So I love watching the Olympics. Summer, Winter, it doesn’t matter, I love the epic unpredictable nature of all the sports upon sports upon sports. Some of my favorites include the snowboarding and the freestyle skiing and Super G, in addition to the ice dancing and the Nordic Combined.
Having watched the Olympics every night for multiple nights, the same question formed in my head that always remains unanswered. How do the mothers cope with this reality before it is a reality? Johnny, here’s a board. Now, go down the hill as fast as you can and flip backwards seven times before landing. Make sure you do the crippler move (Why is it called that) and wear a helmet. Now do it again and again and again and again.
I would die a thousand deaths watching this every time someone wipes out if these were my children.
For all the athletes who pop just back up as if it were one big nothing, how many kids trying to reach this far, were end-stopped by broken bones, torn muscles or worse? Every Mom I know would have been saying, “Over my dead body.” “You should not be doing a sport that can shatter your spine? Who thought this was a good idea?”
Yet here are these young adults who somehow became proficient in these impossible sports without becoming maimed in the process. I’d like to see footage of their parents. I want to see if their eyes bulge out with worry, if they wear on their faces, all the practices they’ve mentally willed their kids through, praying they wouldn’t crash to their doom in the process.
I’m looking at all these candidates for the sports and I’m thinking, I need to tell my own kids if they have any such athletic itches, to choose something safer, like rugby, quidditch. sky diving, wrestling giant demon squid. I think I’d worry less. (Probably not).
Maybe it’s because I’m not athletic, I find the reality of what they have to do so daunting. None of my kiddos, not even those who watch the games with us seem too interested in pursuing such dreams.
Then someone heard how much Michael Phelps eats for breakfast… three fried egg sandwiches, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions and mayonnaise, followed by three chocolate-chip pancakes and I saw longing in some of my children’s faces. I wondered how the parents who could squelch the protective urge, recovered from making a Las Vegas Hotel Breakfast Buffet every morning. I thought about the towels, the laundry, the errands, the driving their bodies to coaches and trainings and events over and over again, surrendering whole years which turn into at least a decade and a half to their children’s potential. The pouring out of time not observed, not documented, not rewarded resulted in an epiphany.
There needs to be an Olympic medal for the parents who weathered the process, and everyone except the moms and dads of Olympians who took home the Gold, Silver and Bronze, gets a Diamond pendant for having put in the time and endured the intense pressure of the years. They could host a parade of parents behind flags proclaiming the nations and the sports and host it in the middle of the games.
I know I’d watch.
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