#23 Up

I have three kids, three of whom practice indoor climbing— bouldering, to be precise. The first two had tried many other sports before, making of us—parents— private taxi drivers around the city to train and around the region to compete, and they stuck to bouldering when they decided that neither korfball, tennis, athletics, krav maga, or water polo were their thing. When our third kid was born, his siblings spent much of their time in the gym, and because they were still young and needed adult supervision, I spent a lot of time walking with the baby’s stroller next to them while they tried to move higher and higher. The stroller phase was easy because the baby slept most of the time, but as soon as he started to touch the chalk and crawl in the gym’s matrasses, I knew what would come: he wanted “up” —to climb as his brother as his sister did. He tried to grab those colorful pieces and move up like the other kids and grownups in his gym. This attitude brought us some trouble until he was six years old, but things got better once he joined the training groups and started to compete. It’s difficult to stop someone who is too eager to do something. Should we do it?

It’s been two years since my younger kid started to train and compete, and he is improving. Fear does not seem to be part of his vocabulary, which is sometimes good for his results and very bad for my nervous system, but I let him do his thing because stropping is not an option — not an easy one. During the last competition of this year, the climber and I fought because he did not want to face a challenging climb, and I did not want him to give up. When I managed to get him back to the wall, he faced his fear (the one he usually does not have), and I watched him climb, but then, he fell.

He did not cry. He looked at me and his father and raised his chin as if he wanted to say, “I’m okay,” but he wasn’t. As he walked towards us, we saw the tears forming in his eyes, and when he was by our side, he started to cry.

We hugged him.

We told him everything was okay, but he did not reply. He was frightened, and that was much worse than the pain in his arm, the one he hit during the fall. he sat with him and told him how proud we were because he did not give up, and it took him less than ten minutes to recover and go back to the wall.

I saw him climb the rest of the boulders and could not stop thinking about what had happened. My son did not win the competition, but we celebrated his achievement, commitment, and how he overcame the fear.

Many times in life, we don’t give up, and we get hurt, but where is the line? How much pain are we supposed to endure? What’s the point? Does it make us better? Stronger? Happier? What’s the cost of going up?