I Failed the Test, But I’m Still Learning

What my son’s ball taught me about falling, failing, and showing up again.

Dear Myles,

I failed a test. This is not a metaphor—some lesson I’m trying to teach you, or some connection I have at the very end to tie this letter together neatly. Nah, I took a test, a real one, proctored and all, and failed it miserably. It hurt. It hurts because I've been waking up early, some mornings at five, other mornings at four, to study before work, before you wake up. I roll out of bed, drag myself to the computer, teeth unbrushed, breath hollering because the sound of running water might wake you and your mother, and put in two to three hours. I’m exhausted. I love learning something new, trying something hard, but failing—not so much.

What’s worse is that I missed your soccer practice. I vowed at the beginning of this journey of trying something new and doing something hard that it would never get in the way of us, our family. But here I was a month later, asking your mother if she wouldn’t mind taking you to practice alone so I could take this test. She gave me that look that didn’t need any words—the look that said, I knew this would happen. And like the wonderful wife, friend, and supporter she is, she took you anyway. But all I had to show for it when you two came home was a big, fat F.

The proctor threw me a problem that was somehow both simple and nuanced. It must have taken me twenty minutes just to break it down, I sweated, breath skipping, trying to understand a problem written in the plainest English ever, while he stared, rubbing his Black cat over and over again. The cat felt like it was staring too, like it just felt so sorry at the person it was looking at one the side of the screen.

Here’s the long story short. The TL;DR: I couldn’t solve it. And when the proctor finally said, “We need to end here,” he said it like someone who had spent ages rubbing a cat and silently watching another person flounder. Then he showed me where I got stuck, fixed it faster than I could blink, and asked, “Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said, lying through my teeth—feeling so stupid I could not even understand the answer. I thanked him and his cat for their time, closed the computer, laid down, and cried.