Be Good, Get Good, or Quit

Nights like tonight inevitably make me feel like I am a bad mother. It’s 10:30 when I climb the steep wooden stairs to our bedrooms with my always present orange backpack on my back. I haven’t been home since five, when we head out to Watertown for gymnastics.

I hear Holly before I see her, as I round the corner at the top of the stairs. Her tiny muscular body is upside down in a handstand, her toes pointed perfectly, her core holding her still. She still has her Olympic replica leotard just like Shawn Johnson’s on, her blond hair still held up in clips. Beside her on the floor is the wrapper from a Fiber One pop tart that was her dinner, or snack, since she ate a bowl of cereal before we left. She releases the handstand into a bridge, her feet echoing through the hard wood floors. She flips back out of the bridge and looks at me, her hands poised above her head gracefully.

“I know. Go to bed.” She tells me before I have the chance to say it.

“Yes. Go to bed. And pick up your wrapper,” I tell her, pointing to the flimsy silver material on the floor. “Somewhere is going to eat it.”

Somewhere, our ten-month-old puppy, is at my heels. She’s nearly always at my heels. She’s especially rambunctious because I didn’t let her run at the park today. I needed to run three miles, and it was my turn. She has a stuffed animal, a small cat, in her mouth. She’s chewed off only the little face, but the rest of the toy remains intact, including its ears. She’s bumping its soggy body against the back of my knees to play. We’ve named it, just like we do with all her toys. This one is Kitten Without A Face. The three legged pink dog is named Tripod, obviously.

I head toward my room and Georgia comes out of hers, her radio blaring. She sings as she dances by me, as if it’s four in the afternoon and not ridiculously late. I tell her to put on her pajamas and put some Aquaphor on her sunburn, which is now peeling. Despite lathering my fair skinned child in sunscreen at her first softball tournament of the season over the weekend, she burned. Georgia concedes about the Aquaphor without much complaint tonight, and comes out of the bathroom looking like a melting wax figure. I kiss her hair instead of her face and shoe her into her room. I will be shocked if she doesn’t come back out at least once. She doesn’t give up.

They have school tomorrow, so why don’t they want to go to bed? I want to go to bed. I will lose my mind if I don’t have at least one quiet hour without hearing the word “Momma.” I love them dearly, but I need them to be silent now.

These days are long, and as the girls grow older, there are more and more of them. Band concerts, chorus concerts, talent shows, gymnastics competitions, softball practices, student council and safety patrol trips fill our waking moments. I silently wonder at times if this is right. They grow so fast. These things they do, these places that I spend countless hours driving them to, they pull my children farther into the world. Farther from me.

At gymnastics practice, one of the hard core coaches calls Holly out on a low back tuck. She’s concerned about Holly hurting herself and she doesn’t mince words. “Holly! That was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. Go back and do it again, but it better be higher.”

I can see from across the room that Holly is angry. She walks slowly and deliberately across the floor, an invisible cloud of steam coming from her ears. Holly is harder on herself than anyone else ever could be. I momentarily think of protecting her, knowing that she can do far better than what she just did. I excuse her in my head because she had a track meet at school and I think she must be tired.

By the time she crosses the floor to try again, every one of the members of her team is watching her. She takes a breath and takes off across the room. She commits to it this time, and flips six feet off of the blue floor, her backward somersault setting in the air, as if she’s momentarily suspended upside down. She lands it perfectly, and finishes with her hands posed. A grin flashes across her face, but it isn’t me she looks at with pride. It’s the coach who pushed her, who called her out. They are grinning at each other, as if they share a secret. I feel almost bad for even thinking about defending her. This woman knew how to deal with Holly. It was between them, and I had no place in it. I watch the concentric circles that my children orbit in my life inch a little farther outward. And I remember why I’m here.

I drag my children all over the state for sports because I think that it gives them something they would be missing otherwise. Throughout history, children had jobs of one sort or another that helped with the family’s survival. As humans have evolved as a species, we’ve made childhood a jobless existence. Maybe a chore or three, but childhood became for playing. There’s nothing wrong with playing, but its lack of structure fails to provide our children the true lessons of working with others, and the value of actual hard work.

I see parents trying to make the world fair and perfect for their children, and I feel that it’s a disservice in a way. The world isn’t like that, and it never will be. As parents, we should not merely provide an illusion of what they world “should” be, but also show them what it really is.

When I take my child to the gym, or the ball field, I let others mold and shape them. They learn their place, and learn that if they don’t like it, they have to change it. Our motto for this, and most things in life, is that there are three ways to do things: Be good, get good, or quit.

So far, no quitting for any of us.