Well, today was awesome and then terrible and then, I think, awesome again. When we got home, I realized Uncle Jake was staying in my room! We were going to be roommates for the whole summer. My mom has a little fold-out guest bed that she put in my room for me. The mattress is thin and kind of uncomfortable, but I don’t care. Uncle Jake is using my bed for the summer. So we got all that figured out, and Uncle Jake put his stuff in some of my drawers and some other stuff in my closet. Then we went down and ate dinner.
During dinner, my mom asked Uncle Jake a bunch of questions about everything. He has been in the SEAL Teams for eight years, and he told her about a bunch of the cool things he has done. They are all things that any kid would love to do, like parachuting, scuba diving, rappelling out of helicopters, and blowing things up with explosives—all the time!
He also talked about being in war. He said the hard part wasn’t the missions or carrying all that gear or being afraid—he said the hard parts were the times when his friends got hurt or killed.
After dinner, we went upstairs to go “square away” (that’s an Uncle Jake term!) my room before it got too late. This is when things got BAD.
Uncle Jake asked me what I was doing the next day. “Are you going to meet with some of your friends? Go play some basketball or soccer or something?”
“I’m not that great at sports,” I told him.
“You don’t have to be good to have fun.”
“Well, it’s not really that fun when you aren’t good,” I answered, already feeling like a big wimp.
“Okay. How about a swim? There has got to be someplace to go swimming around here, right?”
When he said that, I suddenly felt terrible. Here I was with my own uncle who wants to go swimming with me, but I can’t because I don’t even know how to swim! I felt like I didn’t even deserve him as an uncle. Tears suddenly welled up in my eyes, and I blurted out, “I can’t swim.”
“What do you mean you can’t swim?” he asked.
“I mean I can’t swim.”
“At all?” he questioned me.
“At all. I can’t swim at all.” As I said that, I finally just burst. Tears came streaming out of my eyes. Then I told him everything that I didn’t tell my mom. Everything. “Not only that, but I can’t do any pull-ups. I’m probably the weakest kid in the school.” The tears really started coming down now. Even though I was looking like a complete baby, I couldn’t stop myself from crying or talking. “And it’s not just that. I don’t know my times tables yet! I’m almost eleven years old, and I don’t know my times tables!!!!”
“Okay, you know there’s—” Uncle Jake was trying to tell me something, but I cut him off. I can’t believe it, but I butted right in and started talking over him.
“And the worst part is, I get bullied. Almost every day I have to do what Kenny Williamson tells me to do!!”
“Who’s Kenny Williamson?” asked Uncle Jake. “A teacher?”
“No!” I shouted. “He’s another kid. A bully!”
“All right, I get it,” Uncle Jake said. “Is that it?”
“Is that it???? I get picked on by a bully, made fun of because I can’t do any pull-ups, I don’t know what eight times seven is, and I don’t even know how to swim!! How much worse can it get???” I said loudly.
“Good,” said Uncle Jake.
“Good?” I asked. “How the heck is all that good?”
“It’s good because every one of those problems is something you can change. Every one of them.”
I didn’t know what to say. Here I was, a complete mess, crying over my situation. But Uncle Jake was calm, so calm it made me start to get calm, too.
“Look, Marc,” he said, “when I joined the Navy, I could only do seven pull-ups. Now I can do forty-seven. I wasn’t a great swimmer. Now I can swim like a fish. I also didn’t do that well in school, but when I got into SEAL training, I learned how to learn and ended up doing great on all the academic tests. And finally, when I first got into the SEAL Teams, I knew nothing about fighting. But now I can handle myself in any situation.”
“Of course you can! You’re a Navy SEAL!”
“You are missing the point. I wasn’t born like this! I had to work for it. I had to learn it. I had to EARN it. And what I am telling you is that instead of being a wimpy kid, you can be a Warrior Kid.”
WARRIOR KID??!?!?! I wasn’t exactly sure what that really meant, but it sounded AWESOME.
“What is a Warrior Kid?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. You need to go to bed. But I think a Warrior Kid is exactly what you need to become.”
Uncle Jake walked out the door to go downstairs and talk to my mom. WARRIOR KID. WARRIOR KID. WOW.
I lay on my mattress thinking about this as I drifted off to sleep.…