28 Apr Guiding Our Children Through Disappointment

I’ve been through a lot of heartbreak in my life. In addition to the real, lasting losses in my life—the death of my father and my mother’s mental illness—there are scores of disappointments. Awards not won, books not published, stories rejected, and opportunities on which I missed out.

But it is a whole other arena when it’s your child’s heartbreak, and you are powerless to reverse it.

Just last month, I was on the Acela train home from New York when I got a text from my husband telling me that my 13-year-old son had been cut from the middle school baseball team.

Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore flashed outside the rail car windows in what seemed like instant succession, as I prayed and breathed deeply and tried to think about what to say when I got home.

My feelings were complex. I didn’t feel as though my son was somehow owed a place on the team, although I know how good a player he is and I was somewhat surprised. It’s something of a stereotype in the Washington, D.C., region, that parents are fierce advocates, aggressively lawyering for their children’s opportunities, and that was something neither my husband nor I was going to do. (We did inquire about what particular skills might be helpful for him to improve.)

As old-fashioned as it sounds, our attitude was, You win some; you lose some.

We wanted our children’s successes and failures to be their own.

Amid my funk of trying to sort out a response, the Church of Facebook (I’m kidding, but only halfway) came to my rescue once again: The best advice I got was that I should just start and end with how yucky not making the team is. No “try harder next time,” no “you’re really good; just keep going.” In fact, I should do a minimum of talking.

And that’s what we did—we had a family night. We cuddled on the sofa. He’d actually pulled a muscle in his shoulder which was aching miserably, so we let him stay home with ibuprofen and sleep it off.

We also got some advice that was not so great. Some folks suggested that we just encourage him to “move on” to another sport or activity. Plus, I knew that he loved baseball. He might not “be a success,” but he loved the game. We said we would support him as he tried to figure it out.

Healing things began to fall into place soon after. He had the opportunity to be on a recreation league team coached by a wise family friend, whose son was a longtime buddy who now attended a school in another neighborhood. We were thus able to “reframe” the experience as a positive one, in which our son was able to spend good time with his old friend whom he was not able to see so often anymore. And he kept on practicing his skills, not in an effort to “win,” but as an opportunity to grow.

I was so proud of him.

A couple of weeks ago, he was playing softball during intramural sports time, and the coach asked him to come visit him during office hours the next day. At the meeting, he said he had been observing my son, and decided that he should be on the team after all, that he has some skills that were needed. I’ll never forget his excitement as he relayed the news.

How much more of an achievement it was for him, to have persevered through difficulty, but also not to be deterred from something that was his passion—even if it wasn’t clear he was destined to be a “star.”

I’d rather have joy than a star.

Questions for Consideration:

How much are you invested in what your child does, as opposed to who he or she is? What can you do to ensure that the interest is your child’s rather than your own?

It’s easy to talk about God guiding your footsteps when things turn out the way you want them to.  What do you do when failure or disappointment happens even when it’s not a case of “not working hard enough”?