to my daughter
May 20, 2016 § 5 Comments
I don’t know what this moment will feel like years from now, but today rejection feels intimately unjust and impossibly unfair.
For the second time in nine months you have been rejected for a voluntary leadership role, a peer mentoring experience that would have placed you in a position of service. It’s a responsibility in which you would have excelled, but where integrity and character felt second to chance.
You were so intentional in your second application, so thoughtful and cautious in your effort that I thought for certain fate would acknowledge your resilience with opportunity. Perhaps we were wrong to feel confident, but I cannot imagine teaching you to practice for disappointment.
I could tell you that life isn’t always fair or reassure you that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes things don’t work out and all we are left to choose is how we handle ourselves in the face of disappointment.
I’ll confess there was a panicked moment of desperate temptation to rearrange events to conspire for joy; to temper emotions with action. Except I didn’t want to puppeteer a false sense of accomplishment for a hollow achievement or undermine a decision that should be made independent of parental interference.
Then, when you bemoaned those veteran ambassadors who sometimes act unkind, I realized you might have been spared a complicated company in which you could have felt a burden to belong greater than a call to service.
Life isn’t fair. Sometimes things happen for a reason.
Here’s what you can do: advocate for those small improvements you felt passionately could strengthen the integrity of the program.
Encourage those who make the decision to share how they eliminate candidates and to identify what they look for in student applications. Allow the process to become a learning opportunity that nurtures growth.
Propose limited terms so that more children have an opportunity to participate.
Let the school know that you think children should be told in person not on paper that they were not chosen. I love the generosity of that opinion.
Each of these small changes have the potential to create a legacy beyond spirit days and building tours.
Most importantly, keep yourself open to possibility when you most want to close yourself off against further disappointment.
Love, Mom
scribblechic 
And she will look back and realise everything happened as it should Marie…..and, it may have been only for her to suggest those things and they do happen.
She will bring change, to herself and others, and that can only be a beautiful thing because they all bring more love and wisdom towards a lovely heart that is being created each and every moment 🙂
When I think of the time she spent laboring over her answers, her hopes mounting with every neatly shaped letter of intention, I am most proud that she tried… again.
And it will be the making of her…be very proud Marie 🙂
I hope she realizes she can be a voluntary leader, ambassador, mentor, without being in any particular group that claims to be all of those. It sounds like she is already made of the right stuff for it.
A week or two ago my daughter’s school initiated a spirit game that directed students to perform acts of kindness in a tic-tac-toe format. Three acts to win. I found my daughter’s game card stuffed in her binder; when asked about it she said “if someone is acting nice to win a game, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the lesson?”
I think that’s precisely why the second rejection felt so personal; caring for others gives her a sense of purpose. She just needed a minute to remember that loosing an opportunity shouldn’t undermine her sense of self.