Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

Dalai Mama Weekly Blog

Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

In the car Birdy says, "Tell me again. Is my class called jernast-tick or jernast-ticks." When I say, "It's actually jim-nastics," she says, "Oh. Right." And then, quietly to herself, "Jernasticks." Birdy loves gymnastics. Michael has been taking her, and I've been hearing for a month now — from both of them — how great it is. "Pike!" Birdy will cry, suddenly, and go stock-still — her arms out in front of her, her face a mask of surprise: many of Birdy's gymnastics positions seem to involve mostly her eyebrows. "Glunge!" she will say and shoot a bent knee out in front of her, throw her arms up to the heavens. "Is it glunge?" she will ask then, "or lunge?" and I have to answer, regretfully, "Lunge."

But today I'm the one getting to take her, and it's as if I'm on a different planet from the one that was described to me and mapped out on my spaceship's tracking system. I am clearly out of orbit. In short: I love Birdy — love to see her dart around in her grubby shorts and her little T-shirt. The sight of her sturdy body swells me with fondness, pushes almost physically at my rib cage, the way the kids did when they still inhabited my torso instead of hogging up all the space in my head. But the class itself? I kind of hate it. She's so strong and active, that Birdy — loves climbing and hanging, jumping and swinging. We thought it would be a natural fit. But I can see now that, even with these chubby almost-babies, the class is all about constraint rather than self-expression: balance beam, ready position, glunge. Of course, right? I mean, gymnastics is a discipline — that's the whole point. But when the teacher (unsmilingly) corrects Birdy's posture after a fabulously wild leap, I want to grab my daughter and run.

Maybe it's that the teachers seem burnt out. They seem to alternate between not smiling and fake smiling, and I keep thinking of Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons, smoking a cigarette out back between juggling performances. Birdy darts around, gets exuberantly into the wrong place in line, is shooed irritably to the back, chews nervously on the ends of her pigtails. Later, in the car going home, I will say about one of her teachers, "Oh — was she the one with the long hair?" And Birdy will answer, "Yes." And then, mysteriously, "But she doesn't have an elephant's trunk, if that's what you mean." And I will say, "I don't think that's what I meant." And she will say, "Right."

But here in the class, I have that old familiar knot in my stomach. Why am I like this? Why can't I just see the good in it, like Michael? Healthy kids loping around like young horses, tumbling willy-nilly with their dimples and their slappy little feet? Instead of feeling like the only one of my kind, standing worried and apart from the other mothers, who knit and discuss the guy who came to refinish the granite counters and gossip about the boy in somebody's daughter's class who wears a headband! I listen to see if they're talking about Ben, and they're not — but my eyes sting with tears anyway.

It's been ages since I felt like this: so awkward and apart. Over the years, motherhood has gone from feeling like a packaged costume (Now with free station wagon!) to something more like one of those Dr. Scholl's shoe inserts, the kind that mold comfortably to your foot. I love our community, our friends, the parents of our children's friends. But here I feel too shy to try: I don't want to seem like I'm not participating, but I can't muster the energy to participate. I want to love the class, but I don't. I can't exactly picture Michael knitting and gossiping, but then again his Dadness affords him a certain distance already — it probably doesn't even occur to him. Maybe I just want a little more space in the world for everyone — for the girls here to move however they like in their strong bodies, for the women here to interact however they like, from all of their intelligence and humor, kindness and eccentricity and even weariness. I have that line from the song "Galileo" in my head: "I'm not making a joke, you know me, I take everything so seriously."

How long till my soul gets it right?
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light?

I don't think they were talking about preschool gymnastics alienation, those Indigo Girls. But it fits.

P.S.
As of September 17, the column is going to be over on Family.com too — a kind of miniaturized syndication! — and one good thing over there is that I'll be able to join in the conversation a little bit, and respond to some of the comments. So let's look for each other! I don't know why I'm making it sound like we're meeting for a play date at a crowded beach, but I'll be the one in the sagging brown suit! With the smashed-in peanut-butter sandwiches! Come find me!