Gym Tastic

Here's where mothering is the greatest. Last night I said "Time Change be dammed!" and took them to Nathan's practice at the gym at 8 on a Monday night.

Nathan's team is done playing, they finished their last game on Saturday, but they went back to practice because the coach Bruce is such a good coach, that that's just the kind of thing you do when you find a guy like him.

Bruce is not an easy coach! He's the kind of guy who pushes them - he makes them run suicides if he feels they aren't trying hard enough - and for Nathan, this coach has made him see that pushing yourself when you don't feel like it - is maybe the best thing for a lazy but talented boy.

So Lilly and Emma and I went up to the park at night, in our pajamas, and took Becky, and snuck her into our little gym - this gym where they graduated from preschool, and come for Halloween parties every year, it's been a good quiet place to grow up in the weedy, sprawling LA.

Nathan happily took all the coach's challenges, and he's growing, at 14, to understand that learning a skill means not being perfect, and going over it and over it, and allowing yourself to fail. Failing, is in fact in all the steps toward getting there. And last night he was so happy with all that failure, because the other word for it is practice.

So there's this stringbeany coach Bruce, whose body Nathan's is starting to look like, since he's lengthening out like the young high schooler he has become, and Bruce is just running along with the kids, in and out, and I like this section of life where Nathan is, he's half man half boy, and all the good parts are flourishing in him - he's starting to build a person he can rely on in later years. He's starting to like himself, and see who he's going to be. I think.

It was just like floating in our pool, last night, to be at the gym. Not a place I ever was, growing up, and now here I am. But the family was there. Emma was doing handstands and push ups, and Lilly was throwing the basketball into the hoop in her Tinkerbell pajamas, and Becky was watching the kids run up and down the court, and Barry and I were just watching the little tribe we made, and because of B, these are some well-rounded kids. They're physically ABLE. They're aware of the needs of others. They're funny. (That's my part.) They know they belong.

So Lilly got to school late this morning because I let her sleep in, because stopping life sometimes, at 8 at night, to throw a basketball around or float in the little gym that has helped shape our kids, that is just as important as school or work. Seeing the kids grow confident, and being able to be in it, neck deep in their lives, it's a happy, satisfying, wonderful place to be.