DEAR CAROLYN: Last night I sat through my last awards ceremony. I would be ashamed if anyone knew what goes on in my mind during these ceremonies. I watch the exceptional students go up for applause. I sit with my child knowing he will not receive a thing and I wonder -- why are these mandatory-attendance? Do these achievers really need me to be here?
I congratulate these kids -- sincerely and really I do. They have done wonderful things. I won't bore you with the accolades of my son, but I am quite proud of him. And I know the recipients of these awards deserve them.
Yet, I leave these events feeling so low. I also feel ashamed for the jealousy I feel for these achievers. I have a wonderful son; I should have nothing but gratitude. Why do I take this all so personally?
-- Anonymous
DEAR READER: Attendance is mandatory because having just the two or three exceptional students present to applaud each other would come off as a little sad.
And because the reward for winning, besides internal gratification, tends to include applause from the people who didn't win. If good sportsmanship didn't involve a little smiling agony, then it would be called something else. Like, happiness.
Anyway, I'm nattering on despite reasonable confidence you already know this. Where the mystery lies is in the degree of agony you feel as your child goes unrecognized.
While I have no special access to your state of mind, I have read a lot of letters from unhappy people over the years -- and if they have anything in common, it's in harboring expectations that reality doesn't (can't?) fulfill.
So, what expectations did you bring ... to your kid's schooling? to family? to life? ... that these awards ceremonies expose as unmet?
A rational person can certainly understand a few key points about such student accolades: that a "best" anything is but a snapshot of one point in a person's life; that school achievements aren't even remotely the only path to life achievement; that achievement itself isn't the only path to anything, happiness included; that there's always someone better at something anyway; that excellence of any sort is kind of a funny concept, if you think about it, for any single human among more than 7 billion on earth.
But rational people can also invest themselves, without even realizing it, in external sources of validation. It's hard to be a parent; it's fraught with challenges, heartbreaks, and opportunities for self-doubt. Heck -- it's hard to be a person for those reasons. So when your kid reaches a mountaintop or even a molehill top, it's a rare chance to say, "Woohoo! I did something right!"
And that's not wrong any more than it's wrong to enjoy hot chocolate on a winter day. It just can't be your only plan for enduring the cold.
Feeling like an ordinary parent to an ordinary child is your version of winter, apparently -- and knowing intellectually that you and your kid are just fine in the accolade department isn't enough to warm you.
What would be enough, then, to allow you to respond proportionately to outside approval? That's a question I can't answer for you, but it's a good one to ask yourself -- with a pro, if that helps.
Chat online with Carolyn at 11 a.m. each Friday at washingtonpost.com. Write to Tell Me About It in care of The Washington Post, Style Plus, 1150 15th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071; or email
tellme@washpost.com
Style on 08/15/2017