Life's Little Disappointments...okay, not so little

Authors Promoting Authors

It’s hard being a parent. You think you crest the mountain at every stage, get through the shock of non sleep and puking babies, get in shape chasing toddlers over hill and dale, worry your way through kindergarten/first grade, realize your kid’s middle school friends are all pot heads (according to your other kid), try out and sometimes make sporting teams, develop ulcers re-taking standardized tests in your head, gnaw your fingernails to a nub teaching them to drive (and dread that “um, mom, had another accident” call), and then, finally shoot them off into the world more or less equipped with your more or less satisfactory parenting and ….. cross your fingers, say a prayer, have a drink.

But along the way, handling your own child’s random, yet intense disappointments with how “life is” at times is the most daunting thing ever.

Here in my midwest college town, the public schools are by most measures, excellent. Yeah, they’ve had to cost cut like many and yeah, they built a shiny new monument to an outgoing Superintendent’s ego known as a “new high school” that sits half empty but whatever. I’m on my third “go” through the system, this time with the one kid who started at 1st grade and can call herself a Product of the system. The other 2 cobbled together from International and British school experiences and landed in the American public school program later  in life with varying degrees of success.

There is an “alternative” high school, located downtown, with no bus service, very little parking and where the kids call the teachers by their first names and they (kids) are free to roam and wander the halls, treated more like college kids in the “expectation of attendance” department.

There are 115 spots for each entering freshman class and about 420 kids put their names in for the random draw lottery.  Needless to say, the odds, as it were, are not in your favor to get in.

And she did not.

Our district high school is excellent, by the way. If large, with a full regiment of extracurriculars including a grammy winning music program, state champions of many sports including many women’s sports, and has a very high college placement rate.  I know it. Have been through it (twice). I like it and truly believe that the “structure” inherent in a traditional school will be way (way) better for this particular very traditional child.  My middle child would have been a better fit but although she made the lottery cut 3 years ago, she chose to attend the traditional school instead.

But a deep disappointment for your child is just that: deep disappointment with the attendant weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. And handling it without saying things like: I didn’t want you to go there anyway.  You wouldn’t thrive in that environment. And thank GOD I don’t have to drive you to school every morning for the next 3 and a half years.
Is tough.

She’ll be fine. This is the kid who made the Olympic Development Level soccer training cut TWICE which went very deep this year. I say: the things you CAN control you will always succeed at. The things you can’t, you have to let go if they don’t work out for you.

As writers our own lives are full of a drip drip drip of disappointments. Rejections, tough editors making us cut beloved scenes, “meh” reviews (or even bad ones), low sales. All of it. But “teaching” a kid to handle disappointment is impossible, really.  You gotta live through some to come out the other end a more balanced human being.

(and I still don’t have to drive her to school for the next 3.5 years! woo hoo!)
 cheers
Liz

Read more at Authors Promoting Authors