Virtue Is Its Own Award

My kindergartner didn't get an award and it hurt my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! I don’t NEED it to feel seen, but boy does it help….)

At my son’s school, they give out monthly “character trait” awards, to recognize exceedingly virtuous students who demonstrate empathy (September), caring (November) responsibility, (March), and so forth. Because I only skim the monthly updates then complain about how nobody ever tells me anything, I was unaware of this practice until May of last year, when his teacher notified us that my son would be presented with the courage award at that week’s assembly. My son is courageous, I turned the thought over in my head. It didn’t exactly resonate, but then again, he certainly isn’t afraid of his parents. Maybe what I’d been clocking as defiance and disregard were actually the early markings of a great civil rights leader. To be clear, my son is flush with intrinsic gifts: intelligence, logic, poise, a love of vegetables. His courage had never stuck out to me, but it hadn’t NOT stuck out to me. Anyhoo, it took a few weeks, some unpacking with my husband, a few conversations with other moms in my son’s class, but eventually we realized he’d been given the last award of the year, and most likely, courage is what they threw in as a catch all for the kids who hadn’t gotten anything. Which doesn’t make it false. These days, isn’t it an act of courage just to get out of bed in the morning? And he does! VERY EARLY! Nevertheless, the epiphany hurt my feelings.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something alienating about the monthly “character trait” awards. Come August, I wondered aloud to my son’s new teacher if the practice didn’t make the children without awards feel bad? She assured me they didn’t, and besides, every student was guaranteed at least one award, (thereby confirming my suspicion). I knew I needed to let it go, and I mostly did, until I’d go to a new classmate’s house for a playdate and see two or three awards tacked to the refrigerator like the kind of crayon drawings that are only worth looking at because your kid made them. Like one monthly “character trait” certificate was simply holding a place on the refrigerator for the next one. Must be nice, I thought to myself. Must be nice…

But when my son was passed over for April’s fairness award, I hit my breaking point. What kid is more obsessed with fairness than mine?! “That’s not fair!” is to my son what “Got any cheese??” was to Steve Urkel! (Also let’s give it up for Urkel, who managed to codify, not one, but TWO catchphrases into the pantheon of pop culture. Bravo, Steve, you DID do that.) I confronted my husband, enraged, then embarrassed when my husband reacted with — not exactly surprise — but disinterest at my righteous indignation. No one else seemed to care, not the parents whose kids were winning all the awards. Not my husband, whose kid wasn’t. Not my child, who has literally never uttered a word about any of it. And suddenly I was no longer angry. I was ashamed. I wasn’t fighting for my son’s recognition. I was fighting for my own.

After scoring what my parents would only describe as “VERY HIGH” on the SATs (a discretion I assume was taken because they knew I wouldn’t score as high) my older brother opted to go to Bates, which at the time was one of the few liberal arts colleges that didn’t require test scores in the admissions process. One of her former classmates recounts how my sister received the highest score on some standardized test given to her freshman class, an achievement remarkable enough to announce over the school loudspeaker. My sister had miraculously attended school the day the test was given, and very predictably not been there the day the announcement was made, because she only attended a handful of days during the first six weeks of her freshman year, then dropped out. But while my sister seemed apathetic toward recognition, and my brother — to this day — seems to outright disdain it, I, the youngest in the family, crave it like air. My understanding of myself has been cobbled together with a series of external affirmations through the years — that time in 8th grade when a friend told me the boys had made a “top ten” list for the girls in the class and I was on it. (Still clinging to that one with my arthritic claws!) That time sophomore year I had an essay published in the local paper. Senior year when my favorite teacher gave me the award for best English student along with the collected works of Alice Munro (yikes! Another woman who, at the expense of her children, need to be seen a certain way!). That was also the year I didn’t get into an Ivy League school, wrote a column for the school newspaper urging my classmates not to base their self-worth on the college application process, then begrudgingly spent a year’s worth of my parents’ money at a very expensive non-Ivy League and transferred my ass to Yale as fast as I possibly could. I landed an impressive TV writing job. Won Emmys. Bore my husband two male heirs. And sure, I wanted girls, but I STILL took shallow pride in the fact that were I royalty in medieval times (or anyone in China today) that would be considered a serious fucking accomplishment. I need these things. I need this list. This list proves, not just that I am good, but that I’m real. Because without a list, isn’t there simply a blank page? One philosopher (Natasha Bedingfield) tells us to embrace this blank page. To “open up the dirty window/Let the sun illuminate the words that you cannot find.” But seriously, wtf does that mean? And furthermore, a blank page sounds great when you’re cranking out theme songs for The Hills, but these days, when a brief stint on The Masked Singer is already 4 years in the rearview mirror, is Bedingfield still singing the same tune? Probably, because she’s got nothing more recent to sing.

A few minutes after I’d popped off about my son being robbed of the fairness award, my husband found me crying in the kitchen. We were both surprised by my tears. I told him I felt disgusting, for needing to be acknowledged to feel like I exist, and when I can’t get that acknowledgement for myself, for transferring it onto my children. “You need to figure out how to find meaning in the things themselves. The doing part needs to be enough.” He’s right. Over the past few years, I haven’t amassed a lot of bulletpoints (for the proverbial list—STAY WITH ME), and my bitterness about it can corrode what gives me pleasure. Too often I find myself reading beautiful books, resenting the fact that I didn’t write them. Watching TV shows and movies, wondering why someone else got the chance to make them instead of me. I find myself trying to create and wanting to give up because hasn’t somebody already said this? Art is meant to remind us we’re not alone. But how can it do that when all we want is to be told why we’re exceptional?

Katy Perry’s first trip to space

And then there’s another siloed wing of my brain furious about how little people with the most want to share. Why does David Zaslav need to make 4% more than he did last year, when the number of TV shows made in that time is down by 37%? Why isn’t it enough for Trump to wield the power of the presidency, instead of usurping the powers of the other two branches of government as well? Why does Katy Perry need to go to space when she already lived there as an alien 14 years ago?! But how different is my constant need for more when I already have so much?

I didn’t set out to draw comparisons between myself, David Zaslav, and Donald Trump. JEEZ, I’m not THAT bad! (I may be as bad as Katy Perry.) But there’s something liberating in calling out how unexceptional their rapacity and ambition happens to be. Maybe that’s where true power lies, in recognizing that regardless of ranking, I’m base and vile like the 1%, just less so. And Natasha Bedingfield is wise like Kierkegaard, just less so. And my son is courageous like Gandhi, just less so. Maybe I’ll get more out of focusing on the ways we’re all the same, instead of ferretting out the ways in which I am different. Because we are all exactly the same amount human, which could stand to be recognized more.