By Antoine Beauvillain

Tonight I was driving my little girls to ballet class, and my 11-year-old ADHD, ODD daughter was complaining that she had been held back in school a year, and now she couldn’t be with all her good friends in the fifth grade.

After she waxed poetic about this for several minutes, looping through all the nuances a dozen times over, I asked her if I might share something serious and important with her and her sister. (I try to take advantage of car rides, and if the drive is short, the kids are usually open to hearing a “talk,” knowing that the destination will keep it short and sweet.) She gave me permission. This is what I said:

“Sometimes we think that our lives hinge on the really super-de-duper BIG choices in life, like who we marry, where we go to college, what we do for a career, where we go to church, where we live in the world, how many kids we have, and so on. Those are all BIG, IMPORTANT decisions, aren’t they?”

“Um…yes.”

“But now let’s think about the millions of trillions of tiny choices we make every day of our lives. Choices like whether or not to eat everything on our dinner plate. Whether or not to take the dog out for a pee. Whether or not to clean our room. Whether or not to speak kindly to our brother when he is annoying us. Whether or not to do our homework and do it well. Whether or not to practice our music lesson. Whether or not to whine when Mom asks us to watch our little brother for a few minutes.

If you could put all those really big choices in one pile and put all the itty bitty choices in another pile, which pile do you think would be bigger after 20 or 30 years?”

“The pile with all the small choices?”

Yes. That one.

I told them both piles were important. And I reminded the daughter who was complaining about her grade level that she had spent many hours of many days of many weeks of many months of many years fighting schoolwork, and all her small choices to fight every single day added up over time. They added up to an entire lost year of school. And now, no matter how hard she tried, she would not be able to recover that lost year. It was the inevitable consequence of a million small choices.

It was a life direction.

I tried to help them see that in the large scheme of things, this was a small price to pay for a very important lesson. She could learn from this lesson and avoid greater trouble in her young adult life, or she could choose to ignore this lesson and suffer even greater consequences in the future.

I would like to say that her response was mature and hopeful. But she responded this way:

“It was NOT MY FAULT! I know why I was held back! It was because I couldn’t do division! I tried, and I couldn’t do it! It’s NOT FAIR!”

And so the choices continue. I don’t know how her story will end, but I am praying one day she will get it. And it causes me to examine my own life to discover where I might be making the same wrong choices over and over that lead me down roads I don’t want to travel.

Directions I would not choose for myself if I could but see how all those small choices add up—and take me there.