People are successful or they are failures. There are no two ways about that. If you apply for a job, for example, you either get it or you don’t. And if you get it, you either do well at the job, or you don’t, you make a career of it, always on the rise, or you get stuck in some paper-pushing backwater. These distinctions are very clear. Who would dispute them? In Thomas’s family it is good to be successful. He and Mary are agreed on that. They met at a good university where they were considered high achievers. They were high achievers. Now their children are expected to do well at school. Not that Thomas and Mary are obsessed. They don’t want to make monsters of their offspring with cramming courses and trying to get them into top schools. They want them to be normal. It is simply expected that whenever they do something, they will do it well. Play the piano well, do their exams well, write good essays, play smart football, tennis, hockey, etc. Not that they are punished or ever would be if they didn’t do well, having given of their best. Thomas and Mary are not slave drivers. They are not unkind. But inevitably there would be a certain disappointment, if only in sympathy, as it were, with the child’s disappointment. Who doesn’t want to be successful? The truth is, Thomas and Mary find it hard to think of themselves and their children, individually or as a group, as failures.
But of the four of them, who is the most successful?
It’s a question neither Thomas nor Mary wants to ask. Success should unite the family, not divide it. Yet children these days seem to approach life in a more anxiously competitive and comparative spirit than in the past. There’s no stopping them. From a very young age Sally is calling Mark a klutz, he’s useless at this, useless at that. ‘How thick can you be?’ the firstborn asks. Mark suffers but has learned not to do the same things as his sister. Not to choose the same subjects at school. When their end-of-year exam results come in, it’s easy to say that this school is known to be easier than that, or that school tougher than this. Actually, Mark is doing pretty well at school these days. It’s Sally now who has to say her school is tougher. Mark has no idea, she says, how tough her school is.
Mark fights his father on the ping-pong table. Thomas doesn’t want to lose on purpose. That would be false. ‘When you beat me, you’ll really have beaten me,’ he tells his son. ‘You can really feel proud.’ And eventually his son does beat him. Thomas feels disorientated, even though this has been on the cards for a while, even though he wants his son to do well. Sally cheats at Battleships. Thomas is sure she does, but he lets it go. He doesn’t mind losing at Battleships; it’s mainly a game of luck. In general, he doesn’t mind losing if the other person cheats, just as he doesn’t mind other people in his profession being more successful than himself if they obviously had a head start or preferential treatment. It’s losing on an even playing field that’s unnerving for Thomas. Sally insists she doesn’t cheat. Perhaps she’s just really lucky. Or really good!
Mary doesn’t play games with the children. She doesn’t like playing cards or board games or ping-pong. And since she left work to concentrate on bringing up the children, she’s given up the idea of a career. So she’s not in competition with Thomas there. Or with anyone else, for that matter. She is a successful mother, bringing up healthy and generally successful children. She’s a great cook. Hard to beat her in that department.
Sally is good at the piano but wants to give it up. Thomas and Mary are disappointed, but not slave drivers. ‘If you still don’t like it when you’re fourteen, you can give it up then,’ they tell her. Sally gives up lessons on her fourteenth birthday. On that same day Mark starts taking the piano more seriously, more happily. In a few months he has become a pretty good pianist. Thomas thinks that if he had let Sally give up when she was twelve, Mark would have had a chance of becoming a virtuoso. But how could he have known this?
Sally is also good at skating, at karate, at basketball. Her instructors take Thomas and Mary aside and tell them to encourage the girl to invest more time in this sport, she could be a major success. Each time this happens, Sally drops the sport like a hot potato. She concentrates on making small pieces of jewellery. This was not something Thomas or Mary had foreseen. Mark’s piano teacher encourages him to go to the conservatory to study piano, but Mark decides against this. He starts to draw and make zany posters. Rather surprisingly, Sally compliments Mark on his posters and Mark compliments Sally on her jewellery creations. They are successful adolescents.
Thomas is a high-flying advertising executive. Sally opts to study pharmacology. She gets good grades and is happy. Her father can’t understand a thing when she starts to explain about dose–response complexities. Mark gets into computer graphics and design. Years later, both children will change direction. It turns out they don’t really like pharmacology or computer graphics. Separated from Mary now, it occurs to Thomas that perhaps they chose those fields because that way they could dream of career success without competing with other family members. Did we do things wrong? he wonders. Obviously, he wishes his children well in their new ventures. He hopes they will find paths they enjoy and jobs they can be happy in. He no longer feels the need to be proud of their achievements or to tell friends how well they are doing. His life is going better now, though never without an undertow of regret. Some hours after signing the separation papers, Mary texted:
The winner takes it all. Remember the song? Her destiny. Standing small. A loser.
Thomas cancelled the message quickly.