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Bravey(8)
Author: Alexi Pappas

       Is it such a big deal for a kid to eat raw lemons or spill pancake batter? I would have preferred to learn the hard way. But I’m sure that even if my Folgers tin did overflow, one of the moms would have materialized with a damp paper towel to scoop up all the raw batter before I could eat it, as I would have done if left to my own devices. Being surrounded by these moms made me feel less capable. I didn’t like being watched so closely, so suddenly, so constantly.

   My mom never watched me like these moms did. In our house, my mom was the one who needed to be observed and helped, not me. Most times when my mother and I were actually in the same space, which in itself was rare, she seemed either to not realize I was there or to just not care. In the rare moments when my mom did look at me, she usually looked through me. We were cohabitants of the space and she was going to keep being her while I kept being me. This was our understanding. And even though I did want a mom, a real mom, I also liked the freedom I had. I was able to try things like scooping generous handfuls of wet dog food into my mouth or killing dozens of backyard slugs. How do you understand the gravity and guilt of killing slugs you collected in a shoebox and sprinkled with salt if you are stopped mid-mission by someone who already knows better?

       All the most important lessons in life we have to learn for ourselves. The sooner we realize this the better. How are you supposed to learn anything if you aren’t allowed to try things? How do you know what’s on the other side of a cliff if you’re never allowed close enough to peek over the edge? In a way, my mom and I were both allowed to be reckless around each other. She made me feel capable for reasons I still can’t fully explain or justify. I don’t mean to glorify her illness, I’m just saying that someone as tortured inside her own head as my mother was doesn’t have the capacity to insert themselves into someone else’s, for better and for worse. For better because when I was around her I had the unusual freedom to push the boundaries of my curiosity, and for worse because I knew if I asked her for help I wouldn’t get it.

 

* * *

 

 

   My dad grew up abroad, in Saudi Arabia, part of a Greek American family working in the oil industry, and he was independent from a very young age. American school in Saudi Arabia stopped after middle school, so he went to an all-boys boarding school in New Jersey for high school and then to Brown University. He went alone—even though he was close to his parents, they never traveled to the States to visit him and they did not come to his graduations. My dad found his way just as I had to find my way, and it never occurred to him to hover over me like the Girl Scout moms did. It simply wasn’t in his parenting vocabulary.

       My friends’ parents, on the other hand, had attention to spare. I learned this from countless playdates at their houses where their moms were not only present but active participants, enhancing the playdate with craft projects and snacks. I rarely had friends over because my dad worked so much, and even when he was home I never liked other people seeing the waist-high mountains of newspapers that covered the majority of our floor, or the general lack of rules and supervision at our house. My friends loved it because my house felt like a mystical playland with vague parental authority on the periphery—the polar opposite of their regimented existences of plastic sippy cups and time-outs. To my friends, my house symbolized freedom. To me, my friends’ houses symbolized a curated life that I both haughtily reviled and desperately craved.

   I do believe there’s a healthy spectrum of parental attention that exists, with my dad closer to one end of the spectrum and a helicopter parent on the opposite end. But here’s the thing: On the helicopter side of the spectrum, at its very worst, a parent’s personal ego can become wrapped up in his or her kid’s life. They see their kid as a reflection of themselves and they can’t bear to let the kid out of their grip.

   As an adult, I so often notice parents telling their kids that their hair looks so good this way or that, or how they might try pushing their nail cuticles down just a tad, or a million other small things that seem like no big deal but are actually just one of a million small ways to make a kid feel ever so much more under their parent’s thumb. Parents aren’t meant to protect their kids from failure or heartbreak or being ugly—those things are all a natural part of growing up and figuring things out. I get that it can be hard for parents to let go in this way and watch their kid flounder. It’s not a very pretty sight. Maybe for a parent, the hardest thing to do is to let their kid fail. But I believe that reducing a child’s pain to nothing is far worse.

       I see often this dynamic at play in the running world. In Mammoth Lakes, my high-altitude training camp, there’s a father-son duo that I see at the gym. The dad stalks behind his high-school-aged son, pushing him to do one more rep, and the kid has a permanent scowl on his face. I’m sure the dad feels very proud of his son. And who knows what the son feels, probably some mixture of pressure and pride. I’m sure the son is a very fast runner. But this sort of dynamic is rarely sustainable. If a kid only knows how to thrive under the guiding hand of a parent, however eager and well-intentioned the parent is, then they might be good at running in high school and get recruited to a top running college—but when they get there and are suddenly on their own, their whole world implodes. I personally witnessed this type of saga unfold numerous times during my NCAA career. There’s a huge difference between opening doors for your kid and pushing them through.

   My dad never told me to go to bed early, never wrote one of my essays for me, and never sat me down and told me not to drink. He didn’t necessarily know that my friends and I were sneaking into Cal college parties or having bonfires on Ocean Beach, but he made sure I always had a safe way to get around and a safe place to stay. It was up to me to bounce within those barriers. I know my dad would have stepped in more forcefully had he seen me being unsafe or trending in a dangerous direction, but since I wasn’t, my decisions were up to me. He would have been fine if I got B’s in school—I was the one who wanted all A’s. He would have been fine if I stopped playing sports forever—I was the one who committed to running competitively in college. I know that if I had felt even a drop of pressure from my dad when I stopped running my junior year of high school and played soccer instead, I might have done something that wasn’t in my best long-term interest. I might have burned out as a runner and never become an Olympian. It’s not that my dad didn’t care about running. If I’d dropped out of running and spent my time doing nothing, he would have intervened. But when I did stop running partway through high school and focused on soccer instead, he saw I was happier on the soccer field and left it at that. He didn’t care that I had more competitive potential as a runner—he just cared that I was busy and safe. Maybe he knew that, like my mom, I was always hardest on myself. It wouldn’t have helped to be pushed. He never pushed. He bent over backward to ensure that I had opportunities—in middle school my dad would drive me from soccer practice to softball practice to cross-country meets, shielding me with a towel as I changed from one uniform into the next—but when we got to the activity, he let me do my thing. Whether I won a race or crawled across the finish line (both have happened multiple times), we’d go out for late-night pizza all the same. Since my dad’s ego never stood between me and my failures and successes, my failures and successes were entirely my own. I owned them, all of them.

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