We have two girls: Twelve and sixteen years old. Their personalities couldn’t be more different.
The younger one is very ambitious and annoyingly determined at times. She is the one who lays out her sports clothes, shoes, knee pads and water bottle the night before the volleyball tryouts at school and the one who reminds you to be ready to drive her to gymnastics practice.
The older one is rather laid back. I have to remind her at times that her swim practice starts soon and she might consider eating some food or putting her bathing suit on. To be fair, that was her about a year ago. Now, she is way more responsible and independent. But she usually only fulfills the minimum requirements and is a bit too lazy for anything else.
Both of them are very ambitious about school though, The older one even more so. Anything less than a 4.0 GPA is not acceptable. Considering the fact that you won’t be able to get into a good college with less than that, we are very happy that they are being resolved about getting excellent grades.
Anyway, last weekend I basically forced my sixteen-year old daughter to participate in a fun triathlon at my gym. It was simultaneously a fundraiser for our middle school. My daughter, her friend and I had done the same race five years ago and ever since we were displayed on the banner outside of the gym advertising for the event. This year my daughter and her friend were even on the flyer for the tri and you could spy her faces all over the gym. That’s why I thought – silly fun mother I am – it’d be great to do the triathlon again and raise money for the school. Furthermore, there are so many more benefits of doing a race together with others.
My daughter was disgusted when I told her that I signed us up. “OMG, mom, I really don’t want to do it. I have to get up early every weekday and I just want to sleep in on Saturday.” Too bad, even though she kept complaining for a few days, I dragged her to the gym on Friday afternoon to pick up the race packet and to get her fitted on the bike. Whoops! You could see a little bit of excitement on her face…
We got up on time and arrived even a bit early. There was still time to chat with teachers from school and my daughter was happy to meet her former track coach. The race itself went smoothly and I enjoyed it a lot. My daughter started two minutes behind me but expectedly passed me on the swim. We had two stationary bikes next to each other and we were able to chat during the cycling. I started the run earlier and finished a bit before my daughter. The run was a bit of challenge for us since we really hadn’t trained but did this triathlon kind of cold turkey*.
Do you know where the expression "cold turkey" comes from? Read here.
But it wasn’t too bad after all. We shared the experience of the post-race high and it was awesome! My daughter swam the fastest time overall, I was first in my age group (ok, there were only three people 😉 and we were both really happy. The sun came out, we sat in the hot tub together, had some breakfast and a really good talk about what she wants to do after school. We unfortunately missed the awards ceremony, but I won a spa treatment in the raffle and the photographer took a really nice picture of us.
It was a wonderful Saturday morning and I’m so glad I pushed my daughter to do this with me. Being a parent can be exhausting, coping with everyday life itself is tough at times, that’s why it’s easy to avoid an additional confrontation with your tween or teenager. But the triathlon convinced me once again that it is important to sometimes make your children, or even teenagers, do things they don’t want to do. They might make good on the experience or might have a bad experience, but they will definitely learn something from it and broaden their horizons in some way.
Let’s keep pushing them. Amen.
