Mini Me

"Check out that sky," Hollywood said to his teammates, earlier this week, when Vegas bestowed another beautiful sunset upon us.

14 teenage boys turned to look at him with blank faces.

"Yep," he said.  "I'm turning into my mom."

Then last night he fell into the couch with an old person's groan: "Now, I'm turning into Dad."

~

When The Storm did something to remind me of my younger self, I pulled in tight on her face and dropped my finger to her nose. "Mini me," I said.

Not missing a beat, she lifted her finger to mine: "Big me."

~

A friend coming to town was in touch, last night, to remind me that we were together when we went on our first dates.  It was a Friday night, just a few weeks into the school year, when we met our dates, two school boys, in front of the movie theatre where our parents had dropped us off.  Inside, we proceeded to make out with our young studs, amongst a theatre packed with families while ET begged to phone home on the big screen. 

I laughed to recall the spectacle.

Then Sunshine arrived home from her Friday night movie date and suddenly it wasn't so funny anymore.

A Mighty Battle

Last spring, on the soccer field, The Storm struggled with confidence.  It was a dreadful season that she spent mostly on the sidelines while her teammates went on to earn her medals that she cherished, because she's nine and they're shiny medallions on necklaces of ribbon. But it was complicated for her. I could see it in her eyes.

Feeling something bigger than soccer threatening our little girl, Balthazar and I grew frustrated. With the game. With the coach. With each other. With The Storm. 

"Why aren't you even trying?" we'd ask in the car after another full weekend of tournament games that we'd spent watching other people's daughters race around the field, while The Storm sat watching from the bench.

Occasionally, when we'd hear the coach call out her name, we'd perk up in our lawn chairs, fold our hands as if in prayer to hold near our faces while The Storm took her jog across the field into position, looking so tiny in her uniform with her shoulders curled in around her chest.  Still, we hoped, we hoped with every ounce of our parental beings that this would be the game when she would rise, let loose, show the world what we knew was inside of her and her sized two and half cleats.  Even though her posture told us otherwise.

Then the coach would call her out again.

Confidence. She and I have battled more times than I care to count.  On the page, in the mirror, in my own backyard--you name the arena, she and I have had a go-round there.  Some years she wins. Others, I own that bitch.  But, I can't exactly tell you how I win, when I do. Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes, I'm just stronger or smarter; I've slept a better night or eaten a better breakfast; sometimes I'm just so damn desperate that I have no choice but to take her down.

"You're one of the best players on your team," I kept encouraging The Storm. But the minutes on the bench were adding up to an entire season and The Storm was losing faith in herself as quickly as her coach and her teammates were.

She would be asked to leave. Other girls, her bench friends, had already moved on.

And this is where it gets complicated because this is The Storm were talking about, and she values her friendships above all else. Plus, she is excruciatingly socially aware and if she were asked to leave her team of friends, she and Confidence would simply take it off the field to the schoolyard, and the classroom, the pool and the park, maybe even to middle and high school where her adversary's younger meaner cousin, Low Self-Esteem, might bully the crap out of her.

I've lost years to this nasty piece of work.... So, how could I let her get her claws into baby so early?

Ten minutes, maybe two, before the coach would come to me to talk, I went to him. I asked him for the summer and he, the father of his own soccer players, consented.  I hired private coaching for her, not so much to improve her skills as to make her believe she'd improved her skills. I took her out as often as I could, all the time staring down her confidence issues from the sidelines. Like a mother bear.

And slowly, ever so slowly, over the course of the summer I saw her shoulders settle back into place.

On Saturday, at the first game of the first tournament of the season--in sized three and half cleats now--The Storm played the best game of her short little life. And she played it the way only her parents ever knew she could.

"Perfection," said the coach after the game.



"Perfection," we agreed.

Take that you bitch!

Out of Control

The Storm approached me early this morning to ask if I could take her to the park so that she could work on her shooting.  We live in the desert, so finding a patch of lush grass for a kid to practice soccer on isn't as easy as it might be in, say, Iowa. 

"Sure," I said.

"What time?" she said.

"How about ten o'clock?"

At ten minutes to ten, when she found me again, she had her ball under her arm and her cleats laced. For a nine-year-old, The Storm has things pretty together.  "It's almost ten o'clock," she said.

"Got it."

At ten, she said, "I've got some water for you. Let's go."

She comes by her control issues honestly, my baby girl. Long before I banned Balthazar from making the bed, anymore (around the same time I banned him from using my toothbrush!) because he could never do it quite right--The pillowcases should always open toward the bed's edge--my own mother was banishing me, and everyone else, from her kitchen. She still does, quite regularly. She's particular about the way her dishwasher is loaded, and the cloth used to clean her counter, and a few other things.

But, beyond the blue and gold patterns in the kitchen linoleum of my youth, and beyond the ceramics that define her kitchen now, I don't remember my mother being too controlling, at least not nearly as controlling as I am.  

"I feel sorry for her husband," my father's said, countless times, referring to The Storm. 

"I know, right?" says Balthazar, in response, each time.

"It gets worse with each generation," my father says.

"I don't know about that," says Balthazar. Then he ducks to avoid whatever I'm throwing at him.

At the park, The Storm instructs me: "Stand here. When I say ball, pass it to me.  Then move to the goal post (she means the tree she's designated as such). If I can take the shot, I will. If I can't...."

I sort of stopped listening. I don't play soccer. I'm only there to support her.

We take our positions. "Ball," she says, and I pass it to her. She traps it. Then she stops.

"What did I say?" she says. "You weren't listening were you? You need to pay attention." She says these things she's learned from me, that I learned from my mother. I've done this to her, as my mother has to me, via both nature and nature.

"Ball," she says, again. Again, I screw up.

She braces herself on the goalpost-tree.

"Seriously?" she says, and I can see the way she'll plant her hand on her living room wall, decades into the future. I can here her tell her husband, again, the way a hanger should hang in a closet, or how to fold a towel properly.

And I say a little prayer that she that she finds a man with a sense of humor. Someone like her granddaddy. Or Balthazar.