Teach Her the Math. Just Not How to Subtract Herself.

She scores, and says she got lucky.

I have watched that happen a couple of hundred times and only noticed it about a year ago. Now I can't stop seeing it.

She wins a point she has been working on for a month, and before she's back on the line she has already explained it away. I got lucky. She wasn't ready. It was the wind. She gets picked first and says they were just being nice. She plays the best match of her life and comes off saying the other girl was having an off day.

The compliment arrives and she puts it straight back down.

I've started calling it subtraction, because that is exactly what it is. Something happened, it was hers, and within about four seconds she has removed herself from it.

How It Got In

Here's the part I find harder to write. Nobody taught her that in a lesson. There's no moment I can point to. It got in the way most things get in, which is by being praised.

When she was small and did something well and said so, some adult said don't brag. When she was seven and announced she was the fastest in her class, somebody said well, that's not a very nice thing to say. When she was nine and told a coach she thought she should be playing, she got a look.

And every single time she deflected — oh, I got lucky — she got warmth. A hand on the shoulder. That's a good girl. That's a humble girl.

We didn't teach her to be small. We taught her that small is safe, about a thousand times, two seconds at a time.

I don't think any one of those adults was wrong in the moment. Nobody wants an insufferable child. But I have sat through enough dinners listening to somebody's son narrate his own greatness, uninterrupted, to be fairly sure the correction isn't handed out evenly.

What I'd Like Her to Be Able to Say

Out loud. Without softening it, without a laugh at the end, without checking my face first.

I worked for that.

I'm the best on this team.

I want the ball.

I deserve to start.

Every one of those made me slightly uncomfortable to type, which is the whole point.

None of them are arrogance. They're arithmetic. Arrogance is claiming something that isn't yours. Saying "I worked for that" after you have worked for it is just an accurate description of events.

Where This Actually Goes

I would love to tell you it stops mattering after high school.

You already know how it ends. She'll be thirty-four, in a room with eleven other people, deciding whether to say what she is worth. And she will do, in that room, whatever she has practised for twenty-five years.

If what she has practised is deflection, she will deflect. Not because she's weak. Because it's the move she knows, it has always been rewarded, and it will feel like the polite thing to do — right up until the moment somebody else takes the thing.

What I'm Trying

It's small, and I'm not certain it works.

When she deflects, I don't argue with her. Arguing makes it A Thing, and then she's managing my feelings about her feelings, which is worse than where we started.

I just don't accept the substitution. She says I got lucky. I say: you've been working on that serve for three weeks. Flat. Not a compliment, not a correction. Just the fact, put back where it belongs.

She usually says nothing. Sometimes she says "yeah."

Once she said, "I have, actually."

I'll take once.

Teach her the math. All of it. Teach her to count what things cost, to know what a thing is worth, to add up what she is owed.

Just not how to subtract herself from her own results.

What's the last thing you talked yourself out of saying?