The things we let get away from us

I’ve been spending a lot of time in and around ice rinks lately: on the ice twice a week as a trainer, on the ice on weekends skating around with the boys, in the stands twice a week (or more) as a hockey-mom, and in the stands as a fan when the Big Boys play, and I’ve been thinking about the things we allow to get away from us. When we “grow up.” When we get busy. When we put other people’s needs – often our kids’ – first.

I grew up around hockey, we were a hockey family. My brother and I played (though I quit after a season and a half – back in the day being the only girl my age in the entire suburban league wasn’t so fun – my brother played on until he left for college); my dad was a coach and the president of the local hockey association; my mother was secretary or treasurer and sometimes both. When I was old enough, I worked as a time-keeper and kept statistics on goals for and against, minutes played, penalty minutes served. I grew up skating. Winter afternoons were spent at the local rink skating laps and giggling with my girlfriends under the lights. Hot chocolate in the warming house, watching the boys play pick-up hockey, skate-a-thons to raise money for the hockey club and threading a season pass through the laces of my skates. Always a season pass – growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 70s, if you didn’t skate in the winters you didn’t see much of your friends, because for sure they all skated.

Slowly, in high school I guess, I started leaving it all behind. My brother went to college, so I didn’t tag along to his games anymore and I was busy trying to find my thing in high school – it couldn’t be hockey, high-school girls didn’t play hockey back then and anyway although I still skated I had given up on hockey. I went to college and found cycling and after I graduated – I don’t know, I just sort of forgot about hockey and skating. I forgot about it for a long time, until a few years ago when we put SB in the hockey school and slowly, slowly, I started skating again.

But it’s been this year, between SB practicing or playing matches three times a week and my getting on the ice as a trainer in the hockey school, that’s put me right back in the middle of Hockey World – I’m at rinks three or four times a week and I’m having a blast. Oh, I’ll grumble about the logistics of it all because really it’s quite something some weeks – I’ve already decided that we need to be one of those families with the family calendar with a column for each family member – and my carbon footprint is GINORMOUS, but I’m having a blast. I’m having a blast on the ice and I find I’m happier off it – I’ve got a Thing. A hobby (though technically it’s also a job), a place to be. A whole other life. It’s chaos sometimes, and I’m not a big fan of chaos and time-pressure, but I’m having a great time.

And I’m wondering why I let skating slip away from me for so many years, wondering why we allow ourselves to drop our little hobbies and interests along the way. All the years I was in Switzerland before the boys were born, I never went skating – why did it take the boys getting into hockey for me to get back on the ice? Every winter of my childhood was spent in and around ice-rinks and then, somehow, I stopped. Now I find myself in them again and I’m realizing how much I missed it.

Is there something you loved to do when you were younger that’s fallen by the wayside? I challenge you to remember it, and try it out again.

A day in the life

Apparently, it doesn’t take much for me to go from being busy to feeling over-extended. Apparently, it takes about 4 hours a week. I very carefully chose the phrase “feeling over-extended” because I know I am not, in fact, over-extended; I am, however, a person who stumbles over transitions (please, do not try to talk to me about anything requiring a decision for the first ten minutes after I have walked in the door and for the love of god do not catch me in the driveway as I am stepping out of the car and try to talk to me about anything) and who needs a five-minute cushion – getting someplace in the nick of time stresses me out more than actually being late.

So the fall schedule of Small Boy’s Bambini hockey, the Boychen’s hockey school hockey, and my training at the hockey school has knocked me sideways far more than I ever would have guessed a four-hour a week job would. It’s not the four hours, so much as the craziness of those exact four hours.

Here, for example, is how Thursdays afternoons run around here: at 3:45 Small Boy and I need to leave for his Bambini hockey practice. It’s almost always possible for Boychen to stay with his grandparents, which is a relief because Small Boy and I drive to Hockey Rink 1 where he takes the ice at 4:45 for practice that runs to 6:10. At 5:00 I leave Small Boy at Hockey Rink 1 and drive to Hockey Rink 2, where I teach with the hockey school from 6:00 to 7:00. (Boychen doesn’t attend the Thursday session because it’s too late at night for him.) At some point between 6:00 and 6:30 I get a message from R confirming that he made it to Hockey Rink 1 and is taking Small Boy home. So far, R has always made it on time but we’ve worked out a Plan B for Small Boy to follow (basically go to the restaurant, order a plate of french fries and wait for Dada to show up) in the eventuality that he doesn’t get there on time. Which is totally going to happen one of these days.

About every other Saturday, Small Boy has a hockey game at Hockey Rink 3 or, heaven forbid in a whole other town, while Boychen and I have hockey school at Hockey Rink 1. Boychen and I go to hockey school, Small Boy and R go to the match, and when hockey school is over Boychen and I cut across town to catch the end of the match.

It’s kind of chaos; and now I understand why Fellow Hockey Family worked so hard to get their younger son into Bambinis with his older brother. Have any of you seen that Suburu commercial with the hockey mom to triplets? I laugh at the hockey mom of triplets, because her kids are all on the same team. Honey, I could do that in my sleep. The real challenge is having kids 3 years apart who will never end up on the same team and you have to be in two different places at the exact same time.

Once I’m there, though, and take a few deep breaths, and put on my skates and my trainer’s suit – yes, I have an Outfit – and get on the ice with the kids, it’s pretty good. In two weeks, Boy Who Can’t Even Stand On The Ice has been transformed into Boy Who Can Make It From One Side of the Rink to the Other. Last night, Boy Who Cried became Boy Who Played Pickup Hockey With Me. It’s good. I’m friendly with my fellow trainers and last night I had a drink with them after training. (Iced tea, because of all the driving.) Parents will wave me over and ask a question and I’ll tell you what: watching a kid let go of the supports and take four steps towards me, because I told him I knew he could do it, and because he believed me, is pretty awesome.

So life looks kind of like this right about now:

When’s March?

Gooooooaaaaaal!

Small Boy scored his first goal in a proper hockey tournament today; he tipped in a nice rebound after the opposing goalie deflected a shot (though Small Boy’s team still lost the game and ended up third out of four teams in the tournament). The tournament was fun, and gave me an opportunity to continue this strange new friend-making adventure I seem to be embarking upon, but my favorite part (aside from the Small Boy’s goal, of course) was this:

The parents were only allowed to help kids tie their skates. Everything else, the players had to do themselves. This is already strongly encouraged at training, but something about it being Game Day made the kids take it more seriously. I hung out in a corner of the locker room until it was time to lace up Small Boy’s skates, then went out into the hallway. Shortly before the trainers closed the door to the locker room, I went to take a peek to see what jersey number Small Boy was wearing (they don’t have numbers at practice but rather train in practice jerseys) and the kids were just putting on their jerseys. It can be tricky for a little kid to pull a jersey on over their shoulder pads, and then the jerseys often cling to the velcro straps on the elbow pads (and sometimes pull them open again), and I usually help Small Boy with this. How was he going to do this, I wondered, and then saw that kids had buddied up and were helping each other with their jerseys. Small Boy was straightening the jersey of Pro Defenseman’s Kid, so I turned and went back into the hall. They clearly had it covered.

They know what they’re doing, these coaches. They’re developing the whole player, not just the bits on the ice. Evidence that it’s working: after we got clobbered 18-2 in the first game, the team surrounded the goalie and everybody patted him on the head, the shoulder, encouraging taps to the shin pads with their sticks, and they all lined up together to shake hands with the winning team. Then they huddled around the coach and got ready for the next game.

New poem

My poem “Mother and Son at Hockey Practice” is up at Literary Mama, my favorite place for the literature of motherhood. Enjoy, and check out all the great writing while you’re there.

An interesting thing happened on the way to the stadium

So an interesting thing is happening at hockey practice: I’m becoming friendly with several of the parents. There’s Nice Woman Who Helped Small Boy With His Bag and Trainer’s Wife and the mother and father of The Boy With the Beautiful Hair and Awkward Swimming Pool Moment Guy. There is Fellow Hockey School Trainer1 and Fellow Hockey School Trainer2 and Lady I Can’t Quite Figure Out Yet. I’m friendly with these people. I use friendly advisedly – we chat at practice, but with the possible exception of the mother of The Boy With the Beautiful Hair we probably won’t have a relationship outside the hockey rink. I’m reserved, Swiss people are reserved, and the parents of hockey players are busy, heavily scheduled people: the cards are stacked against it.

But that’s okay. I’ve never been great at making friends – I can never quite figure out the way in – and this being friendly and chatting thing, this being part of a group by default, is new and fun. I can walk into practice knowing that I’ll know people, that I’ll be known, that words can be exchanged, that I belong. I wrote in a recent post about the Small Boy knowing his way around Hockey World, being at home there. Turns out I am, too.

Hockey teaches some other lessons, too, lessons I’m not quite ready for

The hockey, it’s good. It’s also good that we have a break from now until the 25th (at which point they go onto the ice in the professional arena and the trainings move to a more reasonable afternoon time slot), because the schlepping back and forth and the Small Boy eating dinner in the car twice a week is suboptimal. It’s a price I’m ready to pay, but it’s suboptimal.

It’s also good to have break until the 25th to give the Small Boy time to get over his outrage at his trainer, who handed out perfect attendance awards after the final training tonight. An award which the Small Boy did not get (five kids out of 39 did) because he missed one training because it conflicted with a school play, and he’s pretty outraged about it. Not, exactly, about not getting the award, which was an SCB cap and scarf, but about the perceived injustice of it. He only missed the training because he was in a school play that he had to go to on the evening of the second training of the summer. The kindergarten had started practicing the play before we ever had a summer training schedule. It was a school thing. He had the lead role. It wasn’t his fault that he missed a training. It’s not as if he missed one because he didn’t feel like going, or was lazy, or we forgot, or just didn’t feel like it. It was a school thing. It’s not fair. (And it’ll likely happen again at some point, because in this house when there is a direct conflict between hockey and school, school will win. Until he’s 16 and can decide for himself, the rule is that school will win.)

I can see the Small Boy’s point that it wasn’t fair, especially when I see through the eyes of a Kindergartener, and I don’t entirely disagree with him, but it’s one of those tricky parenting moments when I’m supposed to be on his side, and agree that it’s not fair, and still teach him that coaches get to make their own rules and if you want to play on the team, you play by the coach’s rules and, by the way, life is unfair and you have to figure out how to roll with that. All while not undermining the coach’s authority along the way. Any tips?

I feel for him. He did everything right. He even, last week, chose to leave a birthday party – a swimming pool birthday party – 30 minutes early so that he would get to training on time. What kind of six year old kid decides that, on his own? I gave him the choice between staying at the party to the end and getting to training late; staying to the party to the end and skipping the training altogether (my preferred option, frankly); or leaving the party early to get to training on time and he said “Klar!” (because he speaks to me in German entirely too often these days) “doch logisch gehe ich ins Training. Hol mir einfach fruh ab.” (“That’s easy! Of course I’m going to training. Just pick me up early.”) Again, I ask you, what kind of six year old kid makes that kind of a choice? A really enthusiastic and committed one, and I’m hurt on his behalf that his commitment wasn’t recognized and honored. Of course he thinks it’s unfair. He’s not wrong.

He’ll get recognition from me (I’ve got plans, and they involve cake), but it’s not what he really wants. What he really wants is recognition from his coaches; he always has. These men who play such a role in his life. They’re going to teach him, and sometimes praise him, and sometimes break his heart, and I’m reminded again of what the head of the hockey school said to us parents once, thanking us for trusting the trainers with our children. The Small Boy’s puck control improved by leaps and bounds this summer and for that I’m grateful, but he got his heart broken just a little bit too and for that, well for that I’m sad even as I recognize that it’s part of sports and part of life.

He’s asleep now, the teary sleep of a six year old who didn’t get the reward that he genuinely believes he earned. And I’m typing this, the teary typing of a mother who agrees with him. Oh life in all your complicated unfairness, must you come knocking on his door so early?

Wanna play?

The parking lot was full, the street parking around the arena where Small Boy has summer hockey training packed. I had left home early, knowing that there was a fair at the convention center and fair grounds next to the hockey stadium (and we had been informed by the head trainer that the fair would be no excuse for being late for practice), but I was still circling, looking for parking. I didn’t want to go too far afield – we had a bag full of hockey equipment and a stick, and even if the bag does have wheels it’s a drag to haul it five city blocks and the longer the walk from the car to the rink, the later we’d be. So I pulled over in front of the stadium and let Small Boy out of the car. I gave him the bag, his stick, and pointed him down to the stadium.

“Once you get to the stadium, you know how to get in. Go ahead and get started putting on your equipment, I’ll find a place to park.”

“But how will I do everything?”

“Honey, you already put on everything yourself except for tying your skates, and I’ll be there in time to help with your skates. Don’t panic, you’ve got plenty of time, just change into your stuff like always.”

“Okay.” He tipped his stick over his shoulder, grabbed his bag, and marched off towards the stadium as confident as can be.

I found parking several blocks away, near the Swiss Pentagon (which is actually built in the shape of the Swiss cross, and the fact that I’m tooling around the Pentagon parking lot on a Tuesday night looking for parking says a lot about Switzerland and deserves a post of its own), and trotted to the stadium, down to the locker room in the basement where I found Small Boy in his long underwear (it’s cotton stuff, needed to protect the skin from chafing under all the velcro holding the equipment in place), shin guards, cup, and starting on his elbow pads. He told me a woman had helped him carry the equipment bag down the stairs – I had overlooked that, when I sent him off to the stadium, that the locker rooms are down a flight of stairs – and that the zipper on his bag had stuck and a man helped him get it all the way open. He pointed out the woman who carried his bag, and I thanked her, and she said she had done the same thing, sent her son off early while she looked for parking, and somebody had helped him carry his bag down the stairs, so it all gets passed around. Small Boy finished putting on his equipment, and I laced up his skates, the last thing he can’t do by himself. (And have you laced up hockey skates lately? I can’t always get them tight enough on the first try.)

The hockey is good for Small Boy. The confidence to do that, to march off to the stadium without me, go into the locker room alone, that’s new and it comes from his experiences with the hockey program. He knows some of the kids, but more importantly he knows how to be one of the kids, to say hi to everybody when he walks into the locker room and to shake the trainers’ hands (that’s very Swiss, and very important), to maybe chat to whoever is sitting next to him. And he’s familiar with the stadium, having trained in it all last winter and now these summer in-line trainings. It’s his world, hockey world, and he knows how to negotiate it.

Last winter, in addition to practice, we went skating a lot because it was a fun thing for the boys and I to do in the afternoon. All the different rinks we checked out had a section blocked off and dedicated for kids to play pick-up hockey, and no matter how old the kids were in there, Small Boy dove right in and started to play. Look at this:

That little green-coated boy in the goal is my Small Boy, in there with the big boys and not backing down for a second in the goal. Hockey has given him that. He doesn’t even know those kids, and those are much older boys, they’re just the ones who happened to be there with sticks. When we ran into a friend now and then from the hockey school Small Boy was always very happy about that, but it didn’t matter to him one bit whether or not he knew any of the kids playing hockey. He had his stick. He was good to go.

All these things on the margins, the ways I see hockey being good for Small Boy in areas that have nothing to do with hockey, are why I’m happy to stick with this even if the scheduling is challenging (which it is, and if he survives the cut in this particular program it will only get more challenging with each age group he moves through). I’ll do that for him, I’ll schlepp him hither and yon if it means he’ll be the boy who marches off to the stadium without me, who walks up to a bunch of kids he doesn’t know and says “Hey, wanna play?”

In which I reaffirm my belief that it’s better to be a work horse than a Wunderkind

Several years ago, I wrote this about Jan Ullrich, which isn’t really about Jan Ullrich at all. It’s about sports, and why I’ve always believed in the virtue of athletic endeavor, and this article reminded me of this old piece of mine.

Jan Ullrich always frustrated the hell out of the cyclist in me. He could have been, he should have been, the best cyclist of his generation, Lance Armstrong notwithstanding. At least one of Lance’s seven Tours should have been Ullrich’s – 2003, at least, should have been Ullrich’s. Ullrich was brilliant, the real deal; but he was the guy who seemed to think that being the real deal was enough. In a world where guys like Lance Armstrong go on training rides on Christmas day and count their calories in the off-season, where Ivan Basso spends the winter in a wind tunnel breaking down his time-trial form and putting it back together again, being the real deal wasn’t enough. Natural talent was never going to be enough when you have Lance Armstrong redesigning his water bottles to shave off an extra ounce. Ullrich was a Wunderkind, he really was. He could time trial like nobody’s business. He could climb, he could tear mountains apart. (And as the Tour de France wore on and he popped out in freckles across the bridge of his nose and into his sun- and wind-reddened cheeks he was cute as a button, to boot.) When he won the Tour de France in 1997 everybody – including Lance Armstrong – assumed it was just the first of many Tours in Ullrich’s future. But it didn’t work out that way. Partly because Lance Armstrong recovered from his cancer and Lance is, well, Lance. But also because Ullrich had been a Wunderkind and it took him too long to catch on to the fact that that just wasn’t going to cut it in the new world forged by Lance Armstrong’s iron will.

When I cycled in college, I was quite good. I had a certain level of athletic ability, but nobody would have confused me with a natural talent. But I was stubborn. I put in the hours and the miles. I rearranged my academic schedule to maximize track time. I took every tip my coach ever gave me, did everything he said, and he won me races that I wouldn’t have won on strength alone. I was never great, but I was really good. And I got as good as I did precisely because I was willing to accept how very far from great I was. Had I been better naturally, I suspect that I would have turned out marginally less successful. But the gap between me and the top girls was just visible enough to me to drive home the need for a little extra effort on my part. And the link between my effort and my results was clear; we kept training logs, after all. In autumn we’d do a ten mile time trial out on Flat Bottom Road to get a base-line and then in the spring we’d do a few more. I got faster. AJ would teach us about rolling through our gears, how to make a U-turn in the fastest possible way while still staying upright, how to dole out our energy. I got faster still. It was exhilarating, getting faster. More exhilarating was the knowlege that I was making myself faster, that all the tools for my success or failure were in my hands. I was never the very best, but the women who could beat me made up a small crowd; two of them were my own teammates who knew my tricks. For the specific event I trained for, I was top-tier. I did not start out top-tier, but I ended there. I forced my way into that circle by sheer will. And I was never the very best, but I was proud to have gotten so close.

Jan Ullrich. He stood on the very edge of greatness, of once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-lifetime larger than life greatness. Season after season he frustrated the cyclist in me so. So close, so very close, just a few calories, a few more hours on the road away from blinding greatness. But the gap between him and the small handful of guys who could beat him was too small for him to see. He was too good, far far too good, to see for himself how much harder he still needed to work and the people around him failed him by not driving home the point. For a person like me to be a step away from great (within my little universe, of course) was a tremendous success. For a person like Jan Ullrich to be a step away from great was a profound failure. He could have been, he should have been so great. Just an ounce, just an hour more effort. But Ullrich had been a Wunderkind and it took him too long to catch on to the fact that that just wasn’t going to cut it in a world filled with work-horses.

Because no matter how good you are, somewhere out there lives somebody just as good. But she’s trying just a little bit harder.

I’ve been around sports long enough to know that there are natural talents. There are people in every sport who have something special. But you know what? Even those people spend hours training, pushing their talents to the very limit. You can have all the natural talent in the world, but if you don’t take your coach’s advice, research the opposition, train regularly, hone your skills, learn some new tricks and keep up with the competition that natural talent can only take you so far. And you learn things about yourself as you bump up against your limits, as you find within yourself the desire to be the first one in the training room and the last one out, as you learn to see the connection between effort and outcome. You learn about effort, about will-power, about mental strength. You can apply those skills to schoolwork, to the job, to running a marathon because you want to, to saving money so that you can quit your job and travel for six months.

In February, at the end of the hockey season, R and I made a point of seeking out the trainer who had worked with Small Boy to help him overcome a bad habit that was interfering with his skating (he bent his right ankle out so that he was constantly on the outside edge of the blade, and to skate you need to push off the inside edge). We thanked him, and he said that Small Boy had done the work and we said but you took the time to teach him how to fix it, and M said he could see how hard Small Boy was trying and how fixing that little thing would help so much. M said, he has such a will.

I’ve written before about my little work horse, my Most Improved Player. You couldn’t pay me even to want to know if Small Boy has “the athlete gene.” I couldn’t care less. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I suspect Small Boy would be better off without it. Maybe, given my own experience and given the kind of hockey players my father taught me to admire, I’m biased towards work horses, but give me a work horse every time. Wunderkinds come and go. Work horses are in it for the long haul.

His just deserts

Remember this post about how I wasn’t sure if hockey was going to work out for the Small Boy?

Well, Small Boy received an invitation to summer training for the SCB Bambini team. The hockey school, also run by the SCB program, is open to any kid aged four through eight. We teach kids to skate and the basics of puck handling skills, but we don’t, strictly speaking, teach hockey. (Hey, did you notice that “we” I slipped in there? I said yes.) When the kids play pick-up hockey, it’s rather a free-for-all. There aren’t assigned positions and there is certainly nothing resembling strategy. That all comes in the Bambini program; and to join the Bambinis – an actual team that plays actual games against other actual teams – a kid needs to be invited, and Small Boy has been invited to the summer training program. At the end of the summer there will be the final selection to see if he makes the team for the hockey season, but for now, the boy can call himself a Bambini.

He’s over the moon.

And if he works in the summer program the way he worked over the winter, that kid is SO on the team.

Walk with me outside the comfort zone

The boys’ hockey school is losing some trainers at the end of this season. The two trainers – husband and wife – who work with the littlest kids, with the kids who have maybe never been on skates before and who begin the year unable to stand up and who end it at least able to walk across the ice on skate if not to properly glide across it, are leaving. She has been trying to leave since Small Boy started, actually, but the school has always begged her to stay and for two years she has but now she is standing firm. He is leaving at the end of the year; I don’t know if he has wanted to leave before this. The school is losing a third trainer as well, my favorite trainer, and I don’t know if that is common knowledge yet; I won’t even get into what a blow that will be. He’s an amazing trainer. I only know he’s leaving because the woman who trains the littlest ones called me to ask if I am interested in taking her place next year, and it came up in the conversation.

I’m interested. Hockey has given my family a lot over the years, and this school in particular has given Small Boy some wonderous things, and I’d like to give something back to the sport.

I’m also kind of terrified. My natural tendency is to curl inward and to stay in my comfort zone. I like to live in my head but this. This is out there. This is public. This is way outside my comfort zone. This is in Swiss-German. This is important. This is scary.

Tell me your stories about the time you went outside your comfort zone. How did you do it? How do you psych yourself up for it? How did it work out? Were you glad you did it? If it went badly, how long did the I Can’t Believe I Did That moment last? If it went badly, did you try again? Tell me your stories. I think I want to do this, but I’m awfully good at talking myself out of things. Help talk me into it.