I never played sports as a kid.  That is aside from the one time I played for the 3rd grade basketball team.  I am not sure how it is I ended up on that team come to think of it.  But, it most likely had to do with my wanting to hang with the popular crowd.  A lot of my decisions did back then.  My parents had divorced the year before, which resulted in my sister and I moving from the house we all lived in on Beechwood Boulevard to a house my mom’s new girlfriend had bought on Northumberland.  I’ll give you a minute to digest that.

My mom is gay.  I’ve got no problem with that now, but when I was in third grade I was not at all happy about it.  Probably this was confounded by the fact that I was not happy my parents had gotten divorced, and I was not happy to have had to move out of the house we’d been living in, the one where I had a room with red carpet that I had picked out myself.  Initially I was not specifically unhappy about my mom telling us she was a lesbian because I did not know what a lesbian was.  I was eight.  My sister explained it to me, which didn’t really clear things up too much.  But, I did get that it was not something other people’s mom’s were.  Not any moms of the kids I knew anyway.  I felt like an odd duck to begin with at my new school.  I was coming in as a third grader.  Everyone else had already been there for awhile and made friends.  This new “situation” at my house made me worried about what the other kids would think of me.

My kids have friends who’s parents are gay and it’s a complete non-issue.  We live in California and it’s just a different time.  Back when my mom came out to us it was not something that was discussed.  The few times someone did figure it out I got tormented at school for it. But that came later, after my one day career as a 3rd grade basketball player.  One day is all it took for me to realize I was not cut out for this sport.  First of all I was (and still am) vertically challenged.  For starters, I was one of the shortest if not the shortest kid in the class.  And while it’s true that many, “Good things come in small packages,” basketball players are not among them.  I went the entire first half without ever getting one hand on the ball.  This was fine by me.  I just wanted to be on the team with the other girls.  The ones who won at the fifty yard dash.  The ones who played double dutch and four square.  The ones who ate lunch together instead of alone.  After half time I was subbed back in and much to my dismay, somebody passed me the ball.  I was stunned that I actually caught it.  It was as if everything was happening in slow motion and all the kids’ voices sounded slurred and their words came at half speed.  “GGGooooooooo SSSssssssuuuuussaaaan dddddrrrrriiiiiibbbbllleeee!!!!”  

I looked around and slow-mo kids were coming at me from all sides.  I took off up the court, dribbling the ball and trying my best not to “travel”.  The sound of the ball was an echoing thunderclap with every bounce on the wooden court floor.  I could hear the parents in the bleachers and the other kids--on both teams even--shouting out my name in their slow-mo slur.  I was unstoppable.  I dribbled that ball like nobody’s business.  I thought I was unstoppable.  Probably because nobody from the other team was trying to stop me.  I proceeded all the way to the net and took that fateful shot.  Swwwoooooossshhhh went the ball as it went through the hoop without touching the rim.  The gym fell silent.  Suddenly I realized why everyone was screaming and why none of the kids on the other team had tried to stop me.  I had remembered the no traveling thing.  But I had forgotten the part where they change sides of the court at half time.  I had just made a perfect shot, right in the other team’s basket.

I was humiliated.  At the end of the game the coach said a few words about good sportsmanship and supporting our teammates no matter how they’d played.  I knew he was talking about me.  Everyone knew it.  And while the kids took heed and did not razz me, I decided it was for the best that I not play basketball again.  Or any other sport for that matter.  It was the start of my long career of taking myself out of the game to avoid failing.

So I didn’t compete in sports.  But, that’s not to say I wasn’t an active kid.  The summer after my ill fated two pointer I started ballet lessons.  No balls, no baskets, no buzzers.  Just ballet.  I loved it.  There are many lessons to be learned from playing on a team.  And I did not learn any of them.  At least not first hand.  And not as a kid.  I learned them as a mom.  My husband had played every sport pretty much and was determined to put our kids into them almost as soon as they could walk.  I was determined however, to put our oldest, our only daughter, into ballet.  I didn’t want her to ever feel the sting of scoring for the wrong team.

Tutus seemed safe.  Gentle.  But our daughter did not want safe.  She didn’t want gentle either.  She was a bumble bee in a class full of butterflies.  That’s not an analogy.  She really was a bumble bee in a class full of butterflies.  Her first ballet teacher had danced professionally in England about three hundred years ago.  She was very old and very proper and about as thin as a piece of paper (if that piece of paper had been on a strict diet of celery and water since birth).  She had instructed the tiny dancers to “flit and float” like a little butterfly around the circle, back to her spot.  I watched from the door, anxious to see how my little darling would do.  Finally it was her turn to be a butterfly.  Only she did not want to be a butterfly.  She did not want to flit or float.  She wanted to run and dive and dart.  And that’s what she did--all while proclaiming at the top of her lungs that she, was indeed not a butterfly.  SHE WAS A BUMBLE BEE!!!!!!!!!!!!  The other little girls giggled.  I myself couldn’t help but smile.  The teacher however, was not amused.  Probably she was too hungry to be amused.  She scolded my little bumble bee and told her to, “Sit down!”  Her little face was dejected.  She’d looked so happy with herself when she’d decided to break from the pack and be a bumble bee.  She was only three years old, I thought.  Why couldn’t that teacher just just let her be a bumble bee if she wanted to?  And then I realized I should have been asking that question of myself.

I did not bring Kayla back.  She has proceeded to become an excellent athlete, as did her brothers after her.  All three have at least tried, just about every sport offered.  And there have been times when they have scored on their own team, and times when they’ve kept the bench warm, missed a ball, struck out, and finished last.  But they’ve finished.  Gloves, cleats, helmets, bats, balls, nets, shin guards, mouth pieces...hundreds if not thousands of dollars.  Learning not to quit when the going gets tough?  Priceless.