If at first you don’t succeed…

At the skating rink for my daughter’s school fundraiser and she starts crying. Now my first reaction was stop crying, you’re going to get the floor wet and people are going to fall!!! HAHA After that, I was like what could you possibly be crying about right now? She then told me she didn’t want to skate without the “walker” (little thingy kids use to balance themselves). She was embarrassed because she didn’t know how to skate and she didn’t want people to see her falling all over the place. She was holding onto my arm so tight, begging me to take her back to sit down. OK, now I know what you’re thinking…why didn’t I get her the walker? Well, they ran out. After I calmed her down I took her to the side to hold onto the wall and asked her to look at the rink. There were kids falling left and right. Parents were hitting that floor hard. I explained to my daughter that no matter how many times she fell she was going to get back up and keep trying. I explained to her that I would be right next to her the whole time to help her up. I had her look around and pointed out how many people were falling and laughing with their families. I explained that no matter how many times you fail at whatever you do, you have to laugh it off and try, try again.

As single mothers it’s difficult to always be the one to have these “life lesson moments” with our kids. We don’t really have anyone to share that responsibility with. We don’t have the other parent there to weigh the options on how we’re going to approach these moments. It can be a little intimidating because we don’t want to say the wrong thing. We don’t want to be the ones to steer them in the wrong direction. I know for me as a single mom, I’m scared that she will look back and be like “WTF was my mom thinking”. Why is there no fucking rule book that says “Follow these rules and your kid will turn out okay”? We have to come up with the game plan on the damn spot and that can be challenging. How many parents out there would’ve said suck it up and skate? No that’s not what we want for them. We want them to learn from these moments. So we bite the bullet and hope that we can come up with something not only that they can understand but that can make them feel better.

That night my daughter fell over a hundred times and we laughed about it. I fell too, so she could see that mom wasn’t perfect and that mom gets back up too when she falls. That night my daughter learned how to skate, by the end of the night she was skating on her own, without the dam walker! I hope when my daughters gets older and has some falls, she’ll remember this night. I hope when she finds herself in a moment of being scared of failure that she’ll think to herself mom says sometimes you just gotta Caya_Te & Live.