I am a competitive person. I am the oldest of five children. There were four of us born in 5 years and 2 months. Everything was a competition. We competed in bike races, shooting free throws, board games, card games and throwing the football. We crowned ourselves the tallest, the fastest, the most muscular, the smartest, the best reader. Pretty normal kid stuff, but we didn’t stop there. We had competitions for things like:
– Who could run downstairs, get a can of soup out of the “cupboard from Aunt Marsha” and get back upstairs the fastest
– Who could untwist on the swing the longest
– Who could get out of having to make Kool Aid the most consecutive days in a row
– Who could dry the fewest number of dishes
We were champions at besting each other. A little healthy competition between siblings, not at all unlike a healthy competition among teammates. It provides just the right incentive to get the best out of everybody.
It should come as no surprise that I have competitive children. However, the competition between my children is very different than that of my siblings. My kids are almost 9 years apart in age and 10 years apart in school. Their competitions tend to start with the oldest saying “when I was your age, I could do” and end with the youngest asking “Mom, did she really do that?”. They tend to take their competitive nature directly to teammates or the opposing team. I have always admired their competitive nature and I consider it a positive quality trait in both of them.
Or at least I did…until this evening. After dinner we had a family discussion about the possibility of a different after school activity for Boo in the fall. No decisions were made, we just talked about a variety of options. Boo had already left the room when Re said that she understood why he was considering other options, but she “hated to let them win”. In this case, she was referring to losing to several, but not all, of the football coaches that Boo has had over the years. She doesn’t want them thinking that they won, by having Boo choose to spend his time doing something else this fall.
That may be taking her competitive nature just a bit to far. Deciding to forego something you would LOVE to do, in favor of doing something just to prove you can, isn’t winning. It isn’t even competition worthy.