Let me set the scene for you: it’s 1998. I am 13 years old, and all my little rebellious self wants to do is learn how to skateboard. That, you see, was the height of demonstrating that you were outside the norm of my basketball-loving hometown’s idea of cool. There were Vans on my feet, JNCOs on my leg, and a thrifted baggy t-shirt covering my heart, but the skateboard life wasn’t to be.
I lived on a gravel road tucked away in fields and forests. Pavement was a luxury that hadn’t made its way to my (literal) neck of the woods.
This becomes important when I tell you that nearly twenty years later, I decided to learn how to roller skate. I was in graduate school, overwhelmed by the task of studying for doctoral exams, and a mother to the most rambunctious toddler I had ever met. Somehow I got it into my head that joining a roller derby team would solve all my problems (and, in some ways, I was right).
But there was just one tiny barrier standing in my way: I had no idea how to skate.
So I took a class. The flyer said “All Ages,” but it was 27-year-old me and a bunch of first graders. It was . . . humbling.
What I remember most (and what’s prompting me to write this today) is the first lesson: how to fall. Before they taught us how to move forward or how to stop or how to turn, we had to learn how to fall — and how to get back up.
Expecting the Fall
Because those instructors talked about falling with such a matter-of-fact delivery, we knew it was going to happen.
They didn’t say “if you fall.” They said “when you fall.”
There was no use worrying about avoiding the inevitable. We would all fall. We would all get back up. It wasn’t an afterthought. It was lesson one.
I was thinking about that lesson (now a decade in my past) the other day as my rising second grader was doing his math.
Frustrated that he didn’t get a perfect three-star score on a section, he started to melt down.
That’s when I realized I had skipped lesson one. Turning him loose on a math program that he fully enjoyed and where he excelled had felt great for both of us.
But I knew he would eventually hit a lesson that wouldn’t go perfectly. I knew that he would miss questions and mess up and have to re-do problems at some point.
He didn’t know.
He’d been skating around that rink thinking he could avoid falling. And I should have done a better job of making sure he knew that wasn’t possible.
I told him the story of my roller skating saga, and he listened, tears slowing. He kept going on his math problems and figured it out.
I’m going to do my best to remember to talk about falling and how to get back up before it happens.
What’s your lesson in falling?