I love you enough to let you be angry

I was watching the movie "Miracle" last night. It is about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team.  I remember getting up early on a Sunday to watch the game against the Russians.  It was beautiful hockey.  I am pretty sure I watched the gold medal game against Finland, but I don't really remember that game as much as I do the one against the Russians.  I suspect I am not alone in this.

I also remember after the game I started looking at all the newspaper articles and the magazine stories about the team.  I think I probably still have the clipping around here somewhere. Herb Brooks was masterful in the way he coached that team.  They started out as rivals from the schools for which they played and they ended up united...often united in their hatred of some of Herb's methods.  He pushed them really hard and he had them reach their full potential.  As he said, "If they lost, he wanted them to know that they had left it all on the ice, that they had nothing left."  He could be really hard on them, at one point, he had them doing suicides, which the hockey team renamed Herbies in his honor (skate from goal line to blue line and back, goal line to red line and back, goal line to blue line and back, goal line to goal line and back) mostly because he had them doing so many of them.  He even had them doing them as punishment after an exhibition game that they lost against Oslo, since he didn't think they were playing up to their potential due to the fact that they were focused on the girls in the stands rather than the game.  Herb earned grudging respect from the team and I think they eventually grew to love the guy despite how hard he pushed them, or maybe because of it.

Ever heard of Aimee Mullins?  She was born with out fibula in her legs, so she had to have her legs amputated when she was a child.  She became a super model and athlete. She credits a lot of her success to the doctor who forced her through physical therapy who she called Dr. P. Growing up, Mullins did not like her physical therapy sessions and did not like the bands she worked with. But her physical therapist, Dr. P, once said, “Wow, Amiee you are such as strong and powerful little girl. I think you will break one of those bands. When you do break it, I will give you $100.” What he did, reshaped an awful experience into a promising experience for Mullins. His vision of her as a strong girl, shaped her own view of herself. It gave her the strength to continue and gave her a new reality. She finally saw herself as capable.

I think we all wish we had someone in our lives like that.  Someone who pushes us to be our best regardless of what we may think of them in the moment.  The hard part is yielding up the control to let them do that and harder still to cooperate.   This seems to be a reoccurring theme in my thoughts.  I wrote about it in my post called This is a song about control.  There is just something so alluring about having someone cares so much about you and who you can be that they are willing to have you dislike them or even hate them or what they are doing at times, to get you to that place where you are the best you can be. I know a lot of women in this little blogosphere that have men like that in their lives and I think for the most part they realize how lucky they are in general if perhaps not always in the moment.  It's nice to see that you don't have to be a Olympic athlete or a super model to have that kind of person: one who is strong enough to work past the resistance and not give up. Someone who is willing to say, "I love you enough to let you be angry with me over what I am doing."