A Buttload of Life Lessons

This week, Life pulled up her rusty old pickup and dumped a buttload of Life Lessons on our front yard. There was no order, no sense -- just a pile of lessons that we had to sort through as a family. And here's just one of those lessons...

Empathy...
Our school district has a variety of options programs available for middle and high schoolers who have a passion or interest in a certain area like the arts or science. Unfortunately, these programs are very popular, and to even the playing field, the district randomly chooses students through a lottery.

Both of my girls independently decided to apply to the same options program that allows students to focus on the arts -- ACMA. Days before her 14th birthday, Emma came to me and told me that she had this intuition that she wouldn't get into ACMA, the school of her choice.

Sure enough, two days before her birthday, I go to the mailbox and discover two very different looking envelopes. I brought them inside the house, placing them carefully on the counter. Emma walked by and without touching them, she proclaimed, "Ellie is IN, and I'm not."

Uh huh...

Ellie at BizTown (editor of the Business Journal)

And so my youngest, who has defied the odds when it comes to her illness, yet again defied the odds by making it into ACMA. With 600 applicants across our district, she was one of 70 chosen through a random lottery.

But instead of feeling ecstatic, we were all reminded that Emma didn't...

And neither did many of our great friends who are all so talented in the arts.

The posts on Facebook started to reveal the many classmates who weren't so lucky by the Fickle Finger of Fate.  Those like Emma... the big sister who belts Broadway songs every night in the shower, who sits quietly in her room drawing hour after hour, who has story after story saved on my laptop.

As the district calls them, "A good fit" for an options school.

A "good fit" with bad luck...

And when you try to teach your children empathy, it becomes impossible to celebrate your own happiness when you know that your sister, your friends are just a random flip of the coin on the opposite side...