Carlo Mercadante

“It’s painful, but important to be able to rescue yourself.” Doug messaged me this today during an ongoing conversation we have about when to throw a life preserver and when you let your kids fight on their own to stay afloat. As a parent nothing prepares you for the urge to lessen the hurt, to save your children from pain, to fill the silence that follows a loss. It’s uncomfortable to watch your child struggle, to lose, to not get what you have been witness to them work so hard for and if it weren’t for one of our coaches one Tulsa trip telling me “ Don’t be so quick to ease their pain” I’d probably rush over a lot quicker than I do. It’s hard to explain to a child who hasn’t experienced enough life that you can’t love the process without falling in love with all the aspects of it. Without failure you can’t feel the depths of success and sometimes without the pain of falling short you can’t experience the extent of the growth awaiting you. As a parent it’s hard not to want to save them, not necessarily from the hurt of the loss, but from the way the mind can work following one. I worry about when they replay the match in their head, when they question if the work is worth the time, or when they question if the result is tied to their worth. I don’t want to save them from a loss, I want to save them from the untrue thoughts they can have following one. And then this is when Doug’s words rang true. I can’t save them from their own mind, they must do the work to rescue themselves. I can surround them with people who hold them accountable, but build them up. I can speak truth to them not just following a loss, but also a win, not just on the mat, but in our everyday life. I can give them examples of those further along in their journey who still experience doubt, struggle, insecurity, and loss despite the success they have experienced and the work they have put in. My job isn’t to ease the pain- its to prepare them for it. As my husband wrote- “No guarantee even when we do things right, we do things right to minimize regret on the other side. You have to be willing to get your heart broke over and over again. The goal isn’t to protect yourself- it’s to march forward in faith, increasing the depths of our trust and courage. The payoff may not show up for years but it will, it’s just not on our time.”