So, here is Sophie's story. My name is Sophie. I'm 18 and I just graduated from high school.
I live with my mum and dad and sister just outside Boston. My life story is about how to keep up with the crazy pace of life when I was in elementary school and it caused me so much stress that I became really sensitive and vulnerable. I started overreacting to everything and became a teasing target.
At first I thought it was just me, but when I looked around I saw that a lot of other kids were overwhelmed and trying to keep up with everything, just like me. The fact that everyone is living stressfully may seem normal, but that doesn't make it right. There's nothing healthy about being crushed by stress.
I hope reading this story helps you realise that feeling pressured all the time is just not okay. We all need to dial back the stress and be calmer and happier. We're kids.
We've got a right to have a childhood. We shouldn't be treated like mini-executives being trained to run big companies when we aren't even high schoolers yet. I tried everything.
I did. I tried everything when I was in 4th and 5th and 6th grade. I took piano lessons once a week, played great travel team soccer, practiced three times a week, and played in games and tournaments sometimes on weekends for most of the year round.
But I also had a ton of homework. I could barely keep up with it all. Looking back on it now, even after going through high school, I can hardly believe so many teachers in elementary school piled that much work on us so early.
They didn't realise that we had a life outside schoolwork, that being both socially active and having time to be ourselves is just as important to our personal growth. Anyway, up until the end of 3rd grade, things went smoothly for me. I was a pretty good student.
I played some sports. I was fairly popular at school. My best friend in the whole world was my big sister Amanda.
We got along great, even though she was three years older. We shared a bedroom, played board games with our friends a lot, went to the same summer camp. She never excluded me from her activities and friendships.
She let me hang out with her when friends came over. We all had so much fun together. Quiet.
That changed when I entered the 4th grade and Amanda moved to Riverton Middle School across town to start 7th grade. We'd been so close for so long. Suddenly, we were headed into a completely different direction.
Now that she was in another school, I never ran into her during the day or in the hallways at recess or during lunch. So, I joined a travel soccer team that year and Amanda swam for the school team. So, we didn't see much of each other at all.
Then, a few weeks into the new school year, Amanda's swim coach, impressed by her work ethic I guess and trial times, convinced my dad that she should swim in an elite swim team that he coached and that trained 6 days a week and had 4 mandatory early morning workouts. That meant 4 days a week. When I woke up to get ready for school, she and my dad were already gone.
He'd drive her at 5.30 in the morning to practices and then to school and then he'd head off to work. For the first few times, it was nice to have my mum all to myself at breakfast, but pretty soon I started feeling sad because Amanda and I had always laughed a lot and acted kind of goofy together and now I almost never saw her anymore. Things changed a lot for our family over the next 2 years.
Mum and Dad, who had both been athletes, were really pumped up about Amanda's development as a competitive swimmer and my dedication to soccer I guess. Because our schedules rarely corresponded, Dad often spent weekends travelling to swim meets with Amanda, while my mum drove me to practices and weekend games. Our vacations were often split up in a similar way.
Dad took Amanda to swim camp, out of state meets and all that stuff. Mum took me to Columbia Day or Memorial Day tournaments. At home, there was never any time for us just to hang out together.
It was almost like we weren't really a family anymore. Amanda was always off doing swim stuff and Dad worked in his home office every night to try and catch up on what he'd missed when he was driving Amanda around. Mum had a little more time because she was a high school teacher, but she often had piles of papers to grade in the evenings and because of soccer, she became less my mum and more like a team manager or like a chauffeur.
We got to talk a bit when we drove to and from practices if I wasn't too tired that I just fell asleep. But what I missed most of all things was Amanda that Amanda and I used to do with mum such as just baking and like cooking dinner and just kind of regular stuff. When I was younger, I'd spend hours in the kitchen helping mum cook.
But there was no time anymore. I'd just sit there at the kitchen table buried in homework assignments while she put meals together as quickly as possible. Then she and I would eat right there and then in the kitchen while we worked and Dad and Amanda's dinners were in the pot so that they could have them when they got home from Amanda's afternoon practices and school activities.
I really miss the days when the four of us just ate together because that had been when everyone relaxed and we all just got to connect over what was going on in our daily lives. Now we often ate at different times because everyone was so just kind of on the go. Sunday night dinners was one meal we sat down as a foursome and that only happened if we're all back at the same time from games and competitions.
As Amanda got older, her attitude towards me changed too. It wasn't just that she wasn't around that much anymore. She basically just didn't want me to hang out with her.
I don't know when exactly it happened but somehow my big sister and best friend in the whole wide world had become like my chief rival sort of. At least that's the way I felt. Everywhere I looked, I was reminded about how great Amanda was.
She was like a straight-A student throughout middle and high school. She was beautiful and popular and won races so often that Dad brought a wall-to-ceiling wooden trophy case that was mounted in the hallway next to the living room to our house with all her like swimming awards and cups and stuff. I worked hard at soccer and did well at school but I could never really measure up to her academically or athletically.
I was a good athlete and one of the better players on my travel team. I was a defender but I was nowhere close to becoming like a star athlete like Amanda was. She was one of the top swimmers in her whole group.
I had one or two good friends at school but Amanda was a middle school kind of like a star. She was on the student council at Reverton and co-chaired like the dance committee. She had loads of followers and friends on multiple social media accounts.
When she was at home, she was always on her phone, texting and messaging with girlfriends and the guys who liked her. When I was little, being around Amanda had always made me feel happy I guess. Now I felt small and sometimes even invisible.
She was so bubbly and energetic. She never really sat down or sat still like a ballerina who never stopped spinning. The only thing that kept her from being perfect was the fact that she chewed her nails and she talked really fast.
The older Amanda got, the deeper she disappeared into her expanded social world. I felt as though I barely existed to her. Whenever I asked her if she wanted to hang out with me, she was kind of curt or sometimes downright mean really.
But I kept trying because once in a while when I caught her in the right mood, I got her to play a board game or just kind of goof around and laugh. We never went anywhere together anymore as we did when we were younger and I sensed she was sort of embarrassed to be seen with me and that felt awful. All she wanted to do was chat with her friends on her phone.
Phone, the phone, the phone. When she wasn't doing that, she'd walk around with her earbuds on and got annoyed if I spoke to her or if I walked into her room. She'd snap at me.
What? She'd say and glare at me. When I couldn't think of anything to say, she got exasperated and she'd say, It's so annoying, Sophie. Well, sorry, I'd reply and stomp out, biting my lip and sit down back at the kitchen table and disappear into my homework.
What's wrong, sweetie? Mum would say in the evenings after I'd had another argument with Amanda. Nothing, Mum, I'd answer. It's just Amanda never wants to do anything anymore.
Well, she's growing up, isn't she? Mum reasoned. And she's very busy with school and like everything. She's not that much older, Mum, and she's not around anymore.
But when she is, she's on her phone all the time. She's like totally addicted. All kids are constantly on their phone at her age these days, Sophie.
It's normal. Well, if that's normal, I don't know, I said. It doesn't seem right or normal to me.
That's the first part of Sophie's story. And it kind of zoomed in on the relationship with her sister, right? As you just heard. But that could be a relationship to a friend.
It could be relationships to kids at school. Louise and I chose to have that zoom in on a family member because of the family being such a secure base and that being eroded for Sophie. But it really could be anything at all, really, where a child who had a previous connection with something or someone has that start to erode.
It's something to keep an eye on as a parent because that's one of the early signs that a child's having the foundations shaken, the rug starting to be pulled from under their feet of, in a sense, their identity and who they can trust and who they can lean into. And if that happens, then even in that situation with Amanda, then I would have loved for the mother and the dad to move in closer to Sophie and not normalize it. And they, in the real-life situation, when they looked back at this, they realized that too and didn't wish for anyone else to make that mistake.
So that's the first part of the reading. Second part of the reading coming right up. Okay, bye-bye for now.
