Hockey Mama
I grew up around ice hockey, grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago skating on outdoor rinks back in the day when winter was winter. My father was president of the hockey association; my mother was variously treasurer and secretary. Later my father coached the high school team and also a young adult league. My older brother played hockey from the time he was five or six until he left for college; after college he played in an adult league and coached high school hockey for a few years. Ever the little sister, I played hockey myself for a season, but this was back before a lot of girls played hockey and I was the only girl my age in the league. Not on my team - in the entire suburban league I played in. There was another girl two years older than me, her name was Annie, but in my age group I was it. After one year of having to stand alone in the hallway while the boys changed in the locker room, of getting checked and knocked down because girls don’t play hockey, I retreated to the stands and the occasional stint in the scorer’s box. But I grew up around hockey.
My mother was a hockey mom. She went to every single hockey game my brother played in for a dozen years. She drove him to practice and car-pooled his teammates and served early dinners and reheated leftovers so that everybody got to eat. She kept his skates sharpened and his equipment aired out and always knew where the hockey tape was. She huddled in warming houses with the other hockey moms and drank cup after cup of bad vending machine coffee. She stepped in as time-keeper and score-keeper when somebody went missing in action and she was the unofficial record-keeper for every team my brother ever played on, keeping track of minutes played and goals for and against and goals and assists and penalty minutes for entire teams of exuberant boys. She cheered and yelled and taught me the phrase “cherry-picking.” She was a hockey mom extraordinaire at a time when nobody cared about the hockey moms.
Since the day Small Boy put on skates last winter and I guided him around the rink by holding his hands as I skated backwards, I’ve been looking forward to this winter, to this year when he would become old enough to start the hockey camp, to being a hockey mom. Hockey school started on Saturday, so I am officially a hockey mom, at last, and I cannot begin to tell you how annoyed - irritated and angry and cheated - I feel to become a hockey mom at a time when the phrase “hockey mom” is associated with someone with whom I have no desire whatsoever to be associated. So please forgive this brief forray into American politics, but I’m feeling the need to reclaim the phrase “hockey mom.”
I like cities. (Most NHL teams, by the way, are found in cities, as are most theatres and opera houses and ballet companies and baseball teams. It just kind of works out that way.) They are vibrant and exciting and give people opportunities to follow their dreams. I like small towns. They allow people to connect more deeply with each other and to look closely into the fabric of their own lives and dreams. I like that I can decide which one fits me better. I am a hockey mom.
I live at the foot of the Swiss Alps and yet I think Yellowstone National Park is the most beautiful place in the world. I believe that geography does not define love of country. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that a blistering slapshot from the point is the most beautiful thing in sports. I am a hockey mom.
I have enough faith in women to allow them to make the most personal decisions about their lives without paternalist outside interference from people who know nothing about them or their circumstances. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that starting a family through in-vitro fertilization is as special as starting a family through sex and I believe that the children of in-vitro fertilization are magical. I believe that the decision to seek fertility treatment is a decision a couple can only make for themselves and I believe that treatment should be available. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that embryonic stem-cell research has enormous potential and that couples who undergo in-vitro should be able to donate embryos to research if they so desire. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that reasoned disagreement is the engine of democracy and that reasonable people can disagree reasonably. The operative word is reasonable. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that the overwhelming majority of global warming is the result of human activity and I believe that the majority of statistical findings support this belief. I am a hockey mom.
I believe in the scientific method and that science is a method, not a subject. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that Wayne Gretzky played a type of hockey that the rest of us could only dream of. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that wild places like ANWR matter. They matter simply because of what they are, not because of what they can give us. ANWR isn’t about the energy we could harness. Places like ANWR, places like Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon National Park and the great network of American parks, are about setting aside something rare and wonderful and preserving it simply because it is rare and wonderful. It is about knowing that there is still something wild and mysterious left in the world. Wild places matter. They matter because they inspire us and teach us. They make us whole. They heal our wounds. They let us dream. They call us to glory and if we listen they teach us the liberating magic of being wholly who and what we are in that moment. They show us, however briefly, a world outside of ourselves. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that while one of us is oppressed none of us is free. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that the world - that new things, new people, new places - can only be approached with an open mind and an open heart. I am a hockey mom.
The word “cosmopolitan” is not derogatory. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that knowledge matters, that facts matter, that expertise matters, that “elite” means highly skilled and that highly skilled people are not, by definition, bad people. I am a hockey mom.
I believe that I am but one of many, that our diversity is our strength, that the sum is greater than the whole of the parts, that we stand together or fall alone, that an open hand is more powerful than a closed fist, that generosity is strength, that I am less when you are suffering and that I am strengthened by your joy, and that greatness cannot exist in isolation, for even Wayne Gretzky needed a team to play on. I am a hockey mom.
I voted for Barack Obama and I am a hockey mom.
Filed under Bloodlines, There's a world outside my window, What makes me tick | Comments (9)Haunted
I’ve been captured by the villanelle lately. It’s a very precise poetic structure with both a rhyme scheme and a pattern in which two lines - introduced with the first and the third lines - are repeated at specified intervals. It does not come easily to me; I find it difficult to pull off a natural, lyrical villanelle. And yet I find myself writing them. I have heard it said - or read it written? - that the villanelle, circling back as it does to those two key lines, is a good form in which to explore obsessions, recurring events, memories one cannot, does not want to, escape. It’s a good form to use when a few images have you by the throat and won’t let go.
The villanelles I’ve been writing are about my father. I remember my father best as a fisherman. As the years pass and specific details fade - what shampoo did he use? what did his voice sound like? what was he wearing the last time I saw him alive? what was he dressed in for his funeral? - there is still a tightly held clutch of memories, solid like river rocks in my fist, that I can still see, taste, hear almost two decades after his death. Almost always, these memories, these moments, are connected to my father’s life as a fly-fisherman and to the places that life took him, took us. Invariably my memories of my father are bound up with the waters he fished, the waters that became the companions of my childhood and the rivers to which I always, though years may pass, return. The places I love and the ways I love them have everything to do with this simple fact: my father was a fisherman.
That is the line I cannot let go of. The line that will not let go of me. That is what I return to like a salmon to her spawning ground. That is my one true thing.
My father was a fisherman.
Family lost, family found
I grew up not knowing much about my extended family. My paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother died before I was born. My maternal grandfather died shortly after I turned four. I have a few memories of him, the sort of memories a three-year old would have: brief flashes, an image of a living room, a face - memories reinforced by photographs so that it is hard to be certain if they are truly my memories at all. My paternal grandmother moved across the country when I was eight, perhaps younger. There were short visits after that - she and my mother did not get along - and she died when I was fourteen. One set of cousins was a dozen states away; another set - my mother’s brother - lived nearby and we used to get together when I was young but for some reason contact ended abruptly. I imagine some sort of falling out between my mother and uncle, but I don’t really know.
But beyond these deaths and absences, these fallings-out and strained relationships, it was the general atmosphere of silence and secrets in my house that kept me from knowing my family. We were not a family of stories, we were not a family of family histories. That’s not uncommon in an alcoholic household. My mother did not like telling stories - at least, she did not like telling stories she could not control; she did not like revealing information that she, for whatever reason, deemed dangerous - and I quickly learned not to ask questions. It was a good survival technique for a young girl, but I regret it now.
I do not know how my parents met. I do not know why they waited so long to have children. I do not know my maternal grandmother’s maiden name and I’m not entirely sure how she died. I don’t know when her family arrived in the US. I don’t know how she and my grandfather met. I don’t know if she had siblings. I don’t know what any of my cousins - those four children of my mother’s brother with whom I used to play - are doing today or where they are living or if they have children of their own. I do know that my maternal grandfather was Swedish, but I do not know where his family came from or when they emigrated to the US, or why. And with both my parents dead there is nobody to ask even if I belonged to the kind of family that talked about this sort of thing.
After my parents died and before I married I often felt rootless. There’s a line from a Shawn Colvin song, “I’ve given nobody life, I am nobody’s wife, and I seem to be nobody’s daughter” that sums up how I felt for many years. I had no family history to connect me to the past, and I had no offspring to drive me into the future. Even after I married, married into a Swiss family that could trace its family tree back about 400 years, I felt like a jigsaw puzzle piece that had fallen out of the box. When my first son was born, my family, my blood family, suddenly had two generations. A doubling of my connections, but still my history was a blurry mystery.
Until Sunday.
Sunday, out of curiosity, I googled my maternal grandfather. He was quite an amateur photographer in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; I have some prints of his that still bear the ribbons they were awarded in local showings. I was looking through family snapshots. I got curious and typed in his name. The first result that popped up was a link to a family tree website hosted by somebody with my maternal grandfather’s last name. I clicked through to the site, and it appears that his father and my grandfather were brothers - my grandfather had four siblings who lived to adulthood. I had only known about one. I spent the afternoon looking through his family tree; there is information there that matches what I know; many of the sources he used to verify his findings are foot-noted. I have a feeling that it’s reliable.
It traces the Swedish branch of my family back to before 1730. I have gone from rootless to seven Swedish generations in the blink of an eye. And that’s just my grandfather’s paternal line. I haven’t even begun to dig around his maternal line. There are people out there with my grandfather’s name, with my blood, with my son’s funny ears and high smooth forehead. There are people out there, my people. I have people.
My how I love the internet.
Filed under Bloodlines, What makes me tick | Comments (3)