Sports

I’ve been watching nine year olds play basketball.

Which is more interesting than you might think.

Mostly because you get to spy on all the interactions of the various adults who’ve been corralled and coerced into attendance.

But also because it’s pretty fascinating to watch nescient abilities blossom. Like if I’m around this area ten years from now – unlikely – and Mia turns into a high school basketball star – more likely – I’ll know exactly what I’m looking at on the old nature versus nurture grid.

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My oldest son was a super-jock all the way up through high school graduation.

This shocked and astounded me. In fact, both my kids shocked and astounded me because they were so-o-o popular in high school whereas I had been the quintessential outcast.

In the same way that I spend an inordinate number of hours wondering what my cats might do if I was somehow targeted by a super-shrink ray so that suddenly, I was six inches tall (Meezer would torture me to death; Rutger would allow me to live but be extremely confused by my inability to manipulate a can opener), so I spend a lot of time wondering what would happen if my younger self had suddenly been propelled forward in time and ended up in the same yearbook as either of my kids.

Robin would have bullied me.

Max would have ignored me.

I’m not sure what, if anything, this says anything about my performance as a parent.

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When Max was 9, he announced one day that he wanted to do Little League baseball.

Little League baseball!

The story I made up to tell my friends at the time – and which I still tell friends when the occasion arises, only thankfully it doesn’t very often – is that I begged Max to reconsider: How about I buy you a subscription to Playboy instead? I ask Max in this amusing story.

Only, of course, this amusing story isn’t true.

I just went ahead and enrolled him in Little League.

Problem was that I wasn’t in a position to play endless hours of catch with him, which I felt was the obligation of every parent with a child in Little League. Ben – whom I must have hooked up with by that point, going on chronology, even though my memory is of being a single mother at that time – showed no inclination to play catch with him, either.

I would have played catch with Max if I could, but the fact is that my mother used to slam me across the face when I was a little kid, so often and so randomly that to this very day, I wince when objects I’m not expecting come too near my face. This wincing tendency prevented me from playing basketball and volleyball, two sports my height made me seem eminently qualified to play in the eyes of an endless parade of PE teachers, all of whom despised me when my inadequacies quickly came to light.

This was a problem.

I had -- have -- an enormous amount of physical energy. With no acceptable outlets in my high school years, I turned to drugs and sex to feel that burn.

In my modeling years, I never exercised at all. Basically because I was just this side of anorexic. I come from healthy peasant stock, I have big bones. But when I was modeling, I had to keep my weight under 120 lbs, and even at that, I was constantly being told I was too fat. (For the record, I’m 5’10”.) I stopped eating. I did a lot of speed, all of it legally prescribed.

As soon as I stopped modeling, I discovered bicycling and martial arts. My first husband and I bonded over our mutual love of competitive cycling, and I got two-thirds of the way to a black belt in Tai Kwon Do.

One of my big regrets, in fact, is that I never got my black belt. But, you know, training for anything is out of the question when you have young children. Proper parenting is just so all consuming.