November 29, 2025
We got a text from our *child’s school alerting us in advance that our child had not been chosen for something for which they’d put a metaphorical hat in the ring. “We’ll announce it tomorrow, and we’re letting you know so you can prepare your child as you think best.”
“How should we break it?” I mused to my husband, neither of us looking forward to delivering the bad news.
“Maybe it won’t be a big deal?” we wondered hopefully, “After all, it wasn’t like it was something they were talking about a lot.”
“Yeah, they just sort of sprung it on us. Maybe it was an afterthought, maybe they won’t really care?” We were quite reassuring.
A few minutes later I was shooing away a sibling who had come to investigate the unsettling noises coming from the room where our child was alternately howling in my arms and stomping the ground in aimless rage.
Eventually, like, a really long time later, the initial waves of emotion subsided and my child relaxed into the moody why-me stage of grief, ushered along perhaps by the special allowance made for a 10 PM ice cream sundae. It wasn’t a bribe per se, but since I couldn’t erase the ripping sense of disappointment, maybe I could at least angle the core memory away from total rejection and toward ‘that night I got to have late night ice cream while my siblings were in bed.’
Moderately sedated, our conversation ambled toward the part where I as the parent help the child mine for gold nuggets of learning in the pain, imparting valuable life lessons. I was fulfilling my role admirably—we even read The Man in the Arena together—conveying the critical reality about how character is forged in the crucible of suffering, etc. etc. As the specter of middle school haunts ever more closely, may was well start swallowing the bitter pill:
“Look, this stage of life is probably going to be hard. You might not always feel like you fit in. You might not be fully appreciated by people your own age. But every adult who knows you thinks you’re so cool. You gotta get through these years, where who you are might not be as appreciated, and know that you’re becoming someone you are going to be really happy to be on the other side.
It’s pretty normal. People who are really cool as adults get that way by going through hard things, ok? Even me . . . “
I start to open up, get all vulnerable with my child, let them into my story—before the child interrupts to clarify a crucial fact.
“Wait. Mom. When were you cool?”
I look at my child in mock shock. “RIGHT NOW! I’M COOL RIGHT NOW!”
We both start laughing, and my forlorn child observes, “Hey, this is the first time I’ve smiled in like an hour.”
You’re welcome, kid.
Maybe it was because I’d just written about secure attachment, and the immense, uniquely human privilege we have of choosing each other, choosing to give our attention, to give honor, to hold space. Or maybe I’m just really becoming someone super mature. But I was proud of how I showed up for my child. I leaned hard into my Enneagram 4-ness, allowing them to feel the feelings, without shrinking them to a size I could handle, without shifting them to a third party we could villainize together. The miracle wasn’t that my words, be it coos of sympathy or pearls of wisdom, made the situation better, but that my attentive presence (+ ice cream) helped my child move through the blind emotion and start coming back to themself. Or maybe even a slightly more super mature version of themself. As I said last week, it’s the utterly unthreatened job of a human.
*You’ll notice (perhaps) I avoid any use of gender in referring to the child in question. As a general rule, I try to never write about my children in an identify-able way if there’s anything which could embarrass them or put them in a bad light. Awkwardly insisting on maintaining references to “the chidl” rather than him/her is my version of anonymizing one of what is not a very large sample size.
