blades to be like her cousins. It took her a long time before she was at all confident, and she hated it until the very end. She kept skating (or blading?) up and complaining about how horrible she was and how much faster everyone else was going. Pointing out that everyone else had probably been blading for more than an hour total in their lives did not help. She expected to be good right away. By the end she had gained a little confidence and she even asked for roller blades for her birthday, which is coming up at the end of the month.

I can't really blame Kittygirl for her expectations to be good at everything. She comes by them honestly. I'm a lot like that too. School was always super easy for me. I hated my sophomore honors English teacher for years because she had the audacity to give me B+ in the first quarter. I didn't have Kittygirl's natural athletic ability, but I did have her expectation to be good at the athletic endeavors I tried. That meant that I was frustrated when I did try sports and never put in the effort it would have taken me to be, if not excellent, at least decent. I eventually gave up on sports altogether. The exception was horseback riding, but I never had an interested in competing in that, so it didn't really matter if my seat wasn't perfect or I was terrified of jumps.

I've seen this tendency in myself as I've recently begun to take my writing seriously. I was critiquing someone else's novel manuscript and I expressed to Mr. Engineer that I was jealous because I didn't think I could write anything that good. He basically told me to get over myself and stop comparing my writing unfavorably to the writing of others, especially to the writing of other unpublished authors. As long as I know I'm doing my best work, it shouldn't matter if I think someone else's work is better. There's room in the world for a lot of different books.

And if, ultimately, my writing isn't good enough to be published (other than on this blog :)) or simply isn't the right style at the right time, that's okay too. My self worth doesn't need to be bound up in that. There are plenty of things I'm good at whether or not I ever have a novel on bookstore shelves.

 I've even seen the tendency to expect perfection crop up in Squirrelboy as he's gotten serious about his filmmaking endeavors. He critiques other students who don't understand as much as he does or who think making a film is easy. He also looks back at his own past efforts and heavily critiques them. I try to gently point out that a) not everyone cares about quality filmmaking in the same way he does and b) his past efforts aren't necessarily bad, their flaws just show how much he's grown.

What I need to remind myself of and impart to my kids is the fact that, just because some things are easy for us doesn't mean a) they're easy for everyone or b) every single thing we ever do will be easy for us. The fact is, lots of things in life take hard work, determination, and a lot of time to master. That's okay. That's actually good. Life would be pretty boring if we were automatically excellent at everything the first time. There would be no room to appreciate those who had mastered those things and there would be nothing to challenge us and compel us to work hard.

Keeping these things in sight will be useful to me both as I try to find my own way in the world and as I prepare my kids to do so.