I will give you ten bones if you can guess which one of these young buckaroos in the picture below is my nephew. Boy in the plaid shirt seriously contemplating suicide before this all starts? Nope. How about the mini Hogwartz professor in the red jacket? Nope. Him neither. The beach bum who just barely made it in time from the morning's surf? No no no. He is none of those boys.
He is in fact the boy in the maroon shirt who looks wildly and totally possessed. You see him now, looking down, only the white of his eyes are showing? Cut it out, Eli, you're freaking us all out!
Here's a non possessed picture of him if you care. We call him Eli- Peli round these parts. I'm pretty crazy about him.
The beginning of the spelling bee. Fifty five unsuspecting speller victims.
And the bee goes on. Twenty some odd spellers left.
Spelling bees run deep in the Blackburn family. My parents encouraged all eight of us kids to enter the spelling bees. Some took to is better than others. I'm pretty sure Travis got out on purpose, whereas Phil went all the way to the state spelling bee to compete.
Here's the order of spelling bees, for those of you who have not been "bee versed". Study up! There will be a quiz at the end of this post!
Class spelling bee winner goes onto school spelling bee.
School spelling bee winner goes onto district spelling bee.
District spelling bee winner goes onto state spelling bee.
State spellng bee winner goes onto national spelling bee.
And to tell you the truth I don't even know what the national spelling bee winner gets. A scholarship maybe? All they know is they air it on ESPN, now that's legit!
Eli was competing at the district spelling bee on Saturday. Meaning that he had already won his class and school spelling bee. All 55 people there had already won their own school and class bees.
The words started out easy enough- deluxe, parfait, leotard. After the first round 11 kids were out. My heart absolutely broke when one kid got the word "seersucker." He spelled it searsucker. After they told him he was out and corrected the spelling he whispered into the microphone, "Ah, that was my first thought!" The kids try to hold it together on stage (The meanie spelling bee people make the kids stay on stage until the end of the round), but then when they get to their parents in the audience, they inevitably burst into tears. I watched seersucker's mom wrap him up in her arms as he let the waterworks flow. Something about watching 11 and 12 year old boys cry doesn't sit right with me. My heart absolutley broke and I watched the poor kid reduced to nothing but sobs.
Eli spelled on, eventually getting 14th place in the bee. He missed an impossibe word- one I can't even remember now because I had never heard it before. He seemed okay with the loss, but still sat sullenly in his chair not wanting to say much. I tried to say a few things to make him feel better, but I knew he just needed to be sad for awhile.
Here's the deal with spelling bees. They're stupid. All they mean is that you spelled a word wrong. I know that's all it is. Yet somehow they become much bigger than that, at least in my family. They become about intelligence and competition and pride. Yes, so much about pride. You study so hard for that spelling bee, practicing words day in and day out. You want it so much. And then you misspell one impossible word and it's all down the drain. Your time, your effort, your sacrifice.
I'll never forget when I lost my school spelling bee in fifth grade. I wanted it so much. I studied my heart out. I thought nothing but spelling bee for weeks on end. The great day arrived, my dad got off work and he arrived with my mom so together they could cheer me on. One o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday and there were both my parents, so excited for me.
I breezed through the first words- easy words like cupcake and jeep. Please, give me something challenging, I thought.
And then he did.
"Contestant #14, your word is pyramid."
"Pyramid!" I said confidently "P-"
Suddenly my mind froze. I had gone over this word literally a dozen times, but the thing with spelling bees is all of a sudden you can't remember how to spell a word you swear you know by heart. You trip up on the easiest ones, the ones that never gave you any trouble.
"R-y or r-y? I thought. "r-y or r-y? R-y or y-r?!?" Panic set in. The lights were glaring, the other kids tapping their shoes impatiently behind me.
"P-r-y-a-m-i-d." I spelled.
"I'm sorry, that is incorrect."
And just like that, spelling bee victor dream was shattered.
I remember trying to hide the tears back, but without much success. I wanted to win so badly! To go onto the district bee, to prove how friggin smart I was! To prove to my parents that they should be proud of me. "Look dad! Look mom! Look how good of a speller I am! I spell better than every single person in this school!"
Isn't childhood weird?
I cried all day. Seriously. I couldn't stop. There is no other way I can describe it, but that I felt my whole world was falling apart. I was ten. The spelling bee and making my parents proud meant everything to me.
I suppose it is for all these reasons that I couldn't really enjoy watching Eli's spelling bee on Saturday. Don't get me wrong, I cheered him on, and I held my breath when he went up to spell, but gosh I just couldn't enjoy a second of it. Every kid that got out broke my heart. Somehow I wanted them to all stay in. To never spell a word wrong and to all feel like they were winners, as cliche as that sounds.
Sometimes I wonder. I wonder about everything we do as children. Everything our parents put us through and everything we will inevitably put our own children through. Spelling bees, auditions, elections, etc. All ways to be publicly accepted or rejected. Is the competition good for kids?
To be totally honest, a lot of my childhood memories involve a form of rejection. Losing the spelling bee, getting cut from the volleyball team year after year (gosh I wanted so badly to be on that team) and the worst- losing school elections. Every year at my high school when the elections roll around I just duck my head and hope my students come out unscathed. Last year when one of my students lost, I wrote this piece about the cruelty of elections- the highest form of high school rejection.
According to the Daily Herald, a local newspaper that did a story on the spelling bee, the spelling bee is of great value to kids, whether or not they win because "It is not just memorizing spelling words, it is speaking in public, preparation and the discipline of study. That is a training ground for a career and academia."
All of this was spinning around in my head on Sunday when I read this article about raising resilient children. I was so interested in what it said about why children have to face these types of "trials"- even early on in life:
As children become resilient, they understand and accept these two facts. They see life as challenging and ever changing, but they believe they can cope with those challenges and changes. They view mistakes and weaknesses as opportunities to learn, and they accept that losing may precede winning.
As children develop resilience, they believe they can influence and even control outcomes in their lives through effort, imagination, knowledge, and skill. With this attitude, they focus on what they can do rather than on what is outside their control.
Another mark of resilience is to see great purpose and meaning in life and people. A sense of purpose will help our children avoid giving up, in spite of setbacks and pressure to do so. If our children are becoming more resilient, they will develop deep values that guide them: charity, virtue, integrity, honesty, work ethic, and faith in God. They will involve themselves in what is happening around them and opt for commitment to values rather than feel alienated and avoid struggle.
I certainly don't want no ninny-pinny crying whiny children, so.... sign them up for every sport/activity/dance possible? Put them through the gauntlet of childhood competition?
I suppose my question is this- if these types of setbacks are ultimately good for kids, and lead to happier, healthier adults, why does the pain linger? I lost that spelling bee 16 years ago, and when I think about it I can feel 10 year old Bonnie's pain. When I think about getting cut from the volleyball team I still feel 14 year old Bonnie's pain and when I remember losing my high school election I still feel 17 year old Bonnie's pain. Isn't that absurd? That as a happy, healthy, fully functioning adult that pain is still there? Lodged somewhere in my brain or my heart- never to go away completely?
Do you (or will you) enlist your kids in competitive sports/hobbies? Or should we all just let the kids play in the dirt and call it a day? And why are all life's questions so dang hard to answer? Do you have a painful childhood memory of "losing" in some way or another? Or are you all healed up like normal adults should be?
