Life with Mom-Living a Fear Filled Life

My mom is 93 years old, and her entire world is driven by fear.

Some background, she was on one of the last boats that came to Taiwan in 1949 just before the relations between Taiwan and China was shut down, so she was one of the last people to leave China. She came to Taiwan, alone, not own anything outside of what was on her back and in a little suitcase. She came to be with relatives and managed to get work and survive. This was quite a change from her youth. My maternal grandfather was a local banker and she grew up with 14 brothers and sisters in a large house, with servants waiting on her. As with most women who lived in feudal China at that time, she never went to school beyond the secondary school, and yet she managed to make a living. Working as an assistant principal of a middle school in Taiwan, and then a bookkeeper for USAID.

She married my father and had me, after three miscarriages; we moved to Honduras for my dad’s career as an engineer and then to the US. Our finances were not great at that time and our family struggled. Mom sacrificed, scrimped and saved, and even managed to work as a book keeper when they lived in Salem Massachusetts. She did all of this without complaint, toughed it out in the US and outlived my father.

All the above is to say mom is a survivor.

Back to the present, every decision my mom makes in her every day life is driven by fear. Fear of the unknown mostly but fear all the same. It is the prime mover in her life.

She is afraid that anything that she does will result in more pain and suffering, she is afraid that every decision I make is a bad decision which would result in pain and suffering for the two of us. She is afraid of leaving the house whenever it rains or snows because she is afraid that we may get into a car accident while driving. She is afraid when I go on long trips and she is afraid when I go on short trips. She was afraid when I started coaching volleyball because she thought I was wasting my time on frivolous non-essential activities, i.e. something isn’t central to my identity as an engineer. She is afraid of being late to anything, so we spend a lot of quality time in waiting rooms because we are so early. She is super generous with gifts for people who helps her, it could be the receptionist at the doctor’s, the bank teller, the lady who helps her at the church she attends, because she is afraid that she would be looked upon as someone who is ungrateful.

At first dealing with this world view was agonizing for me, the insecurity grated on me; but as I stayed home and spent time with her, it came to me: she did not live a normal life. She lived in extraordinary times and her circumstances were extraordinary. Her fears came partly from the times she lived in: the Japanese invasion of China, the division of China and Taiwan. The periods of stability in her life came while she lived in Taiwan during uncertain times, for her and for Taiwa. It came during the cold war between the East and West. She’d moved to two different countries where she had to learn different languages and navigate the very different culture and society that surrounded us. It was completely foreign to her cultural and economic background. And yet she persisted. The key to her survival is because of her persistence, all driven by that fear fear. As I remember our home growing up, she has always been the one who fretted and worried, driven by fear of the unknown.

Her fear has multiplied as the years wore on, her ability to understand the English language diminished, her ability to navigate her way around our modern society is hampered by the erosion of her senses because of old age, and her confusion with the world around her deepens because she just can’t keep up with the changes. Add atop of all that the fact that all of her friends, as well as my father had preceded her in passing on, she lives in a lonely and very scary world. Things that I take to for granted is not so simple for her. Which further amplifies the fear that she feels.

Our clashes since I have been home had, thankfully, receded, partly because of her  and partly because of my slow realization of how difficult living in the modern world is for her. Alas, the biggest problem is that she can’t adjust to all the changes, not that she wouldn’t, but she just can’t. Of course, why would anyone ask a ninety-three-year-old to make changes to accommodate our needs, it seems to be too much to ask and too impossible to accomplish. It would be sheer folly to even try, as the explanations and the process of seeking to understand is counterproductive.

So I have come to learn that it is I who should adjust and conform to her need. It hasn’t been easy, while we still clash, we don’t do it as often nor as intensely as we did before. I still have a tendency to lose my temper, we have the same temperament so it is inevitable that we clashed.

Volleyball Coaching Life-Resulting

How often have we caught ourselves saying: “The ball knows!” After the opponent serves into the net or hit the ball out of bounds after a bad ref call? How about when we were on the verge of correcting a player’s mechanics but stop in mid correction because the hit was a kill or the pass went to target?  We were resulting.

Resulting can be defined as our propensity to mistake the quality of our decisions with the outcome of the decision, that is, we let the result determine how we judge our decision.

We assume that we win because we make good decision, even though it is might be because of good luck. Conversely, we assume we lose because of bad luck or bad decisions.

In any competitive sport, coaching decisions are made with imperfect information with very little forethought due to the time constraints, the difficulty is magnified during live game action, but even when we do have the time to make the decision, there are hidden underlying factors that are not measurable nor are unidentifiable which affects our decision. Under those circumstances, we will resort to resulting because of the lack of other information.

The resulting habit is comforting to inexperienced coaches, but even the most seasoned coaches can find themselves resulting, because it is such an easy choice. Why bother looking for faults with a decision that resulted in your favor. In fact, many coaches are more likely to result when the decisions become more complicated.

One way of resulting is to come to a false conclusion regarding a decision after a positive outcome: the good guys won the point or the game or the match and the coach takes credit for the win attributing it to their own good decision making, even if it was because of sheer luck. This is a false positive: the outcome is positive but the reason for the outcome is false. This erroneous belief in the reason for the win will perpetuate in the coach’s decision making toolbox, and the same decision will be repeated again under the same situation.

The other possible outcome of resulting is the conjugate situation: the result was negative, and the team lost the point, game or match. The coach, being under the self-serving bias will opt to blame bad luck or bad decisions for the failure and move on rather than critically examine the decisions which led to the losing result. The unintended consequence of this bias is that possibly good decisions are dismissed as bad ones once the result is known. More insidiously, the coach blames the bad result on bad luck and won’t consider analyzing the decision. This is a false negative, where the bad outcome obscured the real reason for the bad outcome.

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke talks about decision making in high stakes poker, and the effect that resulting has on her ability to thrive in her profession as a poker player and how she dealt with honing her decision making skills. The book is about decision making and her examples dealt with decision-making processes for one person playing poker against the house and other players; their decisions are just one determining factor amongst many other decision-making processes. The game involves all the decision makers, the cards, and the randomness associated with the cards. As complicated as that is, the volleyball coach is dealing with even more interactions and decisions.

For the volleyball coach, the game outcome is due to the interaction between bench decisions from the coaching staff, how the six players interpret and execute those decisions, the reaction and decisions of the six opposing players, the reaction and decisions of the opposing coaching staff, the reaction and decisions of the four officials, as well as the ever-present uncertainty. Volleyball coaches are having to have their decisions interpreted by the players, an added filter to the process. This filtering effect from the players and the additional complexity from the number of moving parts in a volleyball match make it even more critical that volleyball coaches refrain from resulting and analyze their decision making honestly and critically.

Resulting gives us false readings on our decision making, either false positives or false negatives. A false positive fits nicely with a coach’s confirmation bias even though the reason may be due to luck rather than sound decision making, which may lead the coach to continuously repeat the bad decision. In the false negative case, the coach may avoid pursuing a good decision because of the bad outcome. Sadly, resulting ends up confusing the coach; both false positives and false negatives hinders coaching decision-making by hiding the real reason for the result.