Bowling For Fails
*originally published in Hebrew in Haaretz
Over the holiday, my sister-in-law offered to take my kids bowling. A pastime I once delighted in, I have neglected bowling for many years.
I remember the procedure at the alley vividly. You would trade your shoes in for a pair of stinky oxfords about six sizes too big. My mom used to bring a few pairs of socks in her back to close the size gap. You’d shuffle over to your lane with two golf pencils and a small piece of paper for scoring. None of this was replaceable. If you lost any of it you had to score on a napkin with whatever utensil you could find on the dusty floor of your mom’s handbag. And then the game would begin.
At the bowling alley we went to when I was a kid, they had smaller balls for children. My father perceived this as nothing short of cheating. Even so, succeeding in getting the ball to make contact with any of the pins was nearly impossible. Time and time again the ball would sail out of my hand directly into the gutter. I would stand and watch it slowly make its way to the far end of the lane, arm throbbing, hopes crushed. Often, ten rounds would pass without so much as a single kiss between my ball and a pin. That said, the feeling when the stars aligned and I did sink a pin was nothing short of euphoric.
Standing with my two girls and their three cousins in a bowling alley in the basement of a shopping mall with music blaring as if we were at a rave, I discovered that kids don’t bowl how they used to.
Nowadays, kids aren’t required to swap their shoes for older, smellier, less comfortable ones. Golf pencils and scoring cards have been replaced by screens, obviously. And that’s just the set up. The game itself has been modified to suit even the most fragile ego. There are no gutters. They have been outfitted with rubber strips that ensure the ball continue its journey straight toward the pins regardless of aim or skill. The alley provides metal ramps upon which children place the ball of their choice, tapping it lightly to send it down the ramp, allowing gravity to take care of the rest.
All possibilities for failure have been removed from the game, leaving a pointless exercise in inertia.
Watching this, I thought of the college campuses in America, of the young people wrapping themselves up to vehemently protest a conflict taking place thousands of miles from their homes. I have been struck by these protests, by their scope and timbre. What is clear to me is that young people are angry, rageful even. Could it be that by manufacturing a world in which they cannot fail, their meeting with real-life scenarios of failure is so startling and unexpected that they feel deceived, lied to, tricked?
Could it be that by letting them suck at bowling we are preparing them for the myriad experiences of sub-average performances they will no doubt give throughout their lives? After all, no one hits the bullseye every time.
As a parent, I can identify with the desire to install rubber guardrails all over life, to pave a glossily smooth path for my little ones to walk upon. Since October 7th this desire has only intensified. Barely able to process my own trauma, I wonder about the affects these past months have had on my kids. How have the sirens and disruptions, the posters and teddy bears impacted their forming minds? In the face of this uncertainty, or rather in the face of the certain fact that this conflict has already imprinted ugliness on their psyches, I find myself crumbling over the most trivial conflicts. After all, what is a second dinner option in the face of a war? How can I refuse to buy a new scooter, telephone, bathing suit, video game after all they’ve been through? What’s one more movie or episode of Bluey between hurting humans? The guilt that my choices have placed them in the midst of this mess propels me to hurl my body between their ball and the gutter. I know it is the opposite of what I should be doing, I know they need boundaries and structure and the occasional no but the crippling effect of these months has worn down my parental resolve.
There was a beauty to hurling those balls until your arm felt like it would fall off, in trying over and over again until, for some unknown reason, those pins finally went down. The amount of focus, attention, coordination and effort required to literally get out of the gutter was tantamount and it served as a physical example of hard work paying off. I wonder, when all obstacles have been removed and success ensured, what the fun of playing is. Sucking was a necessary step on the road to mediocrity and, for some the more ambitious of us, a starting point on the road to greatness. Maybe the thing we should strive for as parents in this moment, regardless of the insanity surrounding us, is to continue to let our kids be bad at things that don’t matter that much so that, one day, when they suck at something important, it won’t be their first meeting with that strange sensation.