Athletics were never my strong suit. Not even a suit, really. More like an ill-fitting jacket.
Curious, then, that my offspring have turned me into a perpetual spectator of sports of all kinds — baseball, golf, tennis, flag football, basketball, gymnastics (until the kids discovered it’s a long way down from the balance beam to the floor), soccer, track and, most recently, volleyball.
I was always the last one picked to be on school P.E. teams, but as a parent, I have become one very serious sports enthusiast.
I’m not an athlete. I’m athlete-ish.
This is not to say I am conversant on all sports topics, but I don’t let a little thing like rules of the game stop me. I am a mother, after all. I’ll stand up and holler at the ump with the best of them before my husband reminds me we are at a game that uses referees, not umpires. Refs, umps — they’re all the same to me, which means they’re wrong when making a call against my child.
Oh my. I’ve become one of them. The kind of parent I swore I’d never become. The mother who protests a bad play when her child was clearly heading in the wrong direction to make a touchdown. The dad who bristles when his kid is pulled from the starting line-up. The parent who pulls out team photos at the dinner table.
This is not how I intended to be.
As a young mom, I had visions of a parental democracy. I would encourage my kids to practice freedom and diversity when choosing an activity to play rather than feel forced to enter professional sports at the age of 10.
Then we discovered my son had a decent golf swing. We paid for lessons and golf camps; we even picked up the game as a family (OK, I drove the golf cart, but I was totally in the Tiger zone). And, for a moment, my husband and I indulged in crazythink, in which we were on the 18th green at the Masters in Augusta jumping for joy as our son made an eagle to win the coveted green jacket.
One afternoon, back at home in reality world, my son looked tired after a round on the links. I rubbed his back and told him if golf was getting to be too much, perhaps he should take a break.
The next morning, he declared at breakfast he was giving up golf for a while. This is when I asked him if he had completely lost his mind.
What was he thinking? I didn’t mean what I said! Since when does a teenager listen to his mother?
Ah, the lessons our youth teach us. If only we were young enough to remember them.
I’m also the mom who paraded as a one-eyed pirate in front of 5,000 spectators at Disney World in support of my daughter’s volleyball team last summer.
And you know what? Volleyball season has begun again.
Guess I better find that eye patch.