I’m not a Regular Mom/ I’m a Sport’s Mom!

I’m not sure where you are in your parenting journey. Maybe you are newly pregnant, imagining all the ways your little angel (now the size of a kidney bean but in time a full GROWN human) will race down the football field intercepting every pass. Maybe you have a three-year-old who can’t pronounce Mickey Mouse, let let alone use the toilet, but you saw her bounce that basketball and you can see point guard in her future. Maybe you have a promising high school athlete and you work in the sports booster booth every weekend. Maybe you hate the thought of having kids and enjoy the money that this saves you on the reg, either way, this blog post goes out to all the parents who think they know best, put their best foot forward as parent/coach or maybe need to check into anger management before and after a game.

I subscribe to the belief that all sports are good for kids. That moving your body is never a bad thing and if it builds confidence, I will drag my buns to uncomfortable bleachers to watch them do it. Now let me give you a list of sports my kids have tried and succeeded/failed (is that okay to say as a parent, don’t read this kids). My kids have tried and this is in no particular order; swim, ballet, jazz, hip hop, gymnastics, karate, basketball, football and lacrosse. We began our journey into the sports world with swim. I did swim in high school and loved the sport. Swim is one of those sports where you don’t need a lot of hairspray or know how to try and you don’t have to be in a certain clique to do it. You just need to work hard and know how to sing Ludacris. Actually the Ludacris part is not a requirement, that was just my high school I guess. Anyhow, my daughter was two and a half and I noticed something online about taking your little to the YMCA to do Mommy and Me classes. Well you don’t say, sounds like this is it folks. It’s time to take my mini and begin her on a journey to the the backstroke greatness that her mother loved so dearly. And before you get all bent out of shape on not starting sports too early and let them be little and form their own path, relax Susan it was a god damn mommy and me swim class, not an Olympic Training Session for mighty hopefuls.

So anyhow, I bought her this adorable swim suit, I signed her up with the money we didn’t have, because that is the other thing with sports. It doesn’t matter if your broke, the money that it costs to sign them up, you will always find it. If you don’t, you will walk around with this residual Mommy guilt, like you have permanently screwed them up because they couldn’t suit up for pee wee baseball. And there we were, her and I. Me, looking like an oversize elephant, walking into the family pool and her shaking like I was taking her naked into an arctic adventure. To be clear, she had trouble maintaining her temperature until she was about four due to preemieness and taking her for a half an hour session in a pool that was not heated for babies and Mom’s with actual bathing suits complete with chest padding that cost more than 30 dollars were going to be on the struggle bus for said class. Try holding your kid just so in front of you, who weighs nothing, while your girls freeze up and you can now see every part of your legs you forgot to shave? What I haven’t convinced you to take Mommy and Me swim yet? Well just hold on , it gets better. Then when you get in the pool and your child is clinging to you for dear life and you are trying to look smooth because two hot Dads just entered the pool and they are holding three kids and not just one and literally walking on freakin water. Now, can we just stop for a second, why are there always two hot Dads at every Mommy and Me swim session. I’m not against the male part, I’m actually all in with the Dads showing up and doing the damn thing, but it is particularly difficult to perform any activity with your kid, when your post partum stomach looks like a balloon next to Jerry’s six pack. ADDitionally Mommy and Me classes require singing people. SINGING. You have to move your shaking freezing kid around in a circle, ask them to blow bubbles which they will inherently suck in instead of blow out, you will wonder if you could even perform CPR if you wanted too and then the instructor will begin a round of Itsy Bitsy Freakin Spider. Now you might say, Taryn , you spent 11 years as a K teacher. This is right up your alley. Why don’t you teach the class? And to you I say. In my spare time, I do not Itsy, I do not Bitsy. In my Toyota Highlander, I sing a mix of You Outta Know by Alanis Morsette, I like to do Partition by Beyonce, I’m real real real good at anything by Lizzo. I also prefer Woman by Kesha and anything I can rap by Eminem and Drake, but I do not Itsy Bitsy. Also, my voice is terrible and I just think we should know ourselves as parents going into these classes and if you suck as hard as I do, then save everyone’s eardrums and pretend your kid is splashing, while the two hot Dads take up the melody.

What began as a foray into Olympic Relays, ended real real quick with me whisking her out of the water early and taking not just our towel, but also the two Hot Dad towels (sorry hot Dads!) to try and swaddle my kid to get her temperature back up to normal. Phew, that was a long winded explanation, but let’s just say we did not do many rounds of Mommy and Me, my 11-year-old CAN swim to save herself, but never to save anyone else and she’s not winning any relays just yet.

I have realized after writing our swim journey that it would just take too long to describe how I am an abysmal failure at launching both of my kids into their sports careers, so I will only highlight one more for right now and that other one more is karate. Now, I don’t need people to spew haterade at this blog. I am not, in any way shape or form, dissing the sport of karate. Lot’s of parents and kiddos find success at it. It is a great sport for self discipline, self control, spatial awareness, core strength and the list goes one on and on. What I am re-creating for my readers, is a picture on how my kids failed in the art of karate, and probably more so, how I failed them in the parenting background of it. I hope they will be okay in the end and that I haven’t screwed them up too intensely.

Anyhow, I would like to begin by saying karate was my husband’s idea and that is sort of where it went downhill from there. I always find if it is HIS idea, then I am not fully on board, because all grand ideas should come from moi, but also see deep shame up above from Mommy guilt so I agreed to sign them up. Now let me start first by saying karate is expensive. That’s not me being a judgy b, it’s just the way of the world folks and it’s doubly expensive if you put more than one kid in at a time. So right from the get go- Momma wasn’t loving that. But we bought the white suits, now I’ve forgotten what they are called, isn’t that terrible? Oops, quick google search and I have discovered they are called Gi’s. So yes we bought those Gi’s for them and at the time my son was six and my daughter was eight and they were placed in different classes. I think one might have been Teeny Tigers and the other was Trashy Tigers. Completely kidding, but I was so grateful that they were placed in separate classes, because I thought they would karate kick each other right in the face, just like they do at home.

My husband took them to the first few classes (actually most of them) and he would text me and say this is great for them. They are huffing and puffing and working on kicks and punching and improving coordination. Okay Awesome. When things, are going well, Momma will drive over and so I did. And they were adorable. When they switched belts and got the tape on the end that says that they memorized certain kicks and punches etc. I also have to give big kudos to those coaches in there, because some of those kids were dropped off and it seemed parents couldn’t run out the door fast enough and I could see why. Those kids were hard to wrangle! The problem with karate was never karate itself. I think the problem with karate, is my son especially, he is a social butterfly and competitive to the hilt. He likes when his team can “score” something. He likes to get in my car after a sweaty game and go “we really took it to em didn’t we mom” and with karate, all you are taking it to , is yourself, and he just wasn’t motivated by that. Also, neither one of my kids, could memorize the moves, omg could they not memorize the moves, And I (another parenting fail) wasn’t doing them any favors by turning on the youtube channel with the punches and the kicks and sitting back with my Starbucks, while they practiced them incorrectly in the kitchen. In the end, the three of us, we were karate drop outs. I won’t include my husband in this, I think he would have pushed on, he would have conquered. But the three of us, we hung up our gi’s, I rejuvenated my bank account and we moved onto the next sport, prime for the taking. I will tell you all about that journey in my next post. In the meantime, learn from my mistakes, follow your kids lead, or don’t. Either way, it will be entertaining. But above all, please buy yourself the good bathing suit, with the bra padding when you enter that pool. You know hot Dad will be there.