The Criterion for Success

I am getting older. Thankfully, so are my children. I love the craziness inherent in 4 year-old boys and the instability inherent all of us that comes to the fore so much more often in small children.

But my oldest child is 10 now. As with most of our parenting peers, we’ve tried pretty hard to give her opportunities to grow. Whether that means giving her as little help (and as much encouragement) as we can with her homework, or arranging music lessons or sports classes, we’ve tried to get her input on what’s interesting and do the research to find a good fit for her. In the last 2 years, she’s come into her own as a singer. She started group voice lessons, which doubled as a children’s choir, and really enjoyed it.

Once she realized she liked it, she went on the offensive. She fought (pretty hard) to sing a duet with an older girl for the church Christmas party in 2009 and nailed it in front of 500 people. She put together a solo for her choir’s performance and was excellent. She sings with me sometimes just for fun, and she can stay on the melody while I improvise a harmony.

Then, last Christmas, we got last-minute tickets to The Singing Christmas Tree. Aria had never been to the Keller auditorium before, and she’d never seen a professional-quality musical, either. She liked it. When we went NYC on vacation this year, we saw West Side Story on Broadway. Loved that, too.

So in our “it’s a new school year, what extracuriculars should we arrange for the kids?” conversation a few weeks ago, Katrina and I wondered aloud about the Singing Christmas Tree. With a little help from Google, we found the audition location and time, and that the paperwork to register was supposed to be in the day before. That was the first week of August. For a Dec performance. We submitted the paperwork, spoke to one of the audition judges, and were assured everything was ok.

The audition was last Monday. Aria and I showed up 15 minutes early, right on Tommy time. I always show up early for auditions. We sat and watched as more and more people filed into the room. After a short introduction by the children’s choir director, the parents were sent away, and I left my daughter to her first-ever solo audition. She was purely excited, no nerves at all. And she was very confident.

An hour later, I went back into the room to find her chatting on the hearth with 2 other girls. She was happy with her performance, and we went home, hoping for the best.

Tuesday, Katrina took the other kids out for the afternoon, and Aria chose to stay at home because her foot hurt. Katrina’s email was open on her computer, and an email popped up with news that Aria had been accepted. She called me at work to tell me the news. I cried. What else was there to do? My child had asserted her individual-ness and come out on top.

I am impressed by her maturity. She is ecstatic. I am ecstatic. I am very very pleased that she was chosen for the show. Half of the kids didn’t make it. But I am more proud that she tried. She found something she liked, stuck with it, found she was good at it, and became as accomplished as she possibly could become given the opportunities available to her. Then she saw an opportunity to stretch herself even more, an opportunity to take a risk of rejection. And she took it. That was the real milestone. This was not something her parents could protect her with or influence in any way. We had done what we could to prepare her, now it was out into the wide, cruel world to see how she flew, and if she could land.

Pondering this situation and how to define success, I came to conclude that success can be easily defined in this formula: success = (successful attempts) + (failed attempts). It is no more complicated than that. A life of unmitigated success is a life in which one didn't take many risks.

It is one of the singular challenges of parenthood to prepare our kids for the attempt:

1. the desire to make the attempt,

2. opportunities for an attempt

3. have the ability to self-evaluate the wisdom of the attempt,

4. have the courage to make the attempt

5. the equanimity to take success gratefully and gracefully

6. the maturity to work through a failure to prepare for another attempt

Despite our parenting, Aria made it through. I do consider this her first step into the wide world. But she’s ready for it. All I can say to her is: “You go, girl – you’ve got a lot of living to do.”