First Place...or Participant...

From Morguefile

Saturday night, that would be New Years' Eve, the family went bowling with our church family.  We got there a little late and the kids' lane with the bumpers lining the gutters was filled up so our family took a normal lane.  Rachel and Elie threw a lot of gutter balls Saturday night.

Rachel was getting especially upset.  "Why can't we have bumpers?" she demanded of me.  Nevermind that I didn't like the tone, I replied, "You can go ask for them if you want to."  But I knew she wouldn't. And I didn't want her to.  Even though her frustration level was getting really high, I knew that the bumpers wouldn't help her any.

"Why does it keep going that way?" she asked after her ball went directly into the left gutter again.  Now, I'm no bowler (that may become self-evident in this post, I don't know), but that was exactly the opportunity I was looking for.

"Try making sure your arm goes straight - I think you're kind of moving it across your body when you let go of the ball."

And so the rest of the game went with her questions and my (hopefully) common-sense tips.  Okay, now it's going into the right gutter...  Yes, but way down by the pins - try what you just did, but start over to the left one dot.  Okay, how did that feel?  Move over a little more.  Okay, that's too far, huh?  Okay, maybe you're twisting your hand when you throw the ball...

And on it went.  A game and a half, til Lori's neck started hurting and she bowed out (I didn't play at all - had the flu) but the girls and our nephew, Ryan, kept playing.  At the end of the second game, Elie asked if she could go play on the "kid's lane" - even though her brand of run up to the line and launch the ball had garnered her a hand full of strikes and spares by this time - she simply didn't want to "bowl" she only wanted to knock down pins.  When we told her she could, Rachel chose to stay behind.

And I smile now thinking about that decision on her part.  10 frames before, she would have jumped at the chance to play on the lane with the bumpers - to just "knock down pins" - but then she suddenly realized that she was bowling.  No, she wasn't very good.  But every ball she rolled meant she learned something about how to keep it between the gutters - or how not to, as the case may be.

Failure, while at first frustrated her, didn't devastate her.  Failing is not necessarily a bad thing.  How else do we learn?  My girls make me watch the Disney channel far too much - and there was an episode of Shake It Up (which is probably not the best thing on TV they could be watching...) where one of the characters gets a "participant" ribbon from the science fair and says something like, "I won!" and another character says something like, "You know that just means you showed up, right?" And the first is like, "Yeah!"  We have a whole generation - and I'm on the edge of it - that gets awards for just showing up.  That has lived our whole lives with bumpers on the gutters because "failing" was bad for our self esteem.  Well, guess what?  Getting commended for doing nothing is just as bad for our self esteem.

Rachel stayed on that same alley for three hours - I don't know how many balls she rolled, but I do know that by the end of the night she was keeping them between the gutters more often than not.  And she was having fun again...  Even though she didn't win.

Imagine that.