I get in a really foul mood when Anson’s baseball team loses. I remember I used to do this when the Seahawks or the Ducks would lose, back when I cared about professional / semi-professional sports. But not to this extent.

I’m so cranky. Irritable. My fuse becomes quite short.

Over something I can’t change and never really had any control over in the first place.

And with Anson’s all star summer approaching, I realized that this is not the way I want to behave when my son faces adversity. He’s going to be facing even tougher competition this summer. Of course it would be thrilling if Anson’s team won it all, but as Zeb poignantly said after our last tournament, ‘Just about every team is leaving this field off a loss.’

I started to think about how I want to handle an L. And I wrote this down:

Every L has a W if you take the time to look for it.

There is gold to be had in the disappointments, there is a WIN to be seized from the jaws of defeat when you are alert to the full picture.

I want to help Anson find those nuggets, and I also want to be the mom who processes the disappointment of a loss in a healthy and connected way: not by bossing her entire family around on a search for the control I don’t have when the team is on the field.

It’s so easy and comfortable to process a win. What’s to learn? But a loss? We want to rush through to the part where it stings less, so we don’t really look at the situation to find where there could be some gold. At least, I don’t. But I want to. In my personal life, not just when my son’s baseball team loses.

Because here’s the thing. If I’m cranky and irritable because I felt like I didn’t have control, and then I try to control everybody around me by being bossy, that’s a lose lose. But if I decide that I can be in the loss, and process it by actually feeling it, and then I can start to look for ways to learn from the loss and be better… and if I decide that the thing I control in a loss (my own or one from somebody close to me) IS taking on the identity of somebody who always gets better because of an L… well then, I think we gain back some of that control and personal responsibility, even when our ability to impact the situation is limited.

Is this a little rambly? Perhaps, but I figured this is something I’m working on and working through, and I wanted to share that experience with you here. I am the kind of person who always gets better after a loss. And by modeling that, I might just impact those around me to be that way as well.