Instead of 'Just Being Nice', I'd like to 'Just be Honest'...

This has been rattling around in my head for quite some time, now. My instinct is, of course, to always shelter and protect my sweet babies from heartache, hurt feelings, failure and any obstacle that they may encounter. My heart wants to make life perfect and easy for them. My head wants them to fail, get their hearts broken and struggle. What I need them to know, more than anything, is that I will always be here to comfort them and care for them when they fall...because they will fall...but I can not get back up for them and until they fall, they will never know how strong their wings are. And so I will let them fall...only to watch them soar.

The cycle of 'political correctness' has gotten way out of hand. Of course, this is just my opinion.

As a collective, we spend so much time thinking about and choosing our words so that we are kind to everyone and dissecting every thought to determine who it **MIGHT** offend that we are left with nothing to say lest we inadvertently hurt someone's feelings. In the same moment, we have now have a society that can't handle negative feelings or, God forbid, failure. No learning how to accept constructive criticism or realize that whatever was said that hurt your feelings may not have been intended that way at all. So instead of building strong personalities that can take the ups of life as well as the downs, we can only take the ups. As a friend of ours likes to say, "We've built a generation of wussies." Yep. I agree. Not everyone is a winner. Not everyone is good at this, that or the other thing. People have different strengths, weaknesses, opinions, lifestyles, situations and feelings. And that's good. Because if we were all good at everything, life would mighty boring and there would be no motivation to improve anything. There is truly no way to build a society where everyone is happy all the time. That is how we grow, develop and build character...but only if we are willing to face and are put in the path of adversary. Failure, heartache, and difficult situations all teach us lessons...we should learn from them.

You'd think I was talking mostly about the kids. You know...everyone gets a trophy, everyone makes the team, everyone scores points and so on and so on. But the sad part is that it isn't just the kids. It's the adults, too. We're fond of saying 'I really just want to hear the truth'...but what they really mean is 'I really just want to hear the truth as long as you are saying something nice about me, complimenting me or telling me how great I am.' And in this cycle of always being nice and only sharing positive thoughts, we have also lost the the ability to be truly sorry for the impact of our own actions or words, whether they were intended to be harmful or simply inadvertently hurt someone.

Sorry, that's not how it works. Nobody is perfect all the time but in a world full of rose colored glasses, mine must be broken. I am bossy, a compulsive planner (which I fail to see how that is a negative, but I know it annoys the crap out of some folks), outspoken...usually without a 'politically correct' filter, loud, moody sometimes (yep, I know it...and I admit it), I hate talking on the phone and I am unwilling to compromise when it come to things that impact my children...just to name a few of my flaws. :) I've tried out for sports teams and been cut, I've applied for jobs and been turned down, I've joined clubs/organizations and been ignored, I endured my fair share of teasing through my school years, I struggled in math (and any science class that involved equations), I've lost friends over decisions that I've made regarding my children, I've had my  heart broken, I've felt 'left out' (as a kid and even as an adult) and yet I am happy. I love my life, my family and my friends. Yeah, things suck every now and then. But going through the ups and downs of life is what has made me the person that I am now. I don't care if I have to use a calculator for what others (ahem, my Hubby) consider simple math. I don't care if you don't like that I give my honest opinion when you ask me something...if you don't want an unfiltered response, don't ask in the first place. I've dealt with those things, learned from them, improved myself personally and moved on to bigger, better and more exciting things in my life.

I remember sitting outside my high school gym waiting for the lists to be posted of which girls made which cheerleading squad (betcha didn't know I was a cheerleader, huh?).  There were so many of us and only about half as many spots as there were girls. Nobody was guaranteed...didn't matter if you cheered last year, you tried out again every year. I was good at it. I was loud (ha, shocker), knew the routines and the movements by heart, my movements were sharp and crisp and I knew I'd remembered to smile the whole time. But I was not a tumbler. I knew that this was a drawback for me. I could lift the other girls up like nobody's business but when it came to flinging myself end over end down the mat, it just wasn't happening...cartwheels and round-offs were the extent of my gravity-defying abilities. I imagine that all of the other girls sitting there waiting were also focused purely on what they considered their drawback and so we waited....tense and fidgeting...for our coaches to post those lists in the window of the gym doors...where they would remain for the whole next day, effectively announcing to the whole school who had not made the cut.

The point of this story is two-fold. First of all, I knew my weaknesses. Can we say that of today's children...or even adults? Second, when they finally (3 minutes late, mind you) taped up the papers with each squad's new members two things happened...1/2 the crowd of girls squealed in delight and the other 1/2 fought back tears. And you know what the squealing 1/2 of us did? We comforted the other half. Because in the course of learning failure, we'd learned compassion and because next season that could be us not making the cut for the basketball team that was one of the gal's true strengths and we had been taught to support each other through both triumph and adversary. And so the cycle would go...some failing, some prevailing but all supporting each other.

That is soooooo not how the cycle works today and I don't know when it changed but we aren't protecting anyone by making everyone a winner. We aren't helping anybody by singing only praises. We aren't teaching anything by trying to build a society where everyone is friends. The fact is that we aren't all cut out to be friends with everyone. Polite, civil and RESPECTFUL? Yes. But not necessarily the kind of friends that you invite to your home, meet for dinner or drinks or choose to hang out with on your personal time. We help each other by trying, failing, supporting, trying again, prevailing, supporting and so on. You can't have true success without a few failures.