A Motherhood Realization I Had While Ice Skating

We are on the public track of outdoor skating in our city, and it’s cold, but I’m hot. Sweat is formed in my neck and torso. My body, prone to the suffocation now that I am in medical menopause, floods the spiny heat every time I am stressed, embarrassed or too hot.

I have brought my daughter, her friend and my younger son to the track. I am moving from the treatment of breast cancer, and this is a great way out for me. I have taken my own skates, and my son’s: both are heavy and acute and hit my sides while we walk from the car to the track. I curse me for being the type of person who has skates but not covered with blades.

However, once we are on the ice, it feels good to move. My extremely cautious son is to learn slowly. He holds my hand and surrounds the track at a rhythm of a snail, or slowly danced with the arms around the jerky penguin of the skate, a tuxedo tuxedo appointment for a small child.

This is good, I think. The last six months have been marked by chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, not only for me but for the whole family. Now maybe I can be a mother again. I can take my children to skate in the first days of dismissal. I can even skate with them.

***

The track is almost empty; But not quite. A young lonely woman skates expertly, and two university students, maybe in an appointment? – Fight next to the wall. Finally, another mother arrives with two younger children.

My daughter and her friend, fifth grade, play ice hockey in a mixed team. This in itself is disconcerting for me. I have never played a team sport, I never pushed my body to its limits outside a yoga class, a skill began from scratch, surrounded by my teammates, to have fun. They are very expert in the ice and are shown. They skate fast, bend and occasionally cut the center. They deviate dangerously close to others, including me.

I am annoying and I ask you to diminish, to be more aware of your environment.

“This is not hockey practice,” I point out, pedantically. “There are young children who are learning.” My daughter’s friend pays attention to my warning, but my daughter is not. She shoots me, cutting me, and I almost fell.

I take her to the side and let her have it. Bad mom, beyond the firm, has come out to play. Sudo in my many layers and rabbit. I will make you out of the ice The threatening. You have to be aware of other people.

Is this what I want? If my life is interrupted by the disease, since it worries me almost every day what will be, is this an important maternal lesson? The words – Be aware of other people – bounce around my head like a pinball, while I send it reluctantly to the ice after the remice: am I telling my prepubescent daughter to shrink? Somehow, the answer is yes, because I don’t want to raise a moron. Part of the implacable apologies and obsessive attention to others that is caricatured as female weakness is empathic, affectionate and important.

However, even under my fury and second -hand shame, a small part of me is delighted with his skill, his courage. It’s foreign to me: I’m always getting out of the way, apologizing when someone runs into me.

***

When he was 10 years old, Tonya Harding’s husband hired a man to hit in Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, and I saw both women skating their hearts a few weeks later in Lillehammer at the 1994 Winter Olympic Games. In his leotards and stockings, but Nancy seemed classic in gold. Tonya looked cheap and tartana in red, or at least that’s what he thought then. It seems cruel now.

My friend Mandy and I have made it like Nancy, beautiful, strong and persecuted, and resistant! – While we sail along the frozen pond in our neighborhood, raising our legs and depending on the hips, arms to our sides. We couldn’t jump, or at least I couldn’t. Maybe Mandy could; I think I was envious of his skating skills, but I don’t remember why. Outside the ice, we dressed more like Jordan Catalano, all the flannel and converse shirts, but Nancy was always there in the pond, a few meters from us, turning, shining and winning.

***

That winter of my own fifth grade year, I thought that if I could skate strong enough, I would transform me into Nancy. Now I know that after that winter, I no longer lived near the pond and rarely skated. I subtle those ice skates and never obtained new ones. That once I tried to skate again at the University, in Boston Common, and I could barely remain vertical, but that almost 20 years later I tentatively advanced on the city’s track in our new city, and discovered that it was not difficult at all. Now I also know how it turned out: competent, medium -sized, medium -sized, beloved, reflective, friendly. I am not brilliant as Nancy, but most of the days, although not every day, those other things feel enough.

No one is watching me skating, which is good; I don’t look great, nor do I particularly well. My right foot dominates; I fight to stop with grace. But the pain in my lower back after skating a long time is vaguely pleasant. I am alive and fluid in the ice, moving for the sake of moving. I am amazed at the joy that radiates out when I am in the pond, or even on the track of the city. I feel even on the interior track in the suburbs, which smells like a dirty refrigerator. The dream of becoming Nancy no longer presses me. Now I am driven through frozen water by another force: the pleasure of the movement of my own body.

***

For the following year, my daughter has softened her experience. She keeps her great tricks for the pond in our small city, an oval of frozen joy without freezing hidden in a park, curled up against the river curves. Even so: sometimes she skates too close to me. Once, sliding back, she hits her friend’s father. “I need to be better about being aware of what is behind me,” he says, really apologies. And I am relieved. But I also ask myself: how hell do you see what is behind you? And how do you learn to skate backwards, a skill that I have never really dominated, if you not only have a blind faith that the world will come out of your path?

An afternoon in the pond, a father gives my daughter her album full of lead to practice: she is heavy and moves differently to a normal album. While she pursues her strange weight around the ice, sliding over the frozen submerged leaves, we shoot together. I tell you that I love skating here.

“I’ve been coming every day since he froze,” he tells me. “I mean, what else can you do for free?” His question is rhetorical, and I don’t answer “sex.” If you do not like to run, or basketball on the municipal courts, you are right: body emotion is often expensive to find. But the comparison with the erotic does not lose me: joy for the good of joy.

Every time I patino in a pond I worry that it is the last one, that the ice will melt forever while I worry that my time with my children is stolen from a disease. This covers pleasure in an anxiety sheet, but it also makes it very precious. Gling on frozen water while the world burns, after my body has betrayed me, it feels like a rare gift: move, soft and fast, while a hawk flies parallel to the trees line.

What am I preparing my daughter? How do I want to push the clay of your body and behavior? I am teaching my son the same things: pay attention to the rest of the world, think of those around you and in their comfort and care. And I also tell both that they shout arrest When someone does not respond to their educated application, to raise their voice above the rumble when you have a good idea. What I want for both of is to dominate an act of balance, be dim but not unstable in two thin blades: occupy space, while allowing space for others.

***

At work, a colleague, like me, a mother and a medium -sized wife, tells me that he has taken the violin after years outside him. She tells me that she has joined a local violin group. That she is playing: for her, for fun, with others. We sit down, waiting for our meeting to begin, and mortifyingly, my eyes are filled with tears. “Michelle, I’m crying,” I say, cleaning my eyes, and we both laugh while our younger coworkers look, baffled.

This is something alone, I want to shout my daughter while pursuing the main album with her hockey stick. To skate in the pond, just to see how you feel to move, to see if you can stop quickly or turn sharply. To correct yourself when you think you could fall, to fight at your feet after having lost your balance and annihilate spectacularly: this tells how joy.

Look at her, armed with her stick. Actually, don’t look at her. Keep your eyes on the ice in front of you, in the trees. He feels the way he leans forward, in a cruel winter wind that could send you back to the interior. It won’t. You will skate, until the ice turns water again.

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Miranda Featherstone is a writer and social worker. His essays on raising children, family, illness and loss have appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Los Angeles Review of Books, and in newsletters such as Parentdata and many thoughts. She lives in Rhode Island.

PS 21 completely subjective rules to raise adolescents.

(Photo of Lea Jones/Stocksy).

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