If At First You Don't Succeed....Pick Your Butt Up Off the Floor and Do It Again

Tonight I watched my oldest daughter struggle through something new. Her regular dance class was canceled, so she tried out an adult contemporary class down the street. She's never danced contemporary. She is twelve - the youngest age allowed in the studio in the evenings. And somehow she was shocked that it wasn't an automatic success. I didn't stay for the whole class, because I knew she was self-conscious enough, but what I saw didn't look so bad to me. She mostly kept up, and some of her lines looked quite nice. Contemporary is nothing like ballet, nothing like jazz, and on a different planet from tap. She was learning new lingo, new combinations, and new ways of holding her body - to an eight count that moved at a speed faster than middle school gossip. In other words, it was hard. Katie doesn't like hard. Or rather, she doesn't like hard when anyone else is watching.

One of my daughter's teachers recently told me that she thinks Katie might be afraid to make mistakes. Hmm...noticed that, did she? Well, not so much afraid to make them, but afraid that someone else might notice. I'm not a soft-sell kind of mom - I'm not afraid to say, "you're not perfect, big deal, move on." But really, how DO you teach persistence? I worry that, because so many things have come quickly and easily to my eldest child, she won't see the value in working for the things that don't come as easy.

I admit that I am guilty of the same so many times in my life. But it's gotten easier since I've had my girls - for once, I am held accountable, because their eyes notice everything. When I was thirty years old, I had an expired driver's license. I had to retake my driver's test, in my own car, with my own kids in tow. And I failed. Miserably failed, at parallel parking. I was absolutely horrified. I wanted nothing so much as to go home and get into bed, pulling the covers up over my head. As an adult, I had failed at a basic life skill, and my kids had seen me do it. One of the hardest things I've done in my adult life was to go back to the DPS office that next morning, and do it all over again. I passed...barely...I think they felt sorry for me. Now I drive an SUV...and I really can't parallel park the thing. I get through life just fine without that skill. Admitting that I'm bad at it hasn't killed me.

Growing up, I had a love/hate relationship with my piano. I loved the idea of playing, and I was pretty good at what I knew....but I didn't much care for the time and the learning curve. No way to learn to play an instrument without making a whole lot of mistakes.

Making mistakes is an art. Learning from them is real intelligence. See, I figure if I make a mistake once, I'm pretty smart - because I have an opportunity to learn something. If I keep making the same mistake, however, then I must be pretty dumb. Sometimes I'm dumber than dirt, because I repeat those mistakes again and again.

And some of the proudest moments in my life have come from the little things that were hard won, after lots of mistakes, and picking myself up painfully and doing it all over again. Generally these were things that were worthwhile.

• riding a bike
• rollerblading
• knitting
• playing instruments
• swing dancing
• baking a souffle
• casting clay on a wheel

None of these happened the first time I tried. All of these were worthwhile efforts. All of these involved learning from mistakes. I have mastered none of these, even with years of effort in some cases. I'm OK with that. And I'm not done learning.

So, Katie tried two new things this week. She took a self-defense course last night, and she kicked some serious butt (and I have the bruises to prove it). And she tried a new style of dance, and she's not sure that she wants to go back. But I've seen how happy she is when she dances, and I think it's worth a little pain and maybe some embarrassment on her part, if she gets half as excited about it as she did the first time she got the hang of sweeps or twelve-steps in tap (yeah, I don't really know what those are either, but it sounded neat).

When my kids tell me something is hard, I say, "awesome." Something to view as a goal. Something to sweat over, and a sense of accomplishment looming in their future. You can sit on your butt and watch the world go by, or you can get up and dance again. I prefer to dance. Well...figuratively, anyway.