Mysteries of the World, i.e. The Bermuda Triangle, The Loch Ness Monster...and "Select Sports."

When Andrew and I were kids, we had very different experiences with sports than our kids have today.  I took dance and Andrew did basketball.  Sports were supposed to be for fun in those days.  The goal was to teach teamwork, collaboration and coordination.  And also just to get some excersize.  You were expected to show up at games if you could, but no worries if you couldn’t- it wasn’t the end of the world.  If you were sick, if your grandma was in town, if your hair wasn’t laying quite right, if you were working on your diorama of George Washington crossing the Potomac that was due tomorrow for social studies class- any of these reasons were a perfectly acceptable excuse to miss practice.  At the end of the season, if you were the loser, you didn’t receive a participation trophy.  Nope.  You just lost.  But that was part of life, and it was ok- it wasn’t going to scar you for life and put you in intensive therapy for years on end.  By the time you were at Round Table Pizza celebrating the end of the season with your teammates, you had all but forgotten about the fact that you were losers.  All you cared about now was getting another grape soda in you before your mom picked you up--and strategically moving the joystick to perfectly line up with the Poison Ivy Action Figure in the glass case so that “claw thing” could descend and grasp onto the gold string attached to the doll before you got ripped off again, becoming yet another 2 bucks poorer.
 
Sports used to be casual.  You signed up, your mom paid your $20 for the season, you got your team T-shirt, perhaps borrowed your neighbor’s kids’ old equipment, and that was it- you played for a good time and for something to do after school with your buddies before dinner.  Today, signing up is a thing of the past.  It’s actually extremely difficult to find sports available (at least in our area) for pure recreation. (Thankfully our kids’ school does have some no-cut recreational sports, and I’m extrememly grateful for that!) Generally speaking, however, select sports are the norm.  It’s a whole different animal. 

​When our daughter approached us wanting to do competitive cheer, we were like “Come now. What is this concept you speak of, child?”  When she told us, we started asking around and doing some research.  The more we heard about select sports (competitive cheer being one of those), the more it literally sounded like a joke;  a segment from “Saturday Night Live.”  It was almost like, this whole thing cannot possibly be as extreme as people are telling us it is. 
 
Oh, but it was.
 
For starters, there are tryouts and cuts.  There are practices in preparation for the tryouts.  There are frightening parents, who literally market their kid as if they are a Hollywood agent, or their athlete is being recruited by the NFL.  For competitive cheer, there are gyms to choose, (which, as it seems to me, selecting a college was easier than choosing a gym.) There are special clinics, pre-season conditioning classes, skills and drills sessions.  And this is all very intense process, causing a significant amount of angst and stress for the athletes.  I actually have a good friend whose son went to counseling because he was experiencing “pitching anxiety” during his select baseball season.
 
In addition to sports being serious business today, I also mean that in the very literal sense of the term: Sports have now become ACTUAL money making businesses. I can only speak for competitive cheer of course, but I know this is not unique to cheer.  There are a million fees: for practices, for “Cheer Associations”—whatever those are- but they are mandatory to join. Fees for choreography, end of the season galas (yeah, that’s right, I said GALAS: Nowadays at Country Clubs, people- No longer at Round Table Pizza, I assure you), Fees for competitions, photos, uniforms, warm-ups, spray tans, hair, makeup, etc. There are flights, hotels, transportation costs, not to mention attending an actual competition!  It’s like $20 a person just to get in the door, and if you find free parking somewhere, consider yourself lucky! Thousands of dollars spent per year on all this.
 
By far the most challenging for us personally was the concept of the “mandatory” practice schedule.  It was appalling to us that sick and injured kids were expected to be at practice.  We simply could not believe people would actually schedule their family vacations, and seemingly their entire lives, around their kids’ cheer practice! More mind-blowing still, when random “extra practices” would pop up (“mandatory”, of course), people would alter their plans to accommodate the last minute change. That simply was outrageous to us, shocking actually. We were like, um, new flash: our family life is NOT all about this one kid’s sport!  We were (still are) big believers in “It’s Not All About You.” But then again, at least to some extent-you have to be in a family our size.
 
On the other hand, school cheer (AKA “Sideline Cheer”) we could easily wrap our heads around and support.  Our daughter was one of only 2 freshman to make the squad.  The environment was positive, it was casual, it was meant to develop leadership skills and connection and friendship with her teammates.  Definitely no problem there- we endorsed school sideline cheer wholeheartedly and got behind that one immediately.  Fabulous, loving, understanding coaches and teammates.  A “Just do your best!” mentality. It was a no-brainer.
 
However….our daughter wanted to do both school cheer AND competitive cheer.  Now knowing what competitive cheer entailed, we said no way.  We told our daughter she could not do a full year competitive travel team.  Period. She would rarely be home, and we only had a few more years with her anyway.  Plus, there was no way we would be able to attend any out of state competitions, as we have 6 other children and Andrew’s career is extremely demanding.  Our little amount of down time was by no means going to be spent sitting in a random convention center for hours on end, away from our other kids, just to wait for hours to see one of our kids perform in ONE routine. And this endless wait time to watch her perform will continue for God knows how long…..because the cheer companies do not give out a schedule with even semi-accurate times of each team’s performances until just hours before the competition begins…. And of course the schedule is all subject to change. (Which it does…. many times over.) Andrew’s and my joke is that he can plan an entire airline’s flight schedule 9 months in advance, but a cheer company can’t seem to do it even 24 hours before the competition.  :P
 
We were firm on not allowing her to do a full year competitive cheer team.  We allowed her to do a part time team, which only had 2 required competitions for the year, but she spent that entire year frustrated that she couldn’t be more involved.  As a result, our relationship with her suffered…. A LOT.  We didn’t understand what the big deal was- why would she even want this insanity?  Coaches who yelled and whose job it was to never be satisfied.  Handfuls of bitchy teammates with egos the size of their hair bows.  Mandatory practice for 6 hours a week minimum…. And then traveling all over the country for competitions, many of which weren’t even real “competitions”: sometimes these teams would win by default because there was no other team registered to compete against (at that particular level.)  Uhhhh, say **WHAT**?!?!? Didn’t that defeat the entire purpose of “competitive” cheer? Andrew and I could not conceptualize in our heads why on earth this entire thing was even remotely appealing to her.
 
For a year, we kept up this back and forth.  Andrew and I would complain about competitive cheer (even part time cheer), be very vocal about our opinions on it….and she would pull away from us and become a little more distant each time.  The crescendo came when I was about 8 months pregnant with Anders.  There was a schedule change, and we realized our daughter was going to be at a competition- in Chicago- the very day I was supposed to be induced to give birth.  I was hormonal, and I was pissed.  Livid. Ranting.  NO ONE in our family had ever missed the birth of one of their siblings.  What was I going to do, Photoshop her into the family pictures right after the birth?!?!?  She would miss the entrance of her sibling into this world…. This precious moment that we would never get back.  For. TWO. Minutes. Onstage.  With some random other kids who stomped all over each other to get to “the top”—which didn’t sound much like a “team” to me. I just found this completely unacceptable.  Ridiculous. Preposterous.  Asinine.
 
I continued ranting and bitching for a couple of weeks.  I could get no peace around the situation.  I was all torn up inside.  I felt totally justified in my anger and twice almost pulled her out of competitive cheer altogether.  Then one morning during my daily meditation practice, as I sat in calm stillness, out of nowhere… I heard a voice as clear as day gently say: “It’s YOUR baby, not hers.”  It was like a lightning bolt hit me.  Immediately I knew what I had to do, and why I could not experience any liberation around this.  I had to let it go.  We both needed to do what we individually needed to do: she needed to be at the cheer competition, and I needed to give birth. 
 
I did give birth- literally and figuratively.  Literally to a 7 lb. healthy baby boy.  And figuratively, to a whole new relationship with my daughter—and an entirely new parenting style with her.  There was no reason she needed to be at the birth- Finally, I realized I was selfishly making it all about ME.  Everything changed after that.  Not long after, we had a long talk with our daughter and it began with an apology.  I asked her forgiveness for being so stubborn and opinionated about my thoughts on the matter.  I could clearly see now how toxic and destructive my behavior had been on our relationship. My actions had poisoned our relationship because I just couldn’t keep my big mouth shut- and as I spewed my negative thoughts about a sport that she loved, the message she was receiving was “I don’t believe in this competitive cheer stuff, therefore I don’t believe in you.”
 
As the conversation continued, I told her how amazingly impressed I was with her skills, her talents, her dedication and her drive.  Through tears I confessed how self-centered I had been.  In addition, I lifted the “full time, year round competitive cheer ban.”  I explained to her that I wanted her to follow her dreams, and if she wanted to do year round competitive cheer, we would fully support it and make it happen.  We would arrange to get her to practices, we would pay for everything she needed, and help her as much as we could to bring her dreams to fruition.  We would FULLY support her in this, no matter what.  We only asked in return that she understand that unless she was competing locally, we would not be able to attend her competitions: The sheer size of our busy family with its’ many complicated logistics and moving parts could not be possibly be planned around competitive cheer.  She understood, and I tried not to be offended when she told me that in actuality, she didn’t care at all that we couldn’t be at the competitions!  Andrew and I were laughing, but also very relieved.  That’s how much she loved the sport, nothing else mattered as long as she could participate in full-time competitive cheer.  What was really cool was my retired mom stepped in and started attending Ash’s competitions for us.  The experience has been awesome and bonding for the two of them.  It truly takes a village, at least for us.  Had we had fewer kids, we would have robbed my daughter and my mom of this opportunity to experience this piece of life together.
 
Competitive cheer has also taught me about unconditionally loving and supporting my daughter with no strings attached.  She comes home from practice often exhausted physically and emotionally.  She tells us about the frustrating drama among competitive teammates. Sometimes we wonder if she’s actually truly enjoying it, because most of the time it seems like all it does is cause her stress.  But the second I feel myself start to get caught up in my idea of what the  results “should look like” and shift into that mode of having expectations around the whole thing….. I feel it immediately-like a knife in my gut.  Like a warning alarm goes off in my heart and I need to spring into action and shift my thinking or I start unraveling.  Here’s the secret to that shift in perspective: Gratitude.
 
Gratitude for the strength and health of my daughter and simply that she can physically participate in such an athletically challenging endeavor.  Gratitude for the fact that we have the financial resources to be able to allow her to participate.  Gratitude for the lessons she is learning about commitment and time management, among other things, I’m sure. Gratitude that the times that she is at home and around are all the more precious because our relationship with her has been healed.  Gratitude that God made her totally different than me, and I get the joy of watching her personality and skills and talents unfold.  Mostly, that God has this whole thing as part of her journey for some reason, and that reason is none of my business because it’s not about me.  
 
The part that IS about me is what am I going to learn from this, and how will I react? I am the adult here, and I get to choose my behavior. The goal of an unconditionally loving and supportive relationship with my daughter is the top priority, regardless of my opinions, so my actions must line up with that goal. I’ll never stop focusing on the positives and searching for the silver lining.  I don’t have to understand it, but I have to accept it.
 
The other day, our athlete returned home from Orlando on the red eye flight from yet another competition, and she was understandably physically and mentally shattered.  Then I learned that her coaches would not cancel the team’s practice that night, so after a nap and some food, we jumped in the car again and I drove her to the cheer gym for another “mandatory practice.”  I could almost hear Andrew’s jaw drop over the phone as I delivered this news to him.  Truthfully, we are still baffled as to why kids would even want to do competitive cheer/select sports in general, and STILL neither Andrew or I agree with the principles of it. But it doesn’t matter what we think.  No one’s asking us.  Our job is not to understand it.  Our job is to love and support our kid… NO MATTER WHAT.  Plus let’s face it, there are worse things our kid could be involved in.  So, in the grand scheme of things…….we’ll take this version of madness, thank you very much.
 
Here’s where this whole thing turns into a gift: Competitive Cheer is a small scale opportunity for Andrew and me to start learning this priceless lesson:  There will be MUCH bigger things that come along, especially with as many kids as we have.  So even though it’s definitely bittersweet, I’m thankful that competitive cheer gives us the chance to start practicing this process of letting go, and honoring my kids’ dreams and talents, and who they are… whether I understand it or not.  She is not asking for my personal stamp of approval on her endeavors- she is asking for my unconditional love and support.  
 
And just when we think we can’t take anymore….. just when we get caught up in the endless competitive cheer demands and are tired of jumping around trying to find last minute transportation accommodations for last minute “mandatory practices” …. Just when we can’t stomach another headache-inducing hour of techno music blaring at eardrum-shattering volumes at the cheer competitions……Just when the schedule changes for the 5th  time….Just when our daughter misses another family birthday or event, or she is gone for nightly family dinner again and her chair is empty…. Just when we are burned out from negotiating with coaches about letting our daughter skip a mere 2 practices so she can go on a trip to Hawaii with us that’s been planned for over a year (and was communicated to them originally the very first week she made the team- OH, sorry, I digress…. ;) …. Just when we get to the very frayed end of our rope of patience for competitive cheer…. We received this text from our daughter this weekend while she was away at her cheer competition in Florida:
 
“Hey I just wanted to say thank you so much for funding and supporting cheer for me.  It means the world for me because it’s what I love to do and I know I don’t show it a lot because I get frustrated and exhausted. But I really love what I do and I can’t thank you both enough for your sacrifices despite the fact that we have a gigantic family.  I miss you both and I’m exhausted but I’m having a really great time and I’m getting to watch famous teams. So again I love you guys and thank you for everything you do.”
 
Then suddenly, it all becomes worth it again. 
 
And once more, Gratitude proves herself the healer.  The perspective shifter.  The new pair of glasses. The attitude adjuster.  The breath of fresh air.  The re-focus opportunity.  The chance to pivot 180 degrees.