Those Who Keep Fighting

A couple of months ago, our family purchased a new direct-to-garment printer for our small business. We started a screenprinting and vinyl business quite a few years ago. I can’t remember what year we started, but I can tell you that enough time has passed for me to completely forget what it felt like to be learning. I have forgotten the orders that had to be completely thrown away and restarted due to an error, causing a lost profit. I have forgotten the vinyl sheets that were ruined when the Sihouette was at the wrong setting and I didn’t know to check it every single time I told it to cut. I have forgotten the times the heat press was at the wrong setting and the vinyl messed up, the times we ordered the wrong vinyl and it ruined a shirt, the times Kraig was learning screenprinting and had to do and redo orders. I have forgotten what it’s like to be on a learning curve.

And since I have forgotten what it feels like to be at the beginning of something, I’m comparing our new printer beginning to the much more advanced level we are with screenprinting and vinyl. And I’m frustrated and mad. Every time I go to work on shirts upstairs, something goes wrong. Sometimes it’s small, like colors being off or a shirt printing crooked and having to be rejected. Sometimes it’s big, like not being able to figure out how to create in photoshop or illustrator. And sometimes it’s huge and sickening, like pressing an entire order of over twenty shirts at the wrong temperature, creating marks on them, thus losing the time spent and the profit earned thanks to having to do them over again. I’ve grown to hate the room where that beast of a printer lives, that dragon that breathes fire at me every night until my hair is wet with sweat and my clothes are sticking to me.

And then every now and then, things go right. Every now and then, everything works like it should and I get a glimpse of what it will be like once I am again past the beginning.

As I have wrestled this black hunk of machinery night after night, I’ve looked at and reflected on a quote that hangs in the craft room, a quote by Jon Acuff that my friend Melissa Barnett framed for me. It says, “Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.” How many times does this apply to aspects of our lives other than making tshirts? How many times do we look at those around us who seem to succeed and achieve effortlessly, we feel resentful of or amazed by them, and yet we haven’t seen their struggle? We weren’t there when they were wrestling and failing and losing. All we see is the fruit of their labor rather than the sweat and blood and thoughts of despair and failure that went into it. I look at other parents sometimes and wonder how on earth they came out so clean, so unscathed, so untouched. Then I find out in the rare instances that we are actually vulnerable with each other that their parenting journey is no easier than mine is. I remember being a young teacher and thinking that everyone else had it together, that veteran teachers never had to deal with the sort of disrespect I was facing. Now that I’m one of the “veteran teachers”, I know that the struggle doesn’t end when you get tenure. Sometimes those tough years and tough classes and tough kids are going to come, no matter how long you’ve been at it, but you have learned over time how to cope.

I think we would be much more content if we could just remember that the battle isn’t to the strong or the swift or the talented or the smart, but to the ones who keep on fighting.