DATE: Tuesday, September 9, 1997            TAG: 9709090036

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: Opinion

SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON

                                            LENGTH:   63 lines

LEARNING LIFE'S LESSONS WITH A DAUGHTER AT THE ROLLER RINK

YOU CAN LEARN a lot about life at the roller rink.

I spent a lifetime there one August afternoon.

It was a field trip for my daughter, and after listening to her lament that she was the only 6-year-old left on Earth who was not proficient on wheels - and that it was entirely, absolutely, exclusively my fault - I agreed to go with her.

To help her out.

I did this without considering that it has been, oh, say, 25 years and 100 pounds since I'd donned the heavy roller skates that send legs in north-south directions simultaneously.

I naively thought - prayed even - that this was the kind of thing a mother could manage from the sidelines. Like a coach does. I could yell out, ``Stand up!'' ``Don't fall!'' ``Watch out for the kid behind you!'' ``Keep your feet moving!'' And finally, ``Just cling to the rail!''

But what I soon learned - besides the fact that roller rinks don't have those hang-on-for-dear-life railings any more - is that to teach kids to roller skate you have to get out there with them.

It's the only way to peel their arms off your waist. Then you have to pretend you're having the time of your life even though inside you're terrified of making a fool of yourself, not to mention breaking a bone vital for sitting.

And so together, mostly from the humbling level of a very hard wooden floor, my daughter and I learned one of life's important lessons:

You have to be willing to fall down.

A lot.

Over and over and over.

And you must face this idea of falling fearlessly. Accept it and get right back up and try again. And the harder you try not to fall down, the less likely it is that you'll ever relax enough to get the hang of it.

And while my daughter was thinking this idea was the answer to gliding along beside friends whose mothers taught them to skate from infancy, I was thinking how appropriate a lesson it is for life in general.

That you must be willing to fall. That if you don't, it means you're not trying anything new. And that the best thing to do when you fall is to get right up and keep going. And pretend you're having a good time until you reach a point where - lo and behold - you are.

As another school year gets underway, I am reminded of the importance of learning with my two children. That while the lessons we learn together may mean different things at different ages, they all tie together from cradle to grave.

My daughters' lessons about trying new things teach me to have courage to try my own. The spats they report with each other and playmates teach me about the nature of getting along. Their books about comets and planets and solar systems remind me just how small a space I take up in the cosmos.

And while I may spend my day trying to track down some vital piece of information at work, some telling statistic or just the right turn of phrase, the most important lesson I may learn is from the seated position with wheels spinning above my head.

That's where I watch my daughter's frustration turn to accomplishment as we get up, go around, fall down, get up and go around again - until the moment when my daughter turns to me and says, ``Mom, I don't need you anymore.''

That's when I head to the sidelines to ponder a mother's hardest lesson: You gotta let 'em fall down - and get up - all by themselves.

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