A Letter to My Young(er) Mom Self: Report Cards and ACT Scores and Tryouts Don’t Matter

Dear Monique,

Whew. This love you feel for your elementary school-aged babies is intense, isn’t it?

But there is something else intense within you – a desire to safeguard them from the ups and downs of life.

You and Matt feel you have had to fight so darned hard to be where you are today financially. You want your kids to be OK – not just now, but when you are gone. And you want to be able to safeguard them against the need for so much luck.

Achievements as a Trust Fund ?

Since you don’t quite see the pathway to a massive trust fund (first generation college kids usually don’t), you try to give them a different inheritance – achievements. You want them to be excellent – academically and athletically and musically and in service.

I love you for this sort of focus and intensity, Young(er) Monique. There is so much love and good intention and fight in what you are doing.

But I also see you becoming borderline hysterical because one of your growing babies made a B in third grade social studies. Really? A B in social studies? That’s not so bad. It’s even kind of good, actually. And besides, that grade was based on a couple of foldables and an unnecessarily boring reading passage. If anything, that grade measures the ability of your child to follow other people’s directions.

We also need to talk for a minute about sports. Your kids enjoy sports – a lot. They love soccer and baseball and swim and basketball and football and volleyball. That’s not just you thinking they love it – they really do!

But I want you to know there will come a time when they will want to try other things, too. They will want to play drums and be in the diamond girls and all sorts of clubs. Your daughter will stun you by wanting to do beauty review! They will realize that competing to play college sports isn’t their top priority.

So enjoy the sports. Relish and reinforce the lessons. Take lots of pictures. Smile. Laugh. Treat these experiences like some of your very best memories – because they are. But don’t worry so much about every roster and tryout and race time – every practice that is missed because of a fever or a sprain or a sore pitching arm. It will all be OK.

Get Ready for Some Sci-Fi Craziness

Now, I am about to tell you something that is going to blow your 30-something mind. Are you ready? Sit down. No. Seriously. Sit. Down. This is beyond intense:

In the spring of 2020 – when your kids are buzzing along in their first and second years of high school, a pandemic is going to completely derail their lives and yours. I know. I know. It sounds like something out of a low budget sci-fi movie, doesn’t it? But unfortunately, my sweet and naive younger mom self, it is real.

Right before the pandemic hits, you will still be obsessing over achievements in spite of yourself.

One of your children will make an actual C on their report card in their very best subject because they lost some papers. Or didn’t complete them? Or never got them? Or got them and the teacher lost them? (Unlikely, but possible.) You will lose your MIND about this C. You will be convinced that it is going to ruin their chances of securing money for college, and you will rant at them about the oppressive nature of student loans and how this one grade could negatively affect their lives. You will be a hot mess. And you will know it, but you will still rant.

Then, the pandemic will hit full throttle. You and your little family – and two crazy dogs and a parakeet – will be sheltering in place at home – for weeks and weeks. The last nine weeks of school will happen online, and there will be a grading scale that really makes a lot of the focus on schoolwork seem downright absurd.

You will read news reports at night, when everyone else is asleep, that caution about things like the likelihood that distance learning will have to continue – possibly through your older child’s senior year. There may be no high school sports. No band. No academic awards assemblies or face-to-face service projects. No internships or exclusive summer camps.

During the Shelter in Place order, your daughter will come to you, talking about the ACT Prep you have repeatedly emphasized. And all of a sudden you will look at her and realize: It doesn’t freaking matter. Little of it matters – not much, anyway.

What Matters Has Shifted

Because all of a sudden, colleges are cutting deals with kids to get them to even come to college. And because it’s likely all college learning will be distance learning for months on end, it feels like where they go doesn’t even matter. It might even be beneficial to just take a year off.

One of your kids will begin thinking that they aren’t sure they even want to go to college at all, and this will suddenly seem very reasonable, because who knows what anyone at all is even training and preparing for anymore? How do you prepare for this wild new world? How do you spend four years preparing for a career when you don’t even know which careers will be sustainable?

And that is when it will hit you, my dear, well intentioned younger self: you were focusing on the wrong lessons. Because what matters in this pandemic – and on the other side of it – is that your kids have healthy coping skills. You will look at your carefree child – the one you shouted at to try to make them understand the horrors of earning a C – and you will realize that this carefree nature is actually a freaking superpower – not a deficit.

You will all but weep as you realize that what matters now is the relationship you have with your kids – that there is love and mutual respect and mercy between you.

You will look at your kids and you will see that all those sporting lessons – and the school ones, too – were just ways to learn resilience and coping skills. You will recognize that more than grades, they need to know how to pivot and learn new things. They need to be creative and innovative – to think beyond what’s right in front of them. They need to be able to do their own research and analyze the validity of statements that are made in the media and beyond.

Signs You Will Be OK

One night, around the dinner table (you will eat meals together again during the pandemic, too. Crazy, right?), they will look at you and say something like, “We will be ok. We aren’t worried. We will adjust. We just don’t want more people – even people we don’t know – to die.” These words will touch you at your very core. You will be so darned proud of them – prouder than any achievement could ever make you.

They will have the best coping skills! They will do videoconferences with their friends and their boyfriends/girlfriends. They will play HORSE and do church youth group scavenger hunts virtually. They will create their own schedules, where they are sure to make time for work and exercise and talks with friends and time with you, too. And you will know, with so much gratitude in your heart, that they learned what they truly needed- in spite of you.

It’s going to be OK, Young(er) Monique. THEY are going to be OK. But it won’t be for any of the reasons you thought. Enjoy those sweet, growing people of yours. And help lead your family with heart and grace and love and strength. (Also, invest in Zoom. And Charmin. And hand sanitzer. Seriously. Don’t ask. Just do it.)

Also, I love you. And you are enough. You always were – and so are your kids.