Picture this: There's a six-year-old girl sitting forlornly on the bench with her softball cap hiding her eyes. She doesn't care that the rest of her softball team is playing on the field and she's not. When she finally does get out to right field and a pop-fly is coming her way, she holds her handed-down-at-least-twice glove in the air, closes her eyes, and hopes that it will magically fall into her glove. When it doesn't, she hears where the ball plopped onto the grass several feet over and scrambles for the ball, throws it to the second-baseman just after the hitter rounded toward third base. Yes, this person was me as a little girl.
I don't know why my parents put me in softball every year, but they did and I dutifully went to practice and games each week and never got much better. I woke up thinking about my childhood sports experiences this morning, after Bianca's soccer game last night.
Our team this fall is actually good. We are on a roll and are actually winning. Not only winning, we're creaming the other teams. It's great. It's fun to cheer for the "White Tigers." Eric's helping our friend Paul with the coaching and he loves it. But I can't help but wonder why I'm so bothered by soccer this time.
I think I have it figured out, but am ashamed that these are my feelings. Bianca's just not very good at soccer. In the spring, I thought she was good because she was one of the best players on the team. (Now, I wish I didn't have to mention here that her team didn't win one game, but Bianca scored goals and had her foot on the ball many times throughout her games.) Now we're on a good team, and Bianca is just another kid kicking at the ball in a flock of children and never breaks away with the ball.
Is it against the universal purpose of sports to say that I wish Bianca were on a bad team so that she could stand out instead of on a good team where she doesn't?
I'm already starting to think: Okay, we tried gymnastics--not her sport; we tried soccer--not her sport. Am I going to keep going down the list until I find something she's good at? Or is the point not to necessarily be good at the sport, but just play it because you like doing it?
I don't know. But when I think back on my soft ball days, I don't remember liking it. In fact, I don't remember liking sports until I found something I was good at. I found gymnastics on my own and I'll admit that I was good at it. I was even fairly decent at track (I wasn't a stand-out on the team, but I managed to like it). But throw a ball into any sport, and I sucked and didn't like it.
Is it normal to only like things we're good at? Is it normal for me, as the mother, to only like my daughter to be in sports that she's good at?
