Assimilation 101 - the sports thing

Despite mommy - who suffers from (is exalted by? who can say) an "I am a martian" syndrome, my son is starting suburban ice skating and soccer lessons. This is *so cool!* Part of me wants to just lock him in his room with a painting set and some books for the next 5 years or so, only taking him out for ethnic restaurant visits and trips to enlightening places, but another part of me is happy that he'll go out and get to be athletic. I was thinking about today and realized that athletics might actually be, like, a part of his life. Odd. Incidentally, this whole "stages of life" thing is pretty funny, especially in the silicon valley. For example, many of us who didn't wear coke-bottle lenses and have our calculators in holsters nonetheless experienced a feeling of being "out of step" with life. I think it's called young adulthood, but I'm not sure. At any rate, we went from normal childhood activities to unhealthy fixations about literature, research, existentialism, computers, work, and listening to (often antisocial) music. Ah, our twenties were such fun. And if you live in the silicon valley, you can keep it up. You can go to Science Fiction and Hackers Group parties, where you can show up wearing a large cardboard sun cut to wear your head (if you'd like), and nobody will blink. You can literally spend years responding to every social statement made to you by saying "Burning Man was the best thing that happened to me all year," and nobody will think twice about it. I know that American culture is said to keep us young and acquisitive for years, but the valley beats out everywhere. You can keep that pure, post-pubescent awkwardness thing, mix it up with some overachiever-incredibly-focused on work energy and a lot of "but about 80% of me is still four" humor and love of fun, and you can *bank* on that as your personality - for twenty years if you'd like! Fill your entire apartment with Legos. It's OK. Of course the "we're different, we're odd, we're pretty alienated" stuff palls when you have children. It doesn't go away, mind you, but it's not exactly the type of message that you want little Dylan and Kaiseke picking up. So you smile, and then you take them to preschool. And here's the weird thing. In preschool (as was recently pointed out to me by a psychiatric professional, who found it odd), children are expected to do *everything* well. Ever think about that? ONLY in preschool. If you're an adult, nobody expects you to be across the board normal/good at things. No way. But nowadays, kids are scanned up the wazoo, almost from birth, to make sure that they're *OK.* The fear of ADHD and Autism and Aspberger's hangs like a big, black bat, upside down in the corner, and everyone tiptoes around, facilitating eye contact with their kids and talking brightly. But I digress. In our family, the kid's the social one. He adores people. He is open-countenanced, pleasant, innately happy, and ... (Oh dear heavens) probably athletic. He *is* athletic, too. My husband and I are not familiar with this concept, although if I dredge back to my childhood, I can remember that other children were athletic, and that doing athletics was pretty fun. Well, in between bone-wrenching sessions of self-consciousness, but who's counting? I took my son to go ice skating with our neighbor the other day and "free skate" was finished - they only had lessons. Bright me. I said "Can he try a lesson?" figuring that he'd hate it, we'd be done, and we would have done our obligatory "join the neighbor skate time." However, it turned out to be just lovely. There were four boys, all the same size, in the "tot class," and they were just adorable. They all skated with little tiny steps, arms out, and they had THREE instructors. Is that cool or what? Two of the instructors were guys. Big, manly ex-champ guys, or so I was told, which seems really cool for little boys. The instructors drew a big squiggle across the ice and the kids skated across it. My kid shocked me. He did very well, didn't cry or fail to listen, and ... wow! He's five! He was out there for 40 minutes, and life was good. At the end of the lesson, it was very cute. They have a garbage bag full of 4-inch big pieces of plastic, which they strewed all over the ice. The kids had to skate over, bend down, pick them up, and go over to make a "basket." They all did pretty well, and I can see him doing hockey - *very* easily. IMHO he'd adore it. Hockey for little kids is cool. The teacher also took a couple of the boys for "fast rides" by skating along, holding them. The lesson was **so** much more fun than skating with mommy. So now he takes skating lessons. And we go in for his first soccer class tomorrow! Yikes! That's an accident too. My friend said that her daughter missed her first soccer class last week and I thought "hey, they're the same age!" So I asked my friend where she got the lessons. And then I called and asked if I could go, too. My son was sitting in the car tonight and out of the blue said "I'm sure it will be very fun" in a decisive tone. This kid gives me such a kick. I had to smile.