The C sent my daughter into a panic.
It was one assignment. One C among plenty of As. But to my nine-year-old, it felt catastrophic. As Amaya struggled to catch her breath, I tried to reassure her that she was OK, that one grade didn’t define her and that we would figure out what went wrong.
But as I watched her, I wasn’t just looking at my daughter. I was back in sixth grade at Molo Middle School. Mrs. LeDoux. Algebra. Report-card day. I had all As—and one C.
Technically, a C isn’t failing. But you couldn’t have told sixth-grade-me that. I felt like a failure. Worse, I turned one grade into a statement about who I was: I wasn’t good at math. I began to hate it and convinced myself I couldn’t learn it the way I learned everything else.
More than three decades later, I still occasionally count on my fingers. Amaya catches me doing it and reminds me that, as a grown woman, I really should be better at this. She’s probably right.
Watching her panic over her own C made me realize I had a choice. I could pass down the same anxiety I had carried for years, or I could teach her something I wish I had understood then: You won’t be perfect. You won’t knock every assignment out of the park. Sometimes you will work hard and still come up short. That doesn’t make you a failure.
I want my daughter to hold herself to high expectations. I want her to care. But there is a difference between teaching a child to strive for excellence and teaching her that anything short of it is unacceptable. If I’m not careful, I’m not passing down ambition. I’m passing down anxiety.
Then I realized this lesson isn’t just for my daughter. We never stop getting report cards. The grades just change.
As adults, our grades come disguised as performance reviews, promotions, raises and bonuses. We may not get an A written at the top of a sheet of paper anymore, but we know how it feels when the boss tells us we exceeded expectations—or when someone else gets the promotion we thought would be ours.
Then there are the grades nobody officially gives us, but we give ourselves anyway. Career. Marriage. Money. Parenting. Our bodies. Our homes. Our dreams. We decide that by a certain age we should have reached a certain title, earned a certain salary, bought the bigger house, lost the weight, raised children who make all the right choices and accomplished the dreams we once promised ourselves we would.
And social media has become one giant honor roll. We see the promotion, the new house, the new relationship, the dream vacation and the big announcement that gets thousands of likes. Then we look at our own lives and start assigning grades.
Sometimes social media makes adulthood look like Willy Wonka is passing out golden tickets and everybody found one in their chocolate bar except you. But we’re seeing the golden ticket, not all the wrappers they opened first. We see the yes. We don’t see all the nos that came before it.
That’s the danger of using someone else’s success to grade our own lives. We don’t know how many applications were rejected before the promotion, how many doors closed before one opened, or how many times someone wondered whether a dream was ever going to happen. We’re comparing our entire journey to somebody else’s moment.
And if our measure of success always comes from somewhere outside of us, somebody else will always be holding our report card.
I learned that lesson years ago. I was Employee of the Month at another publication, which taught me something useful: Apparently, employee of the month does not come with immunity. I had done good work and had the recognition to prove it. I still lost my job.
Sometimes the bad grade isn’t even yours. A company restructures. Someone else gets the promotion. A relationship ends. A plan falls apart. Life doesn’t always grade on effort.
The day after I was laid off, I wrote about what happened and sent it to a blog. The story was picked up. Then a message appeared in my Facebook inbox: "You need a job. I need an editor."
It was from someone at Microsoft about an opportunity at MSN. I thought it was a joke. My ever-wise mama had different advice: "Write the man back, fool."
So, I did and that conversation opened a door to a job where I would spend nearly 12 years.
I don’t tell that story because every no magically becomes a yes. It doesn’t. Every heartbreak doesn’t lead to the love of your life. Sometimes things simply don’t work out. We make mistakes in our careers. We lose our tempers in our marriages. We put expectations on our children that belong to us instead of them. We make bad decisions. Sometimes we look back and know we simply could have done better.
The lesson isn’t to pretend those failures don’t matter. They do. The lesson is not to turn them into identities.
"I failed at this" is very different from "I am a failure."
That’s what I want Amaya to understand about her C—and what I’m still learning myself. Look at the grade. Be disappointed if you need to be. Figure out what happened. Decide what you can do differently. Learn what it has to teach you. Then turn the page.
I wish I could go back to Molo Middle School and sit beside that sixth-grade girl staring at her report card. I would tell her that a C in algebra wasn’t a prophecy. It didn’t mean she wasn’t smart or couldn’t learn. She just wasn’t particularly good at algebra.
I can make sure I don’t hand that story to my daughter. And I can remind myself, all these years later, that the lesson still applies.
Our report cards don’t disappear when we grow up. The subjects change: career, marriage, money, parenting, dreams. There will be As. There will be Cs. There will probably be a few things we’re pretty sure deserve an F. But no single grade gets to determine our entire GPA. We don’t always get to decide what life puts on our report card. We do get to decide what we learn from it and what we do next.
It’s OK to fail forward. Just don’t get stuck there.
Emeri B. Montgomery is Newsweek's Director of Homepage Operations.
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