Her Track

Lin Min, 45 years old, is a copywriter and the mother of a fifth-grade girl. Every day, she competes in the parent group for Olympiad spots, researches on the policy for primary school to junior high school, and sets target scores for her daughter. She invented the "wrong question book sticker incentive method" and used princess stickers in exchange for her daughter's good grades. She thought she was helping her daughter win a future. Until my daughter wrote in her composition: "Mom is like an ATM machine. What she spits out is not money, but test papers." Until my daughter drew in her diary: a dinosaur carrying a schoolbag with "homework" written on it. Until the school psychology teacher said: "Xiao He's stress level has exceeded the warning level. She told you, 'My mother is very tired, and I don't want her to be more tired.'" Lin Min decided to quit the Mathematical Olympiad class, stop the English online class, and take her daughter to dig fossils. But the burden reduction turned into an increase - the research camp required me to write 3,000 words of reflections, my colleague's child was recruited by a key middle school, and her husband asked her "Do you want to sign up for another winter vacation class?" She deleted the "last three places" sent by the cram school teacher, and fell asleep late at night, staring blankly at the resume template for junior high school. The daughter ran away from home. She found Xiao He curled up under the dinosaur skeleton in the Museum of Natural History. The daughter said: "Mom, I'm so cold." This is a story about love and anxiety, about the track and the wrong path, and about how a mother relearns to "see" her daughter in a crazy race. It offers no antidote, only a hug. In front of the trilobite fossils 500 million years ago, an 11-year-old girl said: "It has existed, it has meaning."