When I was ten, my mother signed me up for a week long tennis camp. Ten was the year that my body starting gearing up for puberty and in order to do so, I went from being a short, skinny, long-haired kid to a short, chubby, lanky-haired kid overnight. I never once in my ten year old life expressed an interest in tennis so I think this was her ploy to keep me from watching TV and eating all the sweets in the house while she worked. My main exercise seemed to consist of walking down the basement stairs to see what kind of frozen treats were hiding in the cellar freezer. Ever eat so many Freezer Pops you kind of burn the inside of your mouth off? I did. Every day. This should lead you to know that the idea of camp alone was traumatic but then add to it I was expected to RIDE MY BIKE THERE AND BACK. Please know that in addition to being chubby, this was a very clumsy year for me and I had more bike accidents and flat tires than successful bike rides. The same woman who took my bike away for a week due to fall after fall was now telling me it was okay to ride there and back for a week. My mother, in an effort to assuage her guilt over this camp, recently clocked the mileage from her house to said tennis courts and tells me it is 1.2 miles door to door. Can I just say that for a chubby, short-legged girl riding a crap bike that 1.2 miles seemed like 12? My father refused to fix one more flat on my sweet ten speed after fixing one a week for a month and I was stuck riding an old bike I pulled out of the depths of the garage. It was stuck in whatever gear that is that you pedal with all your might and the wheels turn so grudgingly it is like you have the brake on. No, I didn't have the brake on, neither brake worked. But there I was, on this deathtrap, sent down major thoroughfares, holding a racket in one hand, pedaling my heart out and chubby legs off to get to a tennis camp I didn't want to go to. I hated it before I even got there. Then I got there and I hated it even more. Short chubby kids do not make great tennis players and I was no exception. I was terrible and as this was in Lancaster, NY, the teenagers in charge saw no reason not to tell me so. I think they groaned as much as I did when they saw it was me next in line. I spent a lot of time languishing in the back of the line and huddled around the water cooler dreading the ride home and dreaming of Freezer Pops. Somehow, I made it through that terrible week and vowed to never play tennis again.
Until this summer when the boy spotted the tennis courts and said "Mom, let's play tennis!". I quickly lied and said "Oh buddy, we only have one racket." I forgot that the boy who can't memorize math facts has the entire garage and its contents burned into his memory and he quickly came back with "We have two. One is under the shoes by the door and the other is in the green bin by the recycling can." I said we didn't have any tennis balls and he said we did, under the couch in the front room as well as in the pool bag. Realizing I was not going to win this, I gave in and said alright. This was also early in the summer when I was determined to be a great mom.
I apologize to any real tennis players as I describe how it is that the boy and I actually play tennis. I realize it is a true sport and its players are amazing athletes. The boy and I are not amazing athletes and we have butchered the sport beyond recognition. Given that the boy has very little depth perception, he has a hard time recognizing that the ball is coming and where it is once it gets there. This in mind, the ball can bounce more than once. It can bounce ten times, but if he gets a racket under it and returns it, I will hit it. He can knock it into the next court and it counts. He can step on the fault line, over the fault line, in the wrong box and still serve. It counts. Every now and then I will hit the ball over and somehow it will hit his racket and come back at me and we are both so surprised we stop and say what a great hit it was! He will tell me he gets a point for hitting it and I will agree. That's right, a point. There is no love, fifteen, thirty in our games. Everything is a point. I hit the fence behind you? Point. Hit it so hard it got stuck in the fence? Point plus bragging rights. Landed in the corner of the opposite court? Point. It is Calvinball on the tennis courts and he thinks he is great at it. I was surprised to find I was actually having fun with it as well. It is as hot as can be, but for an hour we are kings of the court: trash talking the other, hitting as hard as we can and laughing, by God, we are laughing. My problem with tennis now is that he wants to play it every time we are waiting on SG and while he is obsessed, I am worn out. We are also midway through summer and I am fine with being decent mom and not great mom. He actually thinks he is good at the game and I am wishing some random teenager would come by and laugh to give him some perspective. But then I remember that this is the kid who stopped playing games at recess because he wasn't picked anymore and if wants to think he is a great tennis player, who am I to say he isn't? Actually, it is probably my heinous playing that is really holding him back.
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| This is absolutely my face the entire time. |
SG has two more weeks of her camp left and I have five more times driving which means five more days of playing tennis. I can handle five more times over two weeks. I will keep trying to substitute basketball, football or sitting quietly in the shade, but I know he will keep picking tennis. He is stubborn like that and there is too much tennis in the news recently for him to give it up now. Personally, I think they should lay off that tennis player, Sharapova, and her grunting. I grunt like that just getting the rackets out of the trunk. And walking to the court. And waiting for the boy to hit the ball back. And running across two courts to hit it back. Grunting makes it better. I think I will suggest that we add points for grunting and see what the boy thinks. Ha, what am I thinking? He is a boy, he will love points for grunting! I think we will both really take a shine to this and bring tennis to a whole new level; plus points for grunting may give us a score higher than ten!
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