Gymnastics of various sorts
This morning Carl was paged early and so I ended up taking Noah to his Parks & Rec gymnastics class. The class itself is a little bit sad: the high school is not in great physical repair and it makes me so sad that the kids have to go there every day in such a disrespectful environment.* But for a 45-minute kindergym class, it’s just fine.
So I watched Noah hopping along the balance beam and I was remembering my own gymnastics experience in high school.
The way phys ed worked was that a goodly portion of one’s grade depended on one’s score in running, specifically a 12-minute run. Then every other unit - swimming, basketball, volleyball, soccer, field hockey, tennis, skating, and gymnastics - was a small percentage of the grade, plus an attendence premium. I never really scored well enough on the run to assure any kind of decent grade, so every other unit became really important.
Swimming was fine; I was and remain a good swimmer and since I scored really highly in the long-distance swim events it was always kind of annoying that my endurance was ok even if my running speed was not. Basketball was fine too, and volleyball I did okay at. But I had never had lessons in any of the rest and sucked at them. Skating in particular was just a lost cause - to this day all I can do is go forward and do forward cross-cuts; I still can’t stop reliably. Tennis I could at least pass, and field hockey and soccer had enough group padding to shield me.
And then there was gymnastics, which was either a 4 or 6 week term. I had no gymnastics background whatsoever; I’d never even mastered a cartwheel or a headstand on the playground. Not for lack of trying. I used to spend hours in the backyard and getting friends to hold me up. I also would do them in water and gradually move shallower. But I never got there. Ever.
I did have freakishly good upper body strength though, thanks to a love of the bars at the playground and later, canoeing and windsurfing. But otherwise I was a total dud. And the way you passed gymnastics was that you had to pass a number of levels (up from the year before) to get a passing grade on one of the five girly areas (floor, beam, bars, vault, and - weirdly - trampoline).
The problem by grade 10 was that floor and beam both required handstands or cartwheels at certain points. And vault, I think, needed some rotating-balancing skill like that that I didn’t have, although I think I squeaked through grade 9 that way. Which left trampoline and bars. I maxxed out on the trampoline levels, which only left bars. And if I didn’t pass gymnastics I think I had worked out that the only grade left to me was going to be something like a C+, and gym was averaged into your grades up until grade 11 where it became pass-fail.
Since bars were actually really good for me, what with the upper body strength and the lack of fear on them, I threw my efforts into getting through the next level of bars, which involved a release move. You had to hold onto the top bar, hook your knees over the lower bar, release the top bar, pivot under the lower bar and then drop your legs to come up standing, if that makes any sense. We’re not talking about flying over the top bar or anything.
You could go in early and practice in the gym in the morning, which I did every day the gymnastics stuff was set up, because of this whole level thing. And the only other girl I really knew who did that was Tracey, who was probably about half my size in most dimensions. Now I had done this move a few times with the gym teacher spotting me, so it didn’t really occur to me that this was going to matter but…
… one morning I went for this move, and I released my legs at the wrong time and landed on my head. And unfortunately there wasn’t actually the exact right amount of padding under the bars that day either. The gym teacher, who was coming in from getting her coffee, saw the fall and ran over and with great concern grabbed me BY THE ARMS and pulled me up. Which, as anyone who has any first aid certification whatsoever knows, was a really bad idea.
I don’t remember the rest of that day, but I did give up on school somewhere around 2 pm and went home on the subway and the bus and walked in my front door. And my mum looked at me and freaked out ’cause apparently I was white with black eyes, and walked me over to the doctor’s office. And when the doctor (my current doctor actually) heard what had happened she left the room and called the ambulance, and they came and strapped me to the spinal board, and we rushed to emergency and got xrays that showed that I had…
… not broken my neck by what the doctor at the time described as a miraculous margin of error. What I had done was compressed my spine and broken my skull. I lost about an inch in height, and I also became dyslexic, which is a whole other story. (Not really good for an editor, but I can spell every word I learned before the fall… and very few of the words I encountered afterwards, without checking or mnemonics or serious work. Which actually makes me more careful. Sometimes. But now you know why I miss things in my personal blog space all. the. time.)
The next year involved a lot of pain as my spine gradually uncompressed: I had a lot of different back problems like sciatica, and I also had a lot of adjustment issues to things like picking up the pen with my left hand and not being able to figure out for 5 minutes why I couldn’t write properly. Or setting the table backwards. Or following directions backwards.
And the school closed its gymnastics programme in exchange for not being sued, and somehow I managed to get a B+. I suspect that was negotiated in the same meeting, but no one ever told me.
This long tale of woe, besides sort of being relevant because this was one of the other times I have been feeling poorly for so long, is one of the reasons that I get up early on Saturday to take Noah to gymnastics.
I certainly do not blame my parents for the trouble I had with a stupidly designed gym programme in high school, but there is no doubt that had I been introduced to skills programmes in more sports than just swimming earlier in my life, when I was more flexible and had a lower centre of gravity, that I would have had an easier time. And it wasn’t just that: it was learning to be comfortable in the classes. How to follow instruction. How to fall off things and get back up. Maybe even how to run better.
I think there’s a good and understandable backlash against the “overprogrammed” child. But I also think that sports programmes are really good things. I want to expose Noah to as much as possible without making our lives crazy. And then I want to listen to him and see what he falls in love with, what he tolerates, and what he really doesn’t like.
Today I watched him hanging off the lower bar, tiny boy, and then learn to curl up and touch his feet to the bar, and then hang down and drop off. It was very cool. This is one thing that I can do for him. Stickers for us both!
Health update: I am feeling a little better; it seems a good deal of the sudden downturn was related to a flu-like plague which decimated all members of my team who had attended a one-day brainstorming session together in close quarters. So Margret, not with child, but I had tested ’cause the thought did occur to me too.
But not all of it relates. My appointment was moved to the 27th so I must wait one more day to find out what the ENT thinks, but after that I am all for either moving swiftly to other specialists or decamping to my uncle’s home town for a complete family-based workup, which would be a capitulation of many sorts but I’m getting desperate here, man.
Still, this week things improved to the point where I could walk. Monday I couldn’t walk well enough to get to work so I worked from home, and Wednesday I went to work but got stuck coming home because I couldn’t get up a flight of stairs. (I managed eventually, but I missed a train in between. Tuesday I worked but I drove to work.) The last time that happened to me I think I had mono.
(I truly am thinking of taking this up as a cause; for those who do not deal with the TDSB the issue is that the custodial union at some point was given the concession that ONLY the union can do anything maintenance-wise at all; teachers, principals, parents, and other volunteers cannot do anything without violating the contract. Since they also make a pretty hefty wage this has meant that schools without a dynamic head of custodial staff go for years with locks with doors ripped off; gymnasia with peeling paint, and so on and so forth.)
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