but before you get too impressed, understand that his team was the one that was crushed. and still, we had reason to celebrate. for the first time in, well, forever, he walked off the field after losing with his head held high. there were no tears, no words of frustration. he accepted the defeat like a mature eight-year old.
i couldn't believe it. so i took him out for ice cream.
parenting liam is challenging, to say the least. i suppose every child has their issues, whether they're academic or behavioral or fine motor or gross motor or speech or sensitivity or a thousand others. as parents, i feel like we're called to do the best we can. i've given up on the notion of actually solving the issue, because i'm not sure there's actually a real solution much of the time. instead, we read articles, we ask the pediatrician for advice, we consult with fellow parents, we lean on our spouses, we pray for God's guidance, and we just figure out what works best for our child.
liam's most serious issue is that he doesn't expect to fail. i had originally typed that he doesn't "want" to fail -- but that's not really the best way to describe him, because no one in their right mind ever wants to fail. liam is far more serious than that. his fear of failure cripples him. at the tiniest glimpse of self-perceived failure, he convinces himself that he's never going to master the task. he works himself into a debilitating state where he becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy. he has adopted the approach that he would rather not try something at all than try it and fail. one only needs to look at the years of intense, tear-soaked battles as we attempted to teach him to tie his shoes to understand the depths his despair can go. (he did, finally, learn how to tie his shoes a few weeks after his eighth birthday.)
this post has been brewing in my brain for months now but i've never been able to adequately articulate this journey we're on with him. i'm still not able -- i'm already rambling and verbose and haven't even begun to scratch the surface. but it's a struggle we deal with on a daily basis. the moment he makes a mistake on his homework, he declares himself to be the dumbest person ever. if he misspells a word, he dwells on it for far too long. if he misses an overhead in his tennis lesson, he tells our pro that he'll never, ever figure out how to do it.
just yesterday i met him at the bus stop and could tell he was upset about something. before we'd even made it to the mailbox he began to unload on me. "i got a problem wrong on my math test today," he told me, furiously blinking back tears. his math class takes place first thing in the morning -- so this is a weight that he'd been carrying around for almost six hours. and it was ONE mistake on a test that he actually made an A on. he's a second grader who goes up to the advanced third grade math class to work through the fourth grade curriculum ... yet he stands there in our driveway, crying about a missed math problem from six hours prior, truly convinced that he's dumb in math.
is that just not the saddest thing?
so chris and i struggle with how to deal with this. we do know that that this is all intrinsic; we have never been, nor will ever be, slave-driving parents who expect perfection. we bend over backwards, really, to model the behavior we want to see in him, where we acknowledge mistakes that we make and talk through our reactions to them. i dropped a bowl last week on the kitchen floor -- a wedding gift from thirteen years ago -- and it shattered. as i picked up the pieces i spoke my thoughts aloud, since liam was right next to me. how i was disappointed that it had happened, but that it was just a mistake. i have other bowls, and i wasn't hurt, so it was okay. mistakes happen, i said. as i've said a hundred thousand times since liam started exhibiting his perfectionist behavior.
mistakes happen.
that's why erasers were invented.
even the professional athletes who are paid millions of dollars miss the free throw.
even the biggest jeopardy winners get the answer wrong.
do these help? i don't know. i'd like to think so. i am noticing improvements here and there. liam seems to be cutting himself more slack.
and, let's not forget, it's not all bad. his tennis coach has told me that kids like liam are the kinds of kids that he loves to teach the most. "it shows he cares," his coach tells me. "kids who goof off and shrug their shoulders when they hit the ball into the net are a dime a dozen. but liam really cares. he wants to do better. he gets mad when he loses the point because he wants to improve. and when i tell him what went wrong, and how to fix it, he listens. and then he fixes it. i'm telling you, i'll take kids like liam any day of the week."
great! i think to myself. when he's standing there on the sidelines of his soccer game bawling his eyes out, he's all yours.
which brings me back, in a long-winded roundabout way, to his soccer game. he's on a team that is having a "growth year," which is a nice way of saying that they lose a lot. we knew it going in; they're a year-round team that routinely plays kids who are at least a year older than they are. they do it for the experience and the challenge. we explained this to liam when he made the team. he said he understood. but honestly -- who likes to lose 16 to zip?
but that afternoon he really was okay with it. "they were just so much bigger than we were," he said to me from the back seat of the car as we left the field. "but i think if we stick together like we're supposed to, we could be that good next year. and i had a couple good passes i think. it really wasn't so bad."
this was HUGE for liam. you have to celebrate the successes where you find them. and so i took him out for ice cream.
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