CurrentMom

Sports Mom

Truth Thursday (a little bit late) 

So, my daughter made the high school JV (that’s Junior Varsity, for those of you, like me, who didn’t know) field hockey team. Yay.  And she wants to try out for lacrosse in the spring. Yay.

What I didn’t know was that there is practice every day, and that the after school activities bus leaves much earlier than practice is over. And that there are many additional responsibilities for parents than just showing up at games – there’s the pasta dinner before the season opener, there are list serves to be managed, fundraising to be done, calls to be made, sheds to be built (to house the girls’ gear) and at least 10 other volunteer responsibilities on the sheet that was passed around at the parent meeting at the beginning of the season. 

Sheesh.  I got through my son’s four years of high school by visiting the school about 10 times. I’ve been there 10 times plus in the first week and a half for my daughter’s launch. 

Different kids, different needs.

I went to a high school that had no sports teams. It was the 1970s, and my school, a bit of a hippie experiment in education, was non-competitive. I took ballet and modern dance as my gym credits. There were sports, certainly, and I have a memory of one of my good friends walking around the halls in her “gym leader” uniform, although I don’t know what a gym leader was, since I never once set foot in the gym (really.)

But I have a good friend today who was a high school and college athlete, and she and her daughters have been beacons for my daughter for years.  My daughter has skimmed being really athletic, and while having played on some teams – soccer and basketball – had never really found her niche.

Until now.  She really, really likes field hockey and lacrosse. She comes home from practice starving, because she’s working so hard every day. She delightedly showed me the beginning of her “six pack” the other day. And she is getting to know a wonderful group of girls who are tightly knit and who work together as a team.

Apples, apples and more apples -- Traditional Apple Pudding

Meal Monday

I love the fall. The crisp, clear weather is refreshing (at least here in New England) and it's all about new beginnings. One of our favorite family traditions has been to go apple picking every year. We have great pictures of our two children as infants on our backs, as toddlers, as youngsters, eating fruit right off the trees.

Now that they're both teenagers, they prefer buying apples to picking them themselves (sigh). But I still love visiting the orchards. All of this leads to a surfeit of apples which we can't eat fast enough to avoid some spoilage.

Unmentionables

Truth Thursday (published a day early)

I just finished an early Saturday morning drive to my daughter’s field hockey practice – called for 7:00 am, which meant leaving the house at 6:45 with a teen who has been getting up at 5:45 all week for the first week of high school. You can imagine how happy she was.

But despite the enlightened advocacy in our community around later school day starts, I was, frankly, less concerned about her early start than my having to drive that early in the midst of the dizzy spell I had woken with.

I’ve had these spells for a while.  At first, I thought they were symptomatic of something dreadful, perhaps fatal (I’m from the headache-to-brain tumor in 60 seconds camp, after all.)  But as they continued to come with some regularity, and nothing else ever seemed wrong, I have added them to the growing list of hormonal tics my body is facing as I face down … peri-menopause. 

The Blessing of a Carpool

Truth Thursday

I remember the very first carpool I was in. My oldest son, two years old, was entering half-day pre-school.  We were very pleased with our choice of pre-school, but we were stumped as to how we were going to get him there and back. Our wonderful nanny at the time did not yet have her driver’s license, and we both worked full-time in the opposite direction. 

Somehow we learned about people in our neighborhood whose children were also attending this pre-school, and we figured out a carpool. I remember crying as I was trying to sketch out how this was all going to work – it just felt overwhelming and new and undoable.

Of course, it eventually all worked out, and except for one day when one of the fathers in the carpool forgot to pick the kids up (yes, I still remember that) it all ran pretty smoothly for the year. After that year, things start to blur a bit as to how we got our son to pre-school, but I think our nanny finally learned how to drive, and eventually, when my younger kids were going, I was also working at home as a consultant and could drive them as well. 

So that oldest son is now at college and no longer in need of a carpool. In fact, I haven’t driven him anywhere for years. He was never involved in team sports, and so the clubs and activities he chose were all at school and accessible. And because he is so independent, he chose to find his own way all these years – via metro, bus, car and foot.

But, as they so often do in parenthood, the tides are once again changing, and I am about to enter my next phase of parenting. Call it the Sports Carpool phase. And I am already starting to feel those tears of overwhelmed-ness well up again. 

Departure

Truth Thursday

It was about 8:00 in the evening, and my contractions had really started to holler. My husband and I got in the car and he drove me through the park to the hospital, with the windows open. I remember screaming into the soft, summer trees as we drove past, the pain was so extraordinary. 

At 6:44 the next morning, after a night of contractions and challenges, our son was born by c-section. Because his heart rate had dropped during my labor, he was whisked away to the NICU before I could hold him. My mother arrived while I was still in recovery and came barreling into the room and held me tight. All I wanted to know was that my baby was ok (he was) and that we would be reunited soon (we were.) He went home on the hottest day of the year half swaddled in the bunting she had lovingly chosen for him.

He was a challenging baby.  Didn’t nurse easily, didn’t reach any of his milestones on time. We worried a lot. But eventually, he reached them all. Including the doozy of all milestones - his departure for college.

We just dropped that baby off at his freshman college dorm.

It really does go by in the blink of an eye. I can remember – viscerally – the torture of being up with my newborn every night for two months, as he found the hours of 1:00 – 5:00 am to be the best for playtime. Sitting on our porch swing, waiting for the newspaper to be delivered. He would finally go back to sleep for a couple of hours and I would doze until he woke.  The memory of the physical pain from getting through those two months with no sleep and taking care of a newborn will never leave me.

I ran into the wonderful director of his wonderful pre-school the day before we hit the road for college. It was an omen of grace and goodness, as I would have kept all three of my kids in her charge for their entire school careers if I could. She wished me luck, and we reminisced about how she used to go into the classrooms with a Polaroid camera on the first day of school to bring a snapshot to the parents who were waiting upstairs in the “Tea and Sympathy” room.  She told me she never took a picture of a child crying. My child was merely curled up in a fetal position in the corner. We still have that picture.