"It is tact that is golden, not silence."

My daughter (almost 15) has missed a few training nights for one of her netball teams.  She has genuinely been ill or way too exhausted from her self-induced busy schedule.  I spoke to my brother about her getting a few too many colds and he suggested that she cut down on some of the sport she does.  He's a cyclist and when he and his friends used to train super-hard, they developed colds and flu symptoms all the time.  Little body fat combined with lots of exercise seems to equal a low immune system in some people. (I guess that's why I am in good health lately!)

So, anyway, I would email the coach every time she had a night off from training and I tried hard to explain the reasons why I thought it best if she slowed down a little.  She had put in such a huge effort last year and was playing on 6 different netball teams and I was forever warming the benches and grandstands of our city's sporting venues.  I thought that, being a mother of teenage girls herself, the coach would understand.  And I must admit, I had hoped she would take into consideration how committed my daughter had been the previous year.

One thing I didn't tell the coach was that my daughter was suffering from a few emotional issues that had developed after my husband's heart attack.  I mean, she has undiagnosed OCD anyway - she is just like her father (except his is diagnosed) and so she needs no pressure from me or anyone else to attempt perfection.  And I certainly don't want to see her run-down and teary.

So when I took her to the first netball carnival on Saturday, I was amazed and a little hurt, that she was taken out of her normal team (the top team) and forced to play on the younger, second team.  She was left to stand alone and wait whilst the coach talked to the others.  She kept looking at me with a "WTF?" look on her face and I mouthed back "IDK!".

I certainly don't mind my kids learning their lessons when they need to but I did feel that this would set her back, rather than boost her up.  I was right.  She was humiliated in only the way a 14 year-old girl can be.  I know - I remember what those humiliations were like when I was a girl.  And what I hated most of all was others telling me not to feel that way!  As if I could stop it.  As if such things were not important because someone else failed to feel as I did.

I decided to write to the coach (after the carnival) and explain my feelings about her methods of punishing (and that's what it was) my girl for her "lack of commitment". I thought long and hard for hours about it before I set fingers to keyboard so I was not angry at the time of writing. 
Sometimes we must stand up for our children and other times we should stay quiet and let them battle through life's challenges unassisted.  I thought about this and decided this was a small battle I was called to answer.  Of course, as always, the Tofu-Hearted Mother also used her tofu-heart to think what such an email might be like to receive and so tried to make it as diplomatic and respectful as possible.  But our kids learn from that too.  "It is tact that is golden, not silence."  Samuel Butler.