Marathon Lessons

Back in 8th grade, I wanted a letter to prove I'd made an "A" team more than anything. So desperate was I to achieve this, I even tried out for the one sport my common sense had always told me...you can't do. That's right, Track. But I'm not fast. I'm not tall. I don't jump. So what could a b-team bench warmer do on a track team?

Cross Country.

Now I did make the team and run a 1320 (3/4 of a mile), and I even got a ribbon. I was fifth. The fact that there were five people running doesn't really matter. Before the race, there were more but several quit. On the third lap in, everyone else that had not dropped out had finished. That track felt lonely and quiet and tedious.

I was hot.
I was unhappy.
I lay down.
Deliberately.
I thought about just staying there. (At 13, melodrama is a way of life).

Then, I got up and started moving again and the why fell way as I just kept going.
It wasn't that I signed up that got me a letter from the "A" team. It was that I didn't let myself quit.

So I apologize to all of you that read my "Full Plate" essay. Every word of it was true. (I felt overwhelmed and exhausted and frustrated and all those self absorbed things one feels at 43 that supposedly aren't melodrama because they aren't adolescent). What I needed, was to stop and reassert priorities. But when you feel all those things, it's hard to think, let alone assess.

Three weeks of observing the world dripping with stories that I wasn't writing drove me crazy. Some of those mental photos and turns of phrase would be lost forever. I don't know if such things are agony for anyone else but they haunt me.

So I promise not to flounce.
I promise not to lie down on the track anymore.
I'll finish the race even if I'm stuck running around this track after everyone else has lapped me twice.

What does that mean?

It means I'll be pouring out words for as long as I have access to a computer, but only after I've read to my kids, made sure they've done their homework, bathed, and I've given a bit of time to my husband, the needs of the house and my extended family and friends. I promise to be present in words and deeds.

I'll get fifth for finishing last, and I'll be just as proud of that ribbon as I am of the yellow one that hangs in my office from 1980.

Thanks for coming back.

Lessons Learned from Riding the Bench

Whatever lessons you failed to master as a kid, come back to bite you as an adult.

When I was a kid, I absolutely rotted at sports. This was back in the Jurassic era, when kids were assigned to A and B teams, and you could even be a second stringer on the B team, or not make it at all. I doggedly tried out every year for every sport and consistently made the B second string or sat out the season. I drooled over the idea that some day, if I just worked hard enough, I'd make the A team and get a ribbon, a trophy or maybe even a letter. I was a victim of too many After School ABC specials. I even prayed for this daily. When I wouldn’t make it, I was often reminded, “Sometimes, God’s answer is “No.” but being a bullhead, I figured I’d keep asking.

Fast forward to adulthood, when the one letter I did manage to get remains locked in a memory box somewhere, the wisdom of 25 years sans trying out for A-teams has informed me that not having your name on the list is survivable. That lesson isn’t being taught today, at least not to kids.

In the enlightened 21st century, children now have endless options for participation in “non competitive” sports, meaning anyone can play. The term “non competitive” is hopelessly misleading, as I see antics on and off the fields of play that rival the steroid scandals in cycling and judge rigging in ice dancing. Competition may have been removed from the play, but it hasn’t been extracted from the parents. Parents who made the team when they were kids on merit, are determined to show that their kids would have made the cut in the old school. I know of one mom who played her four year old up with first graders. She lied on the application. No one had the temerity to ask, "What was the point?"

Spotting high school talent scouts with note pads scoping out forth grade CYO games, I started to snicker. I was told very seriously by another mother, if your name gets circulated, you could get a free ride by the time you get to applying for private high schools. Looking at the field of boys, all of whom I had personally seen have long discussions about which pokemon was best and which character in Harry Potter they would be, I wondered why any adult would spend time projecting what a 9 year old might become as at 15?

I thought things would be better when some of my children showed promise in the sports of their choosing. One of my girls seemed a whiz at basketball. She was even invited to join a select team. The initial pride at having a “talented” player went out the window when the coach explained; we would have to pay a four hundred dollar registration fee, plus money for uniforms and three nights of practice a week. Maybe I would consider this if my daughter was in high school and it meant college scholarships, but this was third grade! Besides, at $400 per ten weeks, I figured I could save for college and maybe we wouldn't need a scholarship!

The parents in the league looked at me with pity for denying my daughter this shot at the “big leagues” for a reason as flimsy and petty as money. I saw a mother tsk at me and murmur, “What a shame, her daughter showed real promise.” This refusal to commit was a moral failing on my part and doomed my daughter to a lifetime of lackluster accomplishment in the world of sports. If so, well, at least I know what sin I committed to wreck her life. Given her other talents, I’ll take that chance.

Another of my sons is a natural athlete. If there is a ball in play, he’s on it. He’s good. He’s fast, he understands the game and he cares about sports. It must be a recessive gene. Anyway, I couldn’t wait to see him on the field. Finally, it would be my kid everyone cheered. I dreamed happily of watching him score a goal and say to the camera, “Hi Mom!”

Like most fantasies, reality was far uglier.

In his first practice, my son did a gloating dance as he scored on a kid half his size, from his own team! Then there was the fight he had with a girl because she stole the ball from him. I'm yelling "Red Card!" and the coach explained, they didn't do that at this level of play. Yes, he still moves like a gazelle but I dread showing up at the sidelines. I feel I need to carry a sign that simply says, “Yes, it’s my child. I’m sorry and I’m working on it.”

The problem is, he’s really good at sports. He’s just not a good sport. At one game, when my child was being particularly aggressive and had been warned by the referee, I shouted to the coach, “BENCH HIM!” Everyone else watching the game looked at me as if I were nuts until I explained. “I’m his mother.”

Given that he’d scored the only points our team had made this season, the coach shook his head. I’d be forced to teach the virtue of humility some other way…like maybe when he had kids.

The years have resulted in a treasure trove of ribbons and trophies in my house that signify having played a sport, having been a good sport, having been good at a sport and having simply showed up to watch a sport. As I picked up the feather duster to remove the recent cobwebs, I pined for the days when you might not make the team. The morals learned from not winning, from riding the bench were clear; Not everyone is good at the same thing; Life isn’t fair; Sometimes things happen; Practice and work hard and maybe; all these life lessons came from not making the cut.

Suddenly, making the B teams didn’t seem like it was such a bad thing. And I heard God lovingly laughing at and with me, “Now you’re finally getting it.” And my daughter came home, "Mom, can I try out for competitive softball this Summer?"

When Mom Was a Kid..

What it was like when I was a kid

On Sports and Games

Growing up, we strapped metal wheels to our shoes and fell on our knees on bumpy concrete until we learned to stop falling. Turns were tricky so you either held on, or in my brother's case, got down on your hands and knees and crawled through the turn, or you decided you knew what you were doing, tried to make the turn and fell at least 50 times before you got it.

When we played on swing sets, teeter totters and monkey bars, they were made of wood and steel and sometimes gave us splinters, particularly when we would ride with two or three at a time.

Tag and hide and seek, dodge ball and freeze tag had winners and losers. We played them often. In fact, we loved them. Even when we were mad about being picked last, it just meant we hoped next time, we’d be captains or picked first, or at least not last again.

Sports had b-teams and sometimes, you didn’t even make that one. You only got a trophy if you won, and sometimes, you got skunked. People kept score but the teams for grade school and the like, were not posted in the paper. It wasn’t important. These were kids’ games.

On School and Education…

There were three channels on television if you didn’t count the educational one, which we didn’t.

The library was a place to check out books, a week in advance of the science project that was mandatory.

The science project was a big deal, complete with a hand written four page report and five references, none from the web. Everyone had to make a poster and a project. People would know if your parents did the art work, and you wouldn’t win.

We’d get pop quizzes at school and worksheets that had been freshly run from the ditto machine, and smelled like ink. We loved those, and I think sometimes, the ink made us dizzy.

You got grades. You got grades every day. Most of the time, it was a number or a letter. The grades included C’s, D’s, F’s and the less common, C-, D+ and D-. Your parents got called if you got these grades. Every time. Forging your parent’s signature got you in bigger trouble.

If you didn’t do an assignment, you got to do it during recess while everyone else was outside playing, which stunk.

They made us memorize Kipling’s “If,” our multiplication tables and say the pledge. We often had to read aloud or do problems on the board for everyone else to watch.

They showed us videos of “The Red Balloon,” and “Chicken Soup with Rice” as treats. We saw each every year at least once.

At noon, We’d get kicked outside to play, we had recess. It was after lunch and lasted a decent amount of time. It didn’t matter if it was hot or cold, muggy or raining, we were on our own after lunch for that half hour. Recess lasted long enough to form cliques, to organize a kick ball game, to braid hair or play a no prisoners game of speed solitaire.

On Grown Ups…

People disagreed on politics, as they always have, but it wasn’t acceptable to insult someone just because they held a different political affiliation. No one was considered heartless or brainless for being a Republican or a Democrat; these were party denominations, not the solutions to every problem under the sun requiring absolute religious fealty.

Being kids, we didn’t even know what politics really were until Mom caught us one day having uprooted all the political signs and repositioned them in our front yard because we thought they were cool. These Vote for…posts seemed like some form of mushroom that had sprung up overnight. We were busy dismantling them to make swords when Mom found us.

Television had a family hour which was boring and grown-ups watched the news, which was boring to us, but then the alternative was bed.

There were uber parents out there who made their kids compete in every sport and activity, but most of the grown-ups knew that these people were wrong and encouraged all of us to pick what we loved and do that first.

Grown-ups drank things like beer and wine, ice tea, diet soda and coffee, all of which tasted terrible. They also had weird clothing rules like no shorts after Labor Day and no white in the winter. They ordered foods with dressings and sauces on them and used “Sweet and Low.” They would make us eat the crust on breads, the stumpy parts of broccoli and occasionally, liver.

For Fun…

Swimming lessons and camp took care of maybe two weeks. The rest of the time, we were on our own.

We’d troll the neighborhood to amass as many at home minors as possible. It didn’t matter who, if you were a kid and you were home, we were knocking on the door asking, “Can you come play?”

Then, we’d ride our bikes until dark, no helmets. We’d pin cards to our spokes with clothes pins to sound like motor cycles. On a dead end street, we’d hold races all afternoon until someone announced they were thirsty. There would be a run on the hose, with each person jockeying to be later in line, so as not to get the first swig of heated by the sun water that came out of the end.
Then the beep beep beep of the mosquito spraying truck would be heard and everyone would clear out to their homes as fast as possible. We didn’t know DEET was poisonous, but it sure smelled bad.

When it was too hot, we’d play monopoly in doors until someone won or was called home. We sometimes made card castles, trying to use all 52 cards before the thing fell. We loved fresh boxes of crayons and coloring books. The coloring books were almost always of animals and never had stickers.

Come fall, we’d gather pecans from every yard, filling up two trash cans. Then we’d offer to rake leaves for a dollar all over the block and try to sell the pecans.

Every Christmas, we’d have a Christmas program. They never had plots, just grade after grade, alternating between secular and religious music, with the grand finale, always, Silent Night. Then most parents would reconvene across the street at the Carnation Dairy restaurant to praise our performances and buy ice cream.

Why am I telling you this?

So my darlings, you will understand some of the why I tell you often to turn off the television and the DDS and the DVD’s and the IPods and the cell phones and the computers.

I will shrug sometimes when you are not 100% safe and even encourage you to jump off the high dive, draw until you run out of chalk and drink a soda outside while reading comics in a hammock.

I will not rush out to challenge other parents to a duel to the death because your feelings are hurt, though I will offer you a hug and say I love you.

Life is always unsafe and unfair but worth living. Sometimes, it is even unsafe and unfair in our favor.

Skinned knees and even bruised hearts heal. Memorization, pain from learning to learn is part of the process, and not what you will recall when you get to be nostalgic about childhood. Like giving birth, we don’t recall the labor pain itself, only that it hurt and then it was over, and we had this person, and everything was light and wonderful and still is.

Happy Thank You for Making me A Mother Day! And Happy Mother’s Day to everyone out there who has been so blessed.