Dear A team parent

Dear A team parent

I am writing to you today to tell you that I am ok, my husband is ok and my B team kid is doing fine too.  We are happy, the kids are enjoying whatever activity we they are participating in today.  All in all, all is well with the world.

We get up, we have breakfast, we drop the kids at school, we go to work, we get home when the sun has already set.  We chat, we have dinner, we talk about our days, the highs and the lows, we go to bed and tomorrow we do it all again.

I don’t know where some of you get the energy to spend your daylight hours at school.  It must be exhausting trying to hold down a meaningful job, raise happy well balanced kids, geared for the challenges that they will face and to still spend an inordinate amount of time at school?  You must never sleep, I admire you, hats off.  You are truly super human beings.  I get tired just looking at the sheer volume of WhatsApp’s you manage to fire off in a day, for multiple kids in multiple grades.  You are the organisers, you know the teachers by name, you ensure that the rest of us are always aware of what is plotting. If not for some of your late night messages, my kids would have missed some important things! 

Still, we, we are ok, we tell our kids school is but a small part of life, and whilst it is important to always give your best, failure is ok too.  We tell our kids that the most important thing about any extramural activity is to have fun, for one day soon you will be a grown up, and you will have to spend your daylight hours earning your keep.  You might have to wear dresses and suits and spend days in meetings instead of on the hockey field or tennis court or taking an art lesson.  So even if you are exceptionally bad at your chosen activity, carry on with it, have fun.

Our kids might end up in the A team, in the B teams, or not make the team at all.  This too is perfectly all right, because after all, we are sending them to the best school we can afford to enable them to go off to study, we are saving as much as we can, so that we can give them opportunities far exceeding those we were given, and we were given many opportunities along the way.  We want them to be happy, well balanced, we don’t want to put any more pressure on them than the world will in time to come. 

We want our kids’ biggest problems as primary school kids to be whether they wear sweaters to tennis practice and not whether they made it into the elite tennis squad.  If they do end up making it we will all be ecstatic, but we will also remind them that if you no longer enjoy playing whatever sport you chose, we have somehow failed them, and we need to get back to basics and we need to get them to a place where they are smiling again.

So dear A team parent, you do not need to look away when you see me and my kid at school, don’t feel bad for us, for not making the cut, we are ok, we really are.  We are having fun, we are making memories.  We are trying to raise happy kids, not perfect kids, for when we look back on our lives, we too have been blessed with parents that raised well balanced individuals, and for that, we thank them.