Seriously, I’m not into Sports

I wiled away my youth avoiding physical activity of all sorts and types, as far as it was up to me. As a little kid I'm sure I ran around and stuff, but once I was smacked with all the horrendous hormones of early adulthood, I, whenever possible, never moved from my chair and my book, except to do the dishes which seemed a great imposition from my unreasonable parents, and to feed all my pets, which was a gentle and pleasant activity. Sometimes I would walk my dog in the evenings, before lamp lighting time, to the steam and back. Once or twice we, me and my mom and dad, rode our bikes to the Valley of the Stones. Of course, at school we had to do all kinds of organized sports. In the dense energy sapping mid afternoon heat when all of sensible Africa is sitting quiet in the shade, we had to run around and play soccer and field hockey and lacross. And once a year we endured a Field Day–an agonizingly long day of Just Sports, of being too hot and miserable for a whole day, a day of always being the Weakest Link, a day of humiliation and sadness.

So I have been happy, as a homeschooler, to avoid the sports question. I haven't been running here and there in my car, setting up each child to fulfill his athletic dreams. It never occurred to me that we, in this family, have any. Sure, my husband is obsessively fit. He looks like he could slay ten thousand Philistines and a bear and a lion and I think he could, should they surround us on every side. But he indulges this obsession in the very early morning, far away from me, so that I don't ever really encounter the weights and the walking and the sit ups or anything. I didn't realize, then, that in the balance, I was not prejudicing the children enough against sports. I was not maligning the whole enterprise. I didn't know I had to. I didn't realize that he was quietly teaching Alouicious to do pull ups and going out and throwing a ball at his head, or whatever it is they do in baseball.

Baseball season, then, as you can imagine, was a great shock to my system last year. That Alouicious desired to do baseball in the first place was a failure on my part. Then that he was on a team that nearly won the whole shebang. Then that his little brother thought it looked awfully cool. Then that Elphine observed that it was unfair and that she had been nourishing a deep desire to do fencing. It turned out to be a snowball effect. One thing led to another so that I woke up one morning to find that I, even I, was driving desperately to ice skating whenever possible. That I was shoving little toddler feet into skates and pushing them ever so gently onto the ice and then gliding in circles around them coaxing them to let go of the bar, while the other four zipped around and around and twirled in a most scary manner.