Cheerleading

I'm really exhausted right now and I'd love to go to bed, but cheerleading practice went late and then when we got home at 8:30, my younger daughter told me her bathing suit was dirty. So Mommy needs to wash it. The children's summer camps were combined for this week - indoor and outdoor mixed all together, and my younger, being that she's been in the indoor camp, doesn't understand how to change into her bathing suit in an outdoor changing hut with a dirt floor without rubbing the bathing suit in said dirt. And the other bathing suit? Giant skid mark in it. Because I teach my children how to wipe their asses really well, apparently.

Cheerleading practice. Not for me. This was the girls' choice for their fall activity, which will also be their winter and spring activity. For $180 each, it needs to last through the whole fucking school year is what I think. We've done fall soccer, winter indoor soccer, spring soccer, ice skating lessons, swim lessons every summer, gymnastics and karate. These children should be the most well rounded athletes who are still in their single digit years ever. I bitch about it, but for real, I'm incredibly grateful that we live somewhere where my daughters have so many choices, and I'm even more grateful that The Ex and I have been able to provide this to them, in terms of the financial and emotional commitment. The emotional commitment would be because either he or I have volunteered to coach almost every freaking thing they've done. Plus the volunteer work I've done for the school and the PTA. And the non-profit board I'm on. Plus my career. Holy crap.

This year I have volunteered to coach the flag cheerleading team. Named so not because they are using flags, but because it's five and six year olds, and the football team for that age group (I assume, I haven't seen the practice because I'm so busy trying to get five and six year old girls to stop wiggling at the wrong times) is a flag football team. On the first night of practice, I had absolutely no intention of volunteering for squat, except to watch the practices from my brand new folding-packable chair. On the first night of practice that I had no intention of volunteering for, I heard the call for coaches and still resisted. That was, until my older daughter said, "Mommy, will you volunteer?" I thought, fuck. Why does she always want me to volunteer? And so, I volunteered.

If you know me, you know I'm not some do-good liberal freakshow. I'm working on not being the martyr and learning how to just tell people to kiss my pretty ass with the crazy tattoo on top of it. I really just want to sit around and watch my kids do shit while I think of weird stuff and laugh to myself. But my kids think it's great that Mommy volunteers, and so I volunteer. A lot of this has to do with the fact that my own parents were so uninvolved and unconcerned with my childhood and teenage years, other than to punish me. I couldn't drag my mom to anything involving my school and I don't recall if she ever met any of my teachers in middle school or high school. Her payback for that was me giving her the honor of meeting the entire school board in person right before they suspended me for six weeks. I was always one of those kids whose parents were conspicuously absent, or maybe not, but that's how it felt with the group of kids that I ran with. My mother's current husband (#3) has gotten a pretty good glimpse into her parenting skills and announces periodically that it's amazing to him that I'm even alive. I kind of have to agree with him. It is a fucking miracle that I am not only alive, but a productive, tax-paying, law-abiding and sober member of society. I'm pretty damn proud of myself. My father... could not have cared less about me, or at least, that's how it feels now. As long as he didn't have to give up more than two weekends a month and didn't have to pay extra child support, he didn't give a rat's ass. So I'm pretty proud of myself that I was as awesome of a daughter to him that I was. Eulogy, obituary and all.

I was moderately involved in activities and such in high school, because it was the best way to get out of being at home without getting into trouble. But I never did cheerleading. I'm not going to get into the psycho-social-racial makeup of where I grew up, but cheerleading was never an interest to me. I didn't even watch the cheerleaders at any of the sporting events I went to because I thought the whole thing was pretty dumb. This has not been lost on me now that I'm coaching this shit. Me coaching cheerleading is like asking Helen Keller to teach a paint-by-numbers class. Yeah, it's that bad. Thank God, I've got a 15 year old who is the assistant coach and she knows all of these routines and cheers, because it's a learn-as-you-go kind of thing with me.

The worst thing is that the cheerleading side of the athletic association is that it's really poorly organized. And when I say poorly organized, I mean like, it's as poorly organized as a small African or Asian country that suffers from a military coup every few years and allows the media in to take photos of all the eight year olds running around with AK's. Take race and corruption of the athletic association equation, and it's like New Orleans post-Katrina. Seriously. This wouldn't bother me if I was unorganized. But I'm a Type A personality, if there is any such thing. I would more or less categorize myself as an alpha female. And the woman running the show - not an alpha female. Which makes me want to kick her ass for being alive. Tonight uniforms were distributed. Can you say circle jerk? In fact, because I'm such a fabulous wordsmith, I'll up the ante. It was a uniform bukkake. Yep, I went there. Literally, the woman running the show was in the middle of all of these parents, throwing uniform parts and pieces about. I wanted to die. I wanted to grab the clipboard from her hands, bash her in the head with it, punch a couple of parents to serve as the examples of what can really happen when my anger management techniques go awry, and then line the rest of them up like convicts going to the chow hall for fried chicken night. Except there is no more fried chicken in the state prisons in Virginia because it caused too many problems. But I'm old school, so I could pretend. And then the uniforms would be issued out with military-like precision and if something doesn't work for your child, well then, it will be addressed in an orderly fashion.

But that's not the way the world works, because I don't run the world. And that's not the way the cheerleading team works, because I don't run the cheerleading team. I am a coach. I am learning how to lower my expectations with some people because they aren't me. I'm beginning to realize that it's not fair to them for me to go through life thinking that they are just like me. Maybe this incredibly disorganized mess is the absolute best that this woman can do. Maybe this is her A game. I'm trying to learn this and learn how not to feel superior, because I don't want to be that asshole anymore. I hope I left her at the house with The Ex. As for volunteering, I'll keep doing it for my kids. They enjoy it, they know that Mommy is super-involved in everything they do and takes an interest in everything they do. Maybe I'm just overcompensating for my childhood, but don't we all do that to some degree? I hope they grow up and laugh about all the crazy shit their mom did when they were little. And that will make it all worth my while.