Learning to cheer where I cannot steer

We stood on the edge of the hill, watching. One by one the other runners from our school passed by, and my daughters and I cheered for them enthusiastically but kept our focus further back, at the point where the path came out from the woods. Any minute now we’d see him emerge and it would be time to give our loudest shouts of encouragement, to give him a boost before he had to make his way up the incline.

I shifted my weight restlessly from one foot to another on the soft grass. The wind was cooler than we’d expected on this sunny October afternoon, and my eight-year-old buried her face against my side in silent complaint. I knew what she wanted to ask: How long until we can go home?

It was nearly the end of my son’s first season with the junior high cross country team. He liked to say, with typical thirteen-year-old indifference, that he was on the team only because “my parents are making me do it.” A more accurate statement is that we made him participate in a team sport, and of the two offered by his school for the fall, football and cross country, this was the one he chose. Despite his frequent complaints about the daily 6 a.m. practices, I stubbornly hoped that he would begin to feel connected to the team and to take some pride in his steady improvement.

Speed and athleticism are not traits that run in our family, but cross country is a sport that rewards perseverance and drive, and when there’s something he wants, our son has these qualities in spades. The question is always whether he’ll flip that inner power switch and decide he wants to give it his best… or not. Tired legs and lungs can be hard to ignore, especially when the course offers little shade and nearly everyone is ahead of you.

You’re doing great. Don’t stop. You can do this. I could shout these messages of encouragement to him when he passed by, cheer and clap with all my might, but I could not stop my son from giving up and walking (which was my biggest concern because he wouldn’t feel as proud of himself at the end). I couldn’t make him decide to push harder and move faster, and I certainly couldn’t shorten or change the course. It was his race to run each time, from start to finish, and he had to do it on his own. I was the cheerleader, and that was all.

As the firstborn, my son has been the one to break me in for each new phase of parenthood, and most of the time the lesson has been the same: You can’t control this. Just let it happen the way it will.

I’m a slow learner. Over the past thirteen years I’ve created innumerable rules, charts, and systems of rewards and consequences to “manage” our three children, primarily our strong-willed oldest who has always marched to the beat of his own drummer. My husband still teases me about the sleep charts I made when he was a baby, driving myself crazy trying to look for patterns and figure out what I was or wasn’t doing that was causing him to wake up too early or not take a good enough nap.

(It’s no big surprise that I never solved this mystery, and with his two younger siblings I didn’t even try making a sleep chart. These are the kinds of ridiculous things you only have time to

do the first time around.)

There is actually a lot we can do as parents to teach our children good behavior through a loving but firm approach, with boundaries clearly marked and consistently enforced (I’m often grateful for the stubbornness I inherited from my mother!). But ultimately the child is the one in the driver’s seat, choosing to comply or not.

And for some things—like a newborn’s sleep—all the structure and parental stubbornness in the world will have little effect on the outcome. It’s simply beyond our control.

Sometimes the temptation of control isn’t about behavior; it’s about wanting to protect. Years ago when our children were very little, I read an excellent parenting book called The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. While its pages are filled with both nuggets of wisdom drawn from the author’s Jewish spirituality and practical daily-life applications, what made it such a memorable read for me was its overall message: that we don’t do our children any favors by constantly intervening to try and smooth out the path and protect them from life’s bumps and scrapes.

The book’s author, clinical psychologist and parent educator Wendy Mogel, Ph.D., argues that experiencing disappointments, failures and heartbreaks and seeing themselves come out okay on the other side is essential for helping children learn resilience. They also need the confidence of knowing we see them as strong enough to handle the occasional stumble and the bloody knees that may follow.

I write these words, knowing how true they are, and yet constantly failing in my efforts to live them out.

But what struck me from the very beginning of the cross country season is that this somewhat helpless position it places me in, of watching my child run and cheering him on—this is parenting, in its most purely distilled form. This is the true nature of my role, which I so rarely see with clarity except when it’s staring me in the face in such an obvious way.

Keep running that race, Nathan. I know some days it will take everything you’ve got just to do that much. But other days you’ll keep up a strong pace, maybe even break your personal record. There will be woods to pass through where I can’t follow, but when you come out into the sunshine you’ll see me there, cheering.

Either way, the race is yours alone, as it always has been. That’s what being a cross country mom has reminded me over and over. I just hope I can keep making progress at remembering it.