The Road Ahead Is Paved With Tears
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stayed up for hours thinking about her. I hated seeing her cry.
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss walking the hard road with our children.
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There are so many moments as a parent when I have flashbacks of when I was younger. I’ve lived long enough now to have experienced similar situations from both sides of the equation. This week, I had one of those moments with one of my daughters.
Our schedules have been insanely busy between sports, end-of-the-year activities, and traveling, so some of the typical weekly routines have fallen by the wayside. One of those, which I am not exactly proud to admit, is ensuring that the girls finish their homework and study for their tests. I’m not hands-off by any means. I stayed on top of the so-called important subjects, like math and science. Still, my daughter’s weekly spelling list was the farthest from my mind.
All of my girls make straight As and read well above grade level. I honestly hardly ever think to ask them if they’ve studied for their spelling test or practiced their words. Two weeks in a row I received an email from the teacher about spelling. So I did what any parent would do and asked if she could retake the tests in hopes she could redeem herself.
I was on her all weekend.
“Have you studied your spelling list?”
“How many times have you written those words?”
“Are you ready for the make-up tests?”
On the way home from school Monday, something told me that I would have to take a more active role in this. I had asked my daughter again if she was prepared for the spelling tests scheduled for Tuesday. Her response left me doubting whether she had even looked at the words, much less memorized them.
Much to my dismay, when I started quizzing her, the results were nowhere near what they needed to be. With the two tests combined, she needed to correctly spell about 43 words. She missed more than half.
We spent hours working on this. Writing the words three times each. Verbal quizzing. Taking a mock test. Grading it. Repeat.
At one point, I looked over to the other side of the table after yet another failed attempt at a perfect score to see little tears quietly dropping from her cheeks. I hadn’t yelled at her or made derogatory remarks. It was just pure exhaustion and disappointment leaving her body.
Everything in me wanted to give up. I wanted to hold her and tell her that none of this matters anyway; AI is taking over, and who cares if you can’t spell simultaneously? Spellcheck is going to fix that for her! But that’s not what she really needed, and I knew that, so I pushed these feelings aside and helped her soldier on.
We worked until she spelled every word correctly, verbally and in writing. She was finally ready. I congratulated her on pushing through, told her we would take one more test in the morning before school just to refresh her memory, and then sent her to bed.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stayed up for hours thinking about her. I hated seeing her cry. I remember living through these moments as a kid and crying just like she did. It can weigh on your self-confidence when you study and still don’t make the grade you are looking for.
I almost talked myself out of retesting her in the morning, but ultimately decided that while that would be easier on my heart, it’s not what would best prepare her for the test.
When morning came, I let her wash her face, eat her breakfast, and put on her uniform before I reminded her about the final quiz. She looked a little apprehensive but didn’t refuse. She ripped another piece of paper out of the notebook and sat down.
Accompanying.
Accumulate.
Conscientious.
One by one, I listed off the words as she quietly wrote them down. We had this part down to a science. When I asked her the last of the 43 words, we both looked at each other hopefully. She handed me the paper back, but I had a feeling she was going to do well, so I told her I wanted her to grade it herself.
At the end of the first list, she looked at me, beaming. A perfect score. She wrote 100% at the top of the page and flipped it over to prepare to grade the second test. When she was done, she wrote another big, fat 100% at the top of the page.
“I DID IT!” she screamed at me.
We started high-fiving each other and jumping up and down. Then she pulled me in for a tight hug and laid her head on my chest. Tears were rolling down her face again.
“Thank you, Momma,” she whispered.
I wiped her face and pulled her back into me. I told her how proud I was of her and how much I loved her.
As parents, we often have to force our children to do hard things. This whole experience had little to do with teaching her how to spell these words, but letting her know that the consequence of not doing the work didn’t make it go away. Instead, it caused her to do twice the work in less time. It also taught her that she was capable of doing it, even though it seemed like she would never get there. She did.
And sometimes the best thing we can do for them in these moments is to remember what it was like when we were their age, experiencing the same emotions, and quietly walk the hard road with them.
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