Winning isn't everything. Is it?

I have a confession to make: I like winning. A lot. And in the early parts of my life, winning came very easy to me. Contests, athletic events, even boys. If I set my sight on something (or someone) and focused all of my energy on achieving it, it almost always happened. My father says it is because I am lucky. My sister says it is because I am ultra-competitive. Me, well, I think it is because I just don't like to lose. It hurts to not get what you want, and if it is something you have been pushing and pushing for, the hurt is even more intense. Trust me. I have become very familiar with the feeling over the past few years as my career path took a careening drive off the side of a cliff. Then foolishly landed me in an industry ripe with rejection. One of my goals this year is to submit a piece of writing at least once each month, hoping in part that something will be published, but mostly so that I can start getting used to certain words and phrases. NO. Unfortunately. Sorry. It wasn't right for us. YOU LOSE. No matter how the rejection is sugar coated, that is what I hear in my head every time: YOU  LOSE. And it hurts. (See above.) My husband has said comforting things like, "You just need to stand up one time more than you get knocked down." Our pastor suggested wallpapering my den with rejection letters. I recently read that Steven King hung his on a nail until the weight became too much and he had to switch to a spike. It is part of the industry. Everyone knows that. But how do we toughen ourselves up for it? And how do we teach that skill to our children?

Things come easy to my oldest son. He is smart, cute and full of charisma. And thankfully, he has a very thick skin. Two years ago he entered a contest to win lunch with a visiting author. The students got raffle tickets for reading a certain number of minutes. Every ticket P earned went into the lunch with the author basket. Every day he came home telling me how excited he was to meet the author and ask him questions. Then he lost the raffle. Sadly, I was more devastated about it than he was. It was one of those moments when I am thankful he does not share any of my DNA. I would have moped for days, but P, he just shrugged it off and went on to tell me about the other fun activities they did during the author's visit. This past year he entered the cub scout's annual pinewood derby with a firm intent on winning first place in design (he already won fastest car in the 2013 race). His car was designed to look like a hammerhead shark, and sadly it was destroyed on the first run due to a weak spot near the wheels. In my husband's defense, he had tried to warn P about the possibility of instant destruction, but our son insisted it would be fine. There were no trophies this year. Last place for speed, and 4th place for design. P was disappointed, but again, not crushed. Just more determined to win next year.

There is a bit of controversy in the parenting world today about nurturing a child's self-esteem by giving everyone a "trophy of participation". I don't agree with that philosophy because in life no one is going to give you a reward for just showing up. You have to be the best, or at least better than other people trying to accomplish the same goal. Therefore, we celebrate winning at our house. Winning feels good, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that rush of adreniline you get when the thing you hoped for finally comes true. But we also try to work on losing gracefully. Whether it is a contest, a friendly game of Skip-Bo, or a life altering moment. That is what I work on daily. Losing gracefully, and not moping about or drowning in self-pity after each and every letter that starts with, "Unfortunately". For whatever reason, winning was not meant to be at that moment. And hopefully (says the trying-to-be-more-of-an-optimist), a better opportunity is waiting around the corner.

Gold Stars

Maybe it's the teacher in me. The endless hours of college classes, new teacher trainings, and inservices. The parenting books and magazines I've devoured over the past eight years. Perhaps it is rooted in my own desire to figure out how to change myself and be a better person. Whatever the reason, one thing is clear. I am obsessed with motivation. What motivates my students to learn something new? What motivates my children to behave? What motivates my husband to help with housework? What motivates me to stop procrastinating and get things done?
I've always been fascinated by internal motivation (I want to do this because there is a desire within me) versus external motivation (I want to do this because there is a shiny thing waiting for me) and the role they play in our journey to becoming happy and productive members of society. Many of my students would scoff at a challenge, asking, "What will you give me?" or "Will we be graded on this?" and I worry that the same thing may happen to my boys. It seems like every little action is rewarded these days, and I want them to learn that sometimes you do something simply because it makes you feel good. Click. Internal motivation.
But that doesn't always work. The truth is, we are way more motivated by external forces, especially when it comes to doing things that we don't like, or pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. Things that make us happy, that make us feel good, we do them. No problem. I love to read. Put a book in my hands and I will retreat to my favorite chair and read it. No rewards necessary. But take a student or child who hates books (gasp) or has difficulty reading, and external motivation may be required. At my son's school a local amusement park is offering a free ticket for any student who reads seven hours in two weeks. That's 30 minutes a day. For my child, who reads in the car, the bathroom, his bedroom, at breakfast (you get the idea) that is no problem. We log the minutes and collect the ticket. Easy peasy. But I can imagine in other households, where daily reading is a challenge, the dangling reward may be a strong external motivator. Is it wrong to use these types of motivators?
While reading is not a challenge in our family, there are definitely areas where my boys need an extra push. They are often described by their teachers as having "high-energy" which is the polite way to say they never. Stop. Moving. Or talking. Fine by me, really. My education background gave me a bag full of tricks to pull from when trying to reign in my rowdy children. P responded really well to time-outs as a toddler and learned quickly that no means no and Mommy really means it when she threatens to take something away if you don't pick it up. When he entered school, the negative consequences for poor choices started to pile up and he spent more and more time in punishment (especially in first grade). Then I started thinking about my many inservices and how positive reinforcement is really the only way to change behavior. Enter external motivation. This year P has the opportunity to earn weekday video game privileges (we have a no screen policy Monday-Thursday) for staying on task and getting a positive report at school, and I recently started up a similar program for our youngest. It isn't a perfect system. Slip ups happen. But overall things are getting better.
That brings me to adult motivation. How many of us set resolutions at the beginning of the year, or at some point when we feel like we JUST HAVE TO CHANGE? Change is hard. Yesterday I stumbled upon a home repair to-do list from our previous house stuffed into an old notebook. On the back was a chart of household chores, how often they needed to be done and who would do them. "How many times have we tried that?" I asked my husband. He laughed. "They never work," he said. He's right, they don't. I had to chuckle, pointing at yet another chart I recently made for myself and hung on our cluttered fridge. In my Christmas letter I emphatically promised to follow through with my resolutions and goals for the year. And so far, (pats self on back) I am doing well. My writing goals are straight forward and achievable. In both January and February I met my goals and promptly gave myself a gold star. Seeing the stickers and the little checked boxes makes me feel good. It seems to me that no matter how old we are, it feels good to be rewarded for something you've accomplished. My husband is right, there is no perfect chore chart. But the house looks better than it has and we haven't fought about who cleans what. He lives by the philosophy: if it annoys me, I'll clean it (his words) and I am just trying to make sure the house isn't swallowed up by cat hair, the bathrooms don't smell like pee and everyone has clean underwear.
At the end of the day, we will ultimately be accountable to ourselves. Are my boys behaving well in school simply because they like playing video games during the week, while some other kids are only reading because they want to ride the roller coasters for free this summer? Maybe. Am I only writing this blog entry to earn my gold star at the end of the month? Maybe. But if what you need is that little external push to get the wheels moving, does it really matter?

A Quick Thaw

The boys and I had a wonderful time thawing out in Florida last week. My parents are spending their third winter down there, and it is the second time we have traveled down to see them. They found a great place to rent during the three worst months of northern wintery unhappiness and are having a lot of fun jet-setting all over the state visiting other retired types at their warm weather getaways. The boys were great little travelers. We had no problems getting there or coming home (many flights were canceled due to the huge east coast storm). During our stay we explored several beautiful beaches and collected an insane amount of shells and shark teeth. Okay, really just a few sandwich bags worth, but it seemed like a lot when they were being stuffed into pockets during every beach outing. The boys worked on their swimming skills at the neighborhood pool, and I worked on my social skills by making small talk with other temporary residents and their visitors. We opted to skip Disney this year as it is over two hours away from where my parents are staying, and CJ is hoping to take a full fledged Disney resort vacation when the boys get a little older. Instead we ventured to Legoland. It is a great park for little kids, and the boys had a blast building with Legos and riding the rides. Sadly, I couldn't convince P to ride a roller coaster, even though he was tall enough to ride with me on all of them. He said he "didn't want to get sick going upside down" which was silly because none of the rides went upside down. CJ was disappointed to hear about the lack of roller coaster riding (he stayed home due to no accumulated vacation days at the new job) and has promised to force P onto every roller coaster once he hits the magical height of 48". Which probably won't be for another two summers at his current rate of growth. Facing one's fear of roller coasters is a bit of a rite of passage with my husband. He forced me to do it, laughing hysterically at my high-pitched screams. He forced our nephew to do it, and we were all rewarded with his enthusiastic shout of "THIS IS AWESOME!!!!!" on the most feared coaster. When the day comes, hopefully P will be thankful his father made him face his fear rather than filing away the experience as yet another thing he will discuss in therapy someday.

Back home, we immediately began to re-freeze, with temperatures plummeting into the single digits again later this week. I know I am not alone when I say that this winter has been brutal. But the small dose of sun helped me gain back some energy, and I am very much looking forward to the warm happiness of spring.

The Positive Effects of Wallpaper Removal

While my parents are down in Florida soaking up the sun, I have been fixing up their living and dining rooms. They decided to get the hardwood floors professionally redone and offered to pay me if I stripped wallpaper and painted both rooms first. The wallpaper stripping was a lot of work and took me several days, but it did something rather amazing. My creative juices had been stuck at a slow drip, but once I started spending my afternoons scraping and peeling, peeling and scraping, my mind cleared and opened up a steady flow of creative goodness. I cranked on my WIP (work in progress - a young adult novel), making more progress in a handful of weeks than I had in months. After the wallpaper was down and the walls fixed and washed, I started painting. The creativity is still flowing, but it has slowed from the original gush. Maybe it's because painting is slightly more creative and takes extra concentration. Maybe it's because I am at the halfway point in my book and am starting to feel the pressure that my characters are feeling. Maybe the paint fumes are killing my brain cells. Yeah, that's probably it.
As of this morning, the job is nearly done. We need to go back tomorrow and do some cleanup work, but the walls are painted and the room is cleared for the floor guy. Hopefully my parents will like the color and not want me to paint it again when they return. Although that could be a good thing if the juices get clogged. In the meantime, I need to keep plugging away at my book and seek out other forms of manual labor. Perhaps a closet clean-out project will do the trick.

The Voice in Our Head

As part of the requirements for this year's cub scout badge, P needed to talk with a parent about courage and the challenge of doing the "right thing" when it wasn't easy. There were multiple scenarios in his handbook, but we only had to pick four and write his response to each. I handed the book over, let him read each one and decide on the four we would discuss. They were mostly about peer pressure; your friends want you to steal candy from the store/whistle at a blind person's guide dog/pick on the new kid/etc., and I was curious to see what he would say. My boy is a born leader. I see it on the playground and at school. People follow him, not usually the other way around. I would hope that given any of the above situations, he would rise above. His answers were textbook "I wouldn't do it", thanks in part to all of the anti-bullying messages at school and (hopefully) our modeling at home. But I wanted to dig a little deeper. When I asked him why he wouldn't steal the candy, he answered that he didn't want to get arrested. When I asked what he could do instead of picking on the new kid (who, in this situation also had a physical disability), it took a lot of prompting before he said he would ask the kid to sit near him and strike up a conversation. I started thinking. Are we hard-wired to be compassionate toward others, or is that something we learn through observation and living? We talk a lot about following the rules and doing the right thing, but will my boy only follow through with that message when he is worried about the consequences? As a child, I was always afraid to do anything wrong because my parents had put the fear of God in me. Sin and you will be punished. To this day mom will say things like, "See. That's what happens." when I stub my toe after mouthing off. (On the flip side, she also believes that the key to success and the prevention of illness is thinking positively.) So what drives us to "do the right thing" and be compassionate? Is it God? The law? Some sort of internal compass? Your mother? Whenever P gets in trouble for making bad choices, I tell him to imagine me on his shoulder saying, "Do you think this is a good idea?" I hope that as he gets older and the choices go from picking on the new kid to experimenting with drugs and alcohol or other teenage stuff I'm completely not ready for, that he will find that voice inside his head. And it is loud and screechy, just like mine.

Art and the 2nd grader

I love words. My husband loves words. Our oldest son loves words. Words are magical for me; I would be perfectly content to hang out on a deserted island for all of eternity as long as there were books to keep me company. (And potatoes. I decided a while back that if I had to live with only one food it would be potatoes. They make me happy.) My husband first won me over with a poem he wrote that secretly hid my name within the lines. *swoon* When the boy came along, I knew it was love when he picked up a board book and backed into my lap on his first night home (in between bouts of hysterical crying of course). He sleeps with books, takes them everywhere he goes, and even reads the cereal box and milk carton at breakfast. Which makes me grin because I used to do THE EXACT SAME THING when I was a kid. So you get the picture. We love words.
Art is a different story. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate beautiful paintings and photographs, and we have several wonderful pieces in our house. Hubby and I enjoy art galleries and were hugely disappointed when we tried to see a van Gogh exhibit in DC several years ago and didn't join the entrance line in time (there were a limited number of tickets). But a general feeling of, "I like this one" or "I don't like that one" is the extent of my art knowledge. When my son's teacher asked me to chaperone their class trip to the art gallery, I knew I wouldn't be much help with the explaining parts, but I went anyway. We had a stern, soft-spoken woman as our docent. She was the kind of person who would not hesitate to rap the knuckles of any child caught too close to the artwork, were she allowed to do that sort of thing. Our group would look at a piece of art, I would try to figure out what the artist was trying to say, and then our docent would explain the meaning of the piece. I was wrong EVERY TIME. Now, I know art, like words, is subject to interpretation. But I was just so completely off it was laughable.
Then it got worse. The students began giggling at the nudity in paintings, and a little girl passed by a Jackson Pollack and said to  me, "That looks messy. How come that's art?"  The docent showed us a painting that was an orange rectangle and a yellow rectangle and my son started making this weird noise, like he was a cartoon character who swallowed sleeping pills. Embarrassed, I reprimanded him, which put him in a bad mood for the rest of the trip. He wouldn't talk to me or any of his friends on the bus ride home, and later he told me it was "the worst field trip ever" and that "some of those paintings were really inappropriate." I tried to explain how nudity in art is okay and that sometimes we like a painting and sometimes we don't. But that's all I had. I looked at him and thought, give me some poetry and I can explain what it means and why it is great, but art...
Is it wrong to have a kid that's just not into art? He likes to draw comic strips and read graphic novels, but his artwork is never chosen to hang in the hallways at school and the bottom line is: he's a word kid. Our youngest has always loved to draw and will spend hours molding play dough and creating elaborate collages at home and school. Hopefully when it is his turn to go to the art gallery he will be inspired and not bored. And he won't ask me to explain what it all means.

A Sweet Memory

Yesterday was day 10 of the writing challenge. I got a little stuck last week on the querying, but yesterday's assignment was to write your sweetest memory, and I knew immediately that I wanted to write about Grandma. Many of my favorite childhood memories revolve around time spent with my grandparents, and my paternal grandma was the kindest, most loving person I have ever known. She had extraordinary patience and always appreciated my creative and foolish endeavors.


She sat in the squishy white chair, glasses perched on the edge of her nose, the click click of knitting needles pulsing out a steady cadence. I looked up from my coloring book and watched her hands move expertly in perfect rhythm. Her eyes met mine. She smiled, never missing a beat. Click click. I spotted the ball of green yarn resting on the arm of her chair. It was perfect and round, and I watched in awe as it gradually unraveled with each sweeping motion of the needles. I inched closer to the chair. Reaching up, I clasped my little fingers around the ball of yarn, feeling its fuzzy softness. Grandma just smiled. I pulled the ball of yarn into my lap and tried to resist each tug. Suddenly I had a wonderful idea. Holding the yarn in my hands, I began to slowly crawl across the floor of the living room. A green trail appeared behind me, inching along the floor like a tiny snake. When I reached the end of the living room, I turned down the hallway. The ball of yarn became smaller and smaller as the snake grew longer and longer. I grinned at my brilliance. Through the hallways and around each bedroom I crawled, careful not to overlap my path. Finally I made my way back into the living room. All that remained of the ball was a tiny clump. The clicking stopped. Grandma looked down at the floor with alarm, suddenly realizing what I had done. She took a deep breath and let it out gently. Her eyes softened and the sides of her mouth formed the slightest smile. Her head shook from side to side. “Thank you dear,” she said sweetly. Pride swelled in my chest. I placed the clump of yarn on her chair and turned to look at my masterpiece. I heard the familiar click click and watched as the green snake slithered slowly along the floor, creeping its way closer and closer.