personal development

What Watching My Kids Play Video Games Taught Me About Losing

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A statue of a T-rex on a Jeep (that has two velociraptors driving it) labeled with Nick's Mini-Golf. There is a structure for a high-ropes course in the background.

“Oh come on!” I yelled with genuine frustration in my voice as my mini-golf ball rolled millimeters past the hole. And yet I was smiling only a few moments later. That would have never happened even a few years ago. I credit my kids for this life lesson.

I’ve never been a particularly good loser. I hate wasting time and losing feels a whole lot like wasting time to me. In board games like Settlers of Caatan or Monopoly where you realize early on if you are going to lose badly and then just have to wait for it to happen, I get antsy and anxious. When playing word and puzzle games, I feel like I’m “supposed” to be good at them and then just feel dumb when I lose. It’s just generally unpleasant for everyone involved.

But I started to get a different perspective on losing while watching my kids play video games.

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Cultivating an Environment for Growth

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Small purple crocuses and red berries among grasses

Digging a tiny hole to transplant my peppers, I smiled as the soil crumbled in my hands. It was dark, moist soil, the result of years of adding organic matter (straw, compost, and leaves) to the heavy clay in our yard. While I care for my plants by watering and weeding them, the soil is probably the most important part of my garden’s success. There’s nothing you can do to force a plant to grow, but there are lots of ways we can create an environment that nurtures them. The same goes for people and situations as well.

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Allowing Wonder to Overcome Fear

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment
A view up at the dark blue night sky with stars through dark trees

The sky was dark and smattered with stars. The Big Dipper shone out, bright and prominent. I stood on the campground road, looking up, my mouth partly open as if I was about to say something but then stopped in surprise. I watched the sky for a few minutes and then walked up the road to our campsite, my flashlight off. I gazed upwards every few moments, trying to cement the sight into my memory.

As I reached the campsite, my kids were getting ready to walk to the bathroom. “Keep your flashlight off!” I recommended. “You’ll see the stars so much better.” They hesitated, then turned them off, trusting me and the desire to see that beauty themselves.

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Cycles of parenting and life

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My younger son (a white boy in a sweatshirt with multicolored dinosuars, black jeans, and blue hiking boots) stepping between rocks next to a stream

“The seasons go round and round / the painted ponies go up and down / on the carousel of time….” I crooned softly to myself, looking out my back porch. Joni Mitchell’s song The Circle Game echoed in my head, one of the few guaranteed to make me choke up. For those not familiar, it’s about a child growing up, with each verse describing a different stage of childhood. 

In the past, I heard it and was sad about the child growing up. How terrible to have to leave each of those ages behind, especially as that child’s parent?

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Exploring Our Inner Supervillain

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Me as Poison Ivy (a woman with green skin) from Harley Quinn posing with Nnedi Okorafor (a Black woman in a black sweater) at her signing with a large AwesomeCon backdrop

Looking in the mirror, I saw someone looking back at me who was both terribly familiar and foreign. For one, she had green skin in comparison to my normal pale visage. I noticed a spot that was a bit light and dabbed on a bit more green makeup. There – finished. Save the red hair and the cartoon skinniness, I was the image of Poison Ivy from the Harley Quinn animated show.

On the lawful to chaotic and good to bad morality scale, I am solidly in the lawful good zone. I was obsessive about rules as a kid to the point I would correct other kids regularly. (That made me very popular.) While I’ve shed much of that slavish devotion, I hate breaking rules for no good reason and hold myself to high moral standards.

So why was I cosplaying a chaotic supervillain at a comic book convention?

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Being honest about being a good enough parent

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Me (a white woman with brown hair and glasses in a multicolored sweater) balancing a stuffed Gelatinous Cube on my head

Before kids are old enough to really believe in God (or choose to not believe in God), they believe in their parents. Having taken care of them since they were babies, small children look up to their parents as all-knowing, all-powerful beings that can fix anything. And then, one day, they stop.

My kids are both around the ages – 8 and 10 – where they start losing serious faith in parents as masters of the universe. So when I saw This American Life was doing an episode on that subject called Parents Are People, I was intrigued.

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Finding Rest in the Chaos

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A purple violet growing through the sidewalk
Seeing flowers on my daily walk is a big part of my rest.

“Why are you on your phone – again?” my younger son asked with an edge of whine in his voice from the bathtub.

I felt a pang of guilt. I should be paying attention to him – right? My undivided, unquestioned attention.

But wait. I had given him a ton of attention earlier that day. We had played a board gamebefore dinner. I had just played a game of 20 Questions with him focusing on Dungeons and Dragons monsters while he was in the bath. No, I shouldn’t feel guilty. I needed that break.

“Because my brain needs a break. I find being a good listener takes a lot of energy. Reading gives my brain a rest. So I’m just reading on my phone for a little while,” I responded.

He grumbled and started telling me something anyway, but at least I tried.

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This is 41 (apparently).

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Me (a white woman with brown hair in a black hoodie sweatshirt) falling over laughing while having a white rabbit with brown splotches apparently jumping on me

40 was always the big milestone, the “over the hill” age. It’s the age of big parties and black balloons and ageist jokes. But for me, it was … not much. It was following on yet another COVID spike, in yet another dreary February that seemed to go on for far too long and involve far too many gray skies. It was wondering why I would even bother having a party because I wouldn’t have enough friends to attend. It was desperately contemplating every day if I would ever stop being so damn tired. It was a slight mid-life crisis that felt more like a slog through quicksand. It was being disappointed in myself that I was 40 and this much of a mess.

Now, I realize that a lot of that was burnout turned to depression talking. If there’s one thing that depression does, it lies like a bitch. I started recognizing that burnout and depression the fall before, but really started turning the corner on it just after my birthday.

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Extending a Bit of Empathy to a Fellow Parent

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My older son when he was three and my younger son was an infant. (Alt-text: A young white boy in a red sweater, sitting on the floor playing with a toy fire truck)

“What age is she?” I asked the dad standing with a double stroller next to me in the elevator. The top seat had an older toddler in it; the bottom one was empty, but from the conversation between them, it sounded like there was a baby with the mom.

“Three,” he sighed, obviously exhausted.

“Oh, that’s a tough age,” I responded, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible. Three was by far the hardest for us, especially when our older kid was that age and our younger kid was an infant. “It gets easier – and more fun.”

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Why posts about shallow inclusivity make me cringe

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A photo of me (a white woman with brown hair and glasses) in a Wonder Woman dress standing in front of a bookshelf with books and a plant on it

I know what it’s like to be the kid sitting alone in the cafeteria. I also know what it’s like to be the kid who befriends a kid sitting alone in the cafeteria.

In eighth grade, I was having a very rough year. At the beginning of the year, I was kicked off the swim team for the simple fact that I wasn’t very good, the one place I had a semblance of a social life. I had befriended a few folks at the beginning of the year, but wasn’t very close to them yet and didn’t have the same lunch as them. Most of the time, I ate lunch in the cafeteria alone and then moved on to the library to read or music room to practice my saxophone. I never got particularly good at the saxophone, but it was a heck of a lot better than sitting around by myself in the cafeteria.

Around that time, an advisor for a club I was in (who was also a guidance counselor) suggested that I befriend a classmate. I knew I was nowhere near popular. I was barely tolerated in class among the “smart popular” kids who were in honors classes but weren’t as weird.

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