victory is sweetest when you've known defeat. - malcolm forbes
migo brought home a bronze medal yesterday from another tkd tournament. he should be happy. out of 12 tournaments that he has participated in, he already won 3 bronzes, 2 silvers and 4 golds. that's all in the past 13 months that he's been into the sport. that's more than anyone who started the same time as he. and at his young age of 7, that should be a feat.
but as soon as the referee raised his hand indicating the win of his opponent, migo's eyes welled up in tears as he headed out of the court, towards my outstretched arms. he cried and cried for a good ten minutes, i think. me and his dad and his coach and his tito benedict, together with his teammates comforted him, patted him on the back, gave him words of encouragement and did everything we could to console him. you still got a bronze, anak! don't cry!
it wasn't really a fair fight if you look at it. but who said life, or this sport, is fair, right? he won his first 2 fights for the day and we were already looking forward to the finals. then we found out that he needed to win a semi-finals round with a group 2 opponent. (migo is in group 1. group 1's height is 120-128cm. group 2's height is 128-136cm.) i became a little anxious but knowing my migo, that he is never fazed by any size opponent, i relaxed a bit and waited for his call. it turned out the kid matched to him was about 5-6cm taller, 3 years older and although was a yellow belt, had been training years before migo even started. but migo put up a good fight, with a 5-8 final score, with some points by migo not counted. i have the video! i can prove they didn't count at least 3 points in round 1! to me, it was a tied match but then again, that's me, i'm his mom.
in the end, it was a lesson learned, not only for migo but for me and hubby as well. that we cannot always win. that at some point in life, we will lose. that losing doesn't make us any less, but makes us better people. that we now know how those we defeated before felt. that it's okay. that life moves on. and that there are more things to be thankful for. that prayers sometimes go unanswered because God must have another thing planned out for us. that a bronze is better than none.
my migo became a matured athlete yesterday. i'm still a mighty proud mom.
"Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere."
-Barack Obama
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