The Downside of Getting Good at Anything
There is a cost
This is a continuation of my post Seven Simple Steps to Get Good at Anything. (Hint: read that first.)
“MOM!”
I expect to hear this level of panic from my younger daughters every once in a while, but not from my college-age son.
I located the source of his voice, and I slipped in through the teeny, cautious crack of an opening. My eyes opened wide. He had tried to give himself a fade haircut.
“Can you fix it?”
I learned how to scissor cut hair 28 years ago. And for the past 28 years, I've avoided using a hair clipper. Truth be told, hair clippers scared me. Using one, especially without any of the guards, seemed so final. Once a hair section is buzzed off, there is no going back. Yes, I know - hair grows back. But that takes time. And while you're waiting, your poor victim can look awfully funny.
In the present case, I couldn't do worse to him than what he had already done to himself. It didn't take too much courage at this point to pick up the hair clippers, so I gave it a whirl.
The cost
The downside of getting good at anything is the growing pains along the way.
Growing pains themselves are on a spectrum. Every once in a while, the growing pains are very minor inconveniences, so they're actually not true growing pains. Sometimes, we're the ones who have to suffer them. And at times, other people suffer.
Here are a few things I've learned along the way:
how to keep eleven people in clean laundry without losing my mind
how to form cursive and print letters with my left hand, so I could teach my sole lefty how to write
how to cut fades
In the case of laundry, the only growing pains were people needing to choose something else to wear. No real suffering here.
For lefty handwriting, I suffered the growing pains of learning how to form my letters.
For fade cutting, my son suffered the growing pains.
But in all three cases, there was no permanent damage. And the gains are real.
A gift to yourself
People tend to be patient with their physical improvement. Unless you're super unrealistic, you don't expect to put on 30 pounds of muscle in 2 weeks.
At the same time, people are often impatient with their mental improvement. Yet that patience is exactly what they need. Extend the same grace you give yourself on your physical improvement to your mental improvement too.
These days, I'm great at doing laundry. My little lefty (who is taller than I) has really nice, legible cursive and print handwriting. And fades?
A couple of weeks ago, my son asked for another fade. At the end, I got a "Hey, yeah, that looks pretty good. Thanks, Mom.” High praise!