Totally Winning!

 

Photo by Sarah Manriquez, Paris Photographics

I won a medal. 

It’s an award for being oldish. And fast-ish. female-ish.

It says so right on the back: “1^st Place 50-54 women”.  On the front it notes that the event in which I was fastish, oldish, and female-ish was the 2022 Equinox Marathon (adding, for an added dose of accurate-yet-arbitrariness, that a marathon is 26 miles, 385 yards).

Totally winning!

For all that humans are clearly way into “winning”, we’re terrible at defining what it means, what is doesn’t mean – and whether it’s okay to care.

As a little kid, I got used to losing.  And losing again.  And again.  This wasn’t because I’m a total loser – although, yeah – but because I was the younger kid in a family that like to play challenging games such as bridge, Facts in Five, and no-holds-barred croquet, and didn’t pull punches for lame excuses such as “being six years old”. 

So I lost. In my impressionable little mind, the significance of winning was rife with ambiguity.  Based on my primary role models, success was something to be loudly celebrated, and also something to be downplayed to the point of secrecy.

I can still picture the grinning flourish with which my dad would play a 50-point-bonus bingo in Scrabble – ha, take that, third grade opponent!  Every time his preferred baseball team scored a run, he’d leap off the couch or out of his stadium seat in a spontaneously dorky happy dance.  At the bowling alley, he’d hop and lean as his ball rolled, as if kinetically controlling it from afar, brow furrowing deeply if it spun awry.

Conversely, my mom stressed that competitiveness was gauche.  When I received my first standardized test results at the age of eight, she allowed me to see them only after I made a reticently British promise: “You mustn’t tell any of the other children your scores.” This proved awkward, given that other kids had been given no such instructions; I ended up feeling weird and ashamed. 

Outside my own family, the social rules were equally confusing.  Kids cared about winning to wildly varied degrees. I found that I usually won at games like Rack-o and Mastermind, and lost badly at games that were clearly way cooler, like dodgeball – where other kids’ competitiveness tended to leave me covered in welts.  Plus, other families had very different rules from my own.  I was mystified when I realized little kids were often allowed to win.  To me, this was cheating, and thus Not Fair.  Being Not Fair was bad. 

But… what is fairness?  This confused me as a child, which is not surprising, given that it still confuses me – and possibly everyone else.

A pause from facetiousness: there’s a much bigger question buried in here about societal fairness in all its forms, built from multi-generational evil, greed, oppression, and arrogance. We humans theoretically want to create fairness, but at the same time it’s clear that we don’t; history demonstrates just how badly we’ve done. I can’t pretend that I’m doing justice to such a big topic in a brief and flippant blog post, but at the same time, it lurks beneath everything, and to ignore it is to perpetuate it.

In an effort to create fairness, children’s sports and academic challenges are usually divided by age or grade level. Most adult sports are divided by gender, and some also have age categories – although in the Iditarod, for example, the genders and ages of the musher and the canine athletes are considered immaterial. Boxing and wrestling have weight classes.  Adult cerebral competitions such as crossword championships are not divided by age, gender, height, or weight, and there is no Jeopardy category for people like me who seem kinda smart but are irretrievably terrible at Jeopardy. 

Everyone would agree that a chess tournament in which kindergarteners had to go head-to-head with Grandmasters would be… uncomfortable.  But things get weird when someone has to decide where the cutoffs should be, because all the pertinent variables exist on a continuum -- youth, old age, weight, height, and (yes, newsflash) gender.  Plus, the expected “handicaps” associated with youth, age, weight, height, gender, and other factors varies widely. The basketball player with the greatest physical advantage doesn’t look much like the ideal gymnast or jockey.

When one of my kids turned 13 and suddenly found that she had to compete in the “adult” category at rock climbing competitions, the boundary was abrupt and artificial.  Being small for her age, she couldn’t reach many of the holds intended for people over five feet tall.  It wasn’t “fair”.  But, as she and I discussed, it also wouldn’t have been “fair” if adult-sized 13-year-olds competed as children. There was no perfectly “fair” solution.  There never is. 

Life is not fair.  Has everyone had this conversation with every kid, everywhere?  

Some parent-child discussions of unfairness -- spawned by racism, sexism, violence, and fear -- should never, ever have to occur.  This is not the kind of unfairness that’s inevitable; it’s the kind that’s insidious.

As for the inevitable kind – I now realize that both my parents taught me that life is not fair, but in different ways.  My mom’s perspective was that life wasn’t fair, so I should chalk up any victories to that unfairness, and take no credit for them.  In fact, I should be vaguely embarrassed by them.  My dad’s perspective was that life wasn’t fair, and thus I shouldn’t whine about the bowling ball being too heavy when he beat me, his 45-pound opponent. “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools,” he told me.  Really, he did. 

As a teen, I continued to excel at academics but lose at sports – unless you count garnering the third-place points in unpopular high school track meet events (3000 meters, shot-put) in which only three girls participated. The scattering of other times I’ve “placed” in sporting events have all been equally suspect.  A triathlon in which there were only three female participants?  A dawn to dusk winter solstice run at forty below zero in which I was the only woman to keep trotting for all three hours and forty-one minutes?  Yeah.

These “wins” felt like participation trophies – those “thanks for showing up” prizes that didn’t become common until I was an adult.  Curmudgeons waxed pompous about how such awards would make an entire generation – the millennials – weak, lazy, and coddled.  Every generation of old farts says this about “young people today” and (I remind myself as I age into old-fart-ness) each generation is wrong.  Participation trophies were born out of a noble effort to remove emphasis from crushing the opponent. They stemmed, albeit indirectly, from a growing societal discomfort with the much larger win/lose unfairness that has poisoned us across centuries.  As such, I applaud them.  But they didn’t work out.  Even six-year-olds knew that participation trophies didn’t convey pride of accomplishment – not because winning was everything, but because some other metric was necessary to replace it, and “merely existing” was not sufficient.

This shiny new marathon medal can easily be downgraded to “participation trophy”.  There were only twelve people in my narrow age/gender group.  There were nine women in the older 55-59 group, and two of them beat my time – one by a whopping 26 minutes. And the fastest women in the race, taking 8^th and 12^th places overall, against all ages and genders, were two 42-year-old women. In other words, someone named Meg, only eight years younger than me, beat me by more than an hour and half.  When Meg crossed the finish line, I was eight miles back, bumbling off Ester Dome while eating a lint-covered cookie from my pocket.

This is where my brain goes, when there is some hint that I might have won something – I automatically figure out why the win is meaningless.  Is it a victory if other people got sick?  Got hurt?  Went home?  Never showed up in the first place?  

I learned this tactic from my mother, but this outlook is by no means unique to her; .Jay holds even more firmly to this perspective than I do.  He managed to be embarrassed and in denial when he won the Iditarod Trail Invitational, a thousand-mile human-powered race across the wintery wilderness of Alaska.

It's easier for me to argue against this mindset when it’s put forth by others.  I mean, come on, Jay!  Celebrate a little!  I want my family and friends to feel joy, pride, inspiration, thrill, and adventure when they succeed.  I especially want this for my kids.

What I don’t want, though, is for them to fall into the trap that limited my dad’s joy: wanting someone else to lose.  When I was about twelve, Dad forbade me to read the dictionary because he didn’t want me to improve my Scrabble game “unfairly”.  Um… Dad?  Being so dead-set on winning at a board game that you want your own child not to learn, and to do badly is… not a good look for a middle-aged man. 

Nor do I want anyone to fall into the trap that limited my mom’s joy: being so socially averse to the pitfalls of the win-lose dynamic that success can never be celebrated, or even noted. 

As a child, I managed to extract the worst aspects of each parent’s viewpoint.  I concluded that neither parent was proud of me, and that I should not be proud of myself. 

Totally winning! 

As an adult – and particularly as a parent – I’m realizing (a bit late) that I need to flip this upside down. I can reject my mom’s restraint while embracing her fierce sense of equality and social justice. I can reject my dad’s pettiness while embracing his joy. 

I want this for my kids.  I want them to see their own privilege and advantages with absolute clarity.  I want them to try to create fairness wherever it’s possible to do so.  I want them to understand that “winning” doesn’t mean someone else is a “loser”.  Success is not pie – or if it is, it’s the kind of pie that you can bake more of, and share.  If we’re all competing, we’re ultimately doing so not against one another, but against our past and present selves, and our past and present aspirations.  Everyone can increase their Scrabble score, reduce their marathon time, or learn to bake a more delicious pie. I want my kids to seek out and celebrate other people’s successes.  But I also want to them to celebrate their own successes – to grin the way my dad used to grin, and leap off the couch to do a happy dance.

I want this for myself, too – because why not?  My “victory” over other individuals who happen to be my age and gender is silly and misleading, but my time in the crazy-hilly Equinox Marathon was the fastest I’ve ever run, in my fourteen attempts over the past twenty-one years.  I was faster because I trained just a bit more, and tried just a bit harder, and sometimes even remembered to stretch.  I challenged myself, and I felt good about that -- and maybe it’s okay to admit it. 

Totally winning!

I won a medal.  It means something, and I appreciate that.  It also means absolutely nothing – and I like that about it, too.

Mauve

And the cool kids are… [wait for it… wait for it…]

…the people in the caps with a “B”! 

A picture of a pair of socks will also do.  But not, for heaven’s sake, a picture of a bird. After all, as everybody knows, the world is divided into “Us” and “Them” – and these distinctions are as immutable as the bad hotdogs at ballparks.

I grew up watching baseball, and loving every ponderous inning of spitting, swinging, and scratching.  Even though my interest waned with adolescence and distance from Shea Stadium, every time I see a ramped-up Facebook post about how Our Team is clobbering, trouncing, or flattening Their Team, I want to grin, kick back, and second-hand-enjoy the illogical bliss of these die-hard fans.  I want to -- but I stumble. Sometimes sports-hoopla seems like a too-potent reminder of the Hatfields-and-McCoys or Montagues-and-Capulets side of human nature. 

In elementary school, my compatriots and I enjoyed one day each spring known as Field Day.  Field Day was a competition featuring useful skills such as Everyone Gets Crushed by the Bigger Kids During Tug-o-War.  Somehow, our gym teachers persuaded us that this was a Really Big Deal.  We practiced for the event for several weeks, during which time every child in the school became increasingly rabid about who was Red and who was Blue. 

This was huge.  It put friendships on hold.  It put everything on hold.  By the eve of the Big Event, instead of actually running around and playing at recess, kids faced off against each other for screaming matches.  “Extra, extra, read all about it, Blue’s gonna win, and there’s no doubt about it!”  I have no idea why we all thought we were Depression-era newsboys, but we had good lungs.  REALLY good lungs.  Honestly, it’s surprising that the playground aides weren’t either homicidal or suicidal – although the one we all referred to as “Prune Face” may have required heavy medication.

Even at the time – as I participated in the screeching, and hunted through my third-grade wardrobe to make sure I wore clothes of the right color, and ONLY the right color – part of me knew that the whole thing was weird, trumped-up, and perhaps even a bit disturbing.  Sure, we didn’t metamorphose into the Crips and the Bloods, but some kids did get mean.  Why was I yelling at my own sister?  Well, ok, yelling at my sister was kind of normal.  But why was I antagonistic toward my best friend?  Why did this antipathy feel as it was somehow beyond my conscious control?

You say that folks all over Boston are partying in the streets because people whom they don’t even know are pretty good at whacking a little white ball with a stick?  Uh-huh. Yup.  I’ve delved a bit into psychology literature that elucidates just how shallow and war-mongering Homo sapiens can be, if given the chance to put on different-colored hats and shriek imprecations at one another. It ain’t pretty.

Of course, at some level, the feud of the Reds versus the Blues was merely competition.  Even as a kid I was plenty familiar with the idea that most games had winners and losers.  Sometimes the losers were bummed enough to sweep the whole Candyland board off the table and stalk away in a huff.  I wasn’t one of those kids; as the younger sibling, I had to be relatively ok with losing.  I lost at Facts in Five, I lost at chess, and I lost at bridge.  In fact, I was amused by the fact that bridge scores were officially – officially! – noted as “We” and “They”.  I always kind of wanted to be on the “We” team, but I knew it didn’t really make a difference.  It wasn’t forever.  It wasn’t real.  It was a label, but it didn’t define me.

That, of course, is the crux of the matter.  Competition is not intrinsically bad.  Differences are not bad.  Temporary labels aren’t bad.  Unchecked divisiveness, however, can fester. “We” and “They” or “Red” and “Blue” are not really the problem, so long as the alliances are fluid.  At the end of a bridge match (ok, fine, a “bridge rubber” – because, yes, it’s called a “rubber”), the teams dissolve.  At the end of Field Day, the Blues and the Reds melded together into mauve happiness.  In the Real World, however, the divisions run deeper.  The Reds and the Blues keep the battlements up.  In the real world, there are too many ways in which our “We and They” mentality can take deeper root. 

This frequently occurs – to pick an example, oh, totally at random -- in Congress.

Back when the entire US government ground to a globally embarrassing halt a few weeks back, I struggled to explain the phenomenon to the kids.  “The people we elected to run the country can’t agree about how much money to spend on what.  And… they aren’t playing nicely.  They aren’t listening.  They aren’t being reasonable.” I then proceeded to explain my own position on the issues at hand – which, given the other folks with whom we eat dinner in our liberal-intellectual no-it’s-not-a-commune community, represented not merely my opinion, but Our Opinion.  Yes, kids, this is what the Good Team thinks!  Um… yeah.  I found myself wondering, a bit uncomfortably, how well I would do, if tasked with “playing nicely” with the other team, a.k.a. Them.

Don’t get me wrong -- I realize that in politics, the divisions are not arbitrary, as they are in grade-school sporting events (or grownup sporting events – admit it, you hat-wearing people).  The differences are ideological.  They are tremendously important. We don’t need to – and indeed shouldn’t -- water down our opinions or our moral choices.  But we do need to alter the mentality with which they are examined and discussed.

I’m not going to give a rundown on all my core beliefs, economic frustrations, and ideas about governance in this blog post.  I’d like a few readers to stay awake, and I have so many years of potential blog post ahead of me (aren’t you EXCITED!?).  However, I’ll assert that I’ve thought these ideas and beliefs through pretty carefully.  I’m a scientist, so I try not to swallow statistics without understanding them, or spout facts without checking them.  Nonetheless, I can’t pretend that there is no emotional component involved, when it comes to choosing sides in our politically polarized nation.  I can’t pretend that I don’t listen a trace more carefully when my friends are sharing their thoughts, as opposed to when Fox News is blaring in the background at an airport terminal.  And I’ve noticed that if my team occasionally makes a factual or strategic error, I write it off as just that – an error.  Fix it, apologize, and move on.  But I tend to perceive the errors perpetrated by Them as somehow more intentional and more malevolent.  “They” are not just wrong; “They” are conniving, disingenuous, manipulative, evil. 

“Blue’s gonna win, and there’s no doubt about it!”

The weird thing is, this kind of thinking is hard to recover from, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary.  I can meet individuals with social, political, or religious ideologies very different from my own, and I can LIKE these people.  I can recognize that, as individuals, they do not actually want children to go hungry, old ladies to go without their arthritis medication, or school roofs to cave in – even if they do not support the programs that I feel would alleviate these problems.  In the same vein, I’m pretty sure that such individuals recognize that I (as a human-type-person whom they know) don’t actually support the US being destroyed by terrorists or overtaken by a totalitarian regime, even if I don’t always agree with the way in which our nation attempts to avoid such dreadfulness.  So far, so good, on an individual basis.  But collectively, we view each other with suspicion, at best – and, at worse, with vituperative animosity. We draw the lines, and we don’t cross them.  Us.  Them.

I’m both fascinated and appalled by how we self-assort, at every level of life, and according to varied metrics.  Gender, race, sexual orientation, region or nation of origin, level of education, voting habits, reading habits, employment, breakfast beverage, baseball cap design – which cues and clues am I using, I wonder?  And which (oh, horrors) are my kids using?

Kids think in pure terms.  Good. Bad.  No middle ground.  If they know that alcohol is Bad and that bike helmets are Good, they will stare in horror at an adult who is sipping a glass of wine or briefly rolling helmetless in his own driveway.  They may even abjectly embarrass their parents by pointing and loudly decrying these naughty, naughty grownups.  We adults do a lot of preaching about Right and Wrong, but we need to work on our Shades of Gray speech, too.  While we’re at it, we could work on our Us and Them speech, too.  Our Winners and Losers speech.  Our Red and Blue speech.  Field Day was fun, wasn’t it, kids?  Now how about some dull lecturing!

Nobody tried for that sort of thrilling follow-through after Field Day 1979.  But it now strikes me that this may be an area in which we actually are making progress, for all that our electoral maps scream otherwise.  That is, I hear a lot of grousing about how our kids aren’t being trained to be competitive enough.  This probably means we’re doing a fantastic job, collectively, of ensuring fewer government shutdowns in the year 2048.  Not competitive enough?  Sure, Field Day would not have been as much fun, if we hadn’t cared – obsessively – about who won.  But it might have been even better, if (perhaps after the last kid had been rescued, gasping, from the tug-o-war melee) our teachers had talked to us a bit about teamwork, and competition, and cooperation, and the whole fuzzy mess that lies between the extremes.  

These days, teachers and coaches are doing just that.  They are letting kids know that sometimes the Reds need to listen to the Blues, and vice versa. Sometimes one team will win.  Sometimes, everyone wins.  So maybe what we need now is a little upward mobility in this lesson.   Listen up, grownups!  Sometimes the team with the “B” on their caps will win.  Sometimes one view will be proven correct -- but the process needn’t involve rancor, bloodshed, National Park Service websites with bleak “we are closed” messages, or the cancellation of an entire season of federally-funded Antarctic research.  Sometimes, after all the civil, reasonable words have been spoken, everyone will end up a little less Red, a little less Blue, and a little more mauve. 

All of Boston is partying in the streets because a bunch of tight-white-trousered guys they don’t know won a game?  Well… ok.  I would never dump the cash necessary to attend a World Series game – or even to buy the hat – but were I in Boston, I’d probably be cheering just a little bit, too.  After all, Boston (once, long ago) was MY town.  Baseball (once, even longer ago, in shining childhood Shea Stadium hours I shared with my dad) was MY game.  True, sometimes the stakes in Real Life are too high for us to assort ourselves by the lettering on our caps.  But at other times – so long as we can admit that it makes no sense, and so long as nothing is too irredeemably serious -- there can be joy in a little game of Us and Them. 

We just need to know the difference.

Play ball, America.  Play ball.