Ecstasy and Agony

Sunday, Grace went to the Ice Box to skate. We arrived at the rink especially early because Grace wanted to work on her axel before her lesson with Jason. She looked at me before she went on the ice and said, "I know I can do it, Mom. Just watch." It's never wise to doubt Grace when she makes such claims, but I'll admit I wasn't so sure.

The Ice Box is a funny rink. It's located on the State Fairgrounds and in the summer during the fair serves as the horse ring. When the ice is laid down again in the fall, the rink is still full of flies in search of horses to annoy. As the building cools under the onslaught of the refrigeration system, the flies grow slow. They buzz gracelessly about the heads of skaters and their parents, who watch from the sidelines.

I took my seat close by the boards and watched Grace work. She warmed up, working her edges, stroking and doing crossovers. She tried out a few spins and then began working on the axel walk through. She jumped and fell, jumped and fell, jumped and fell. I walked to the rink lobby to stretch my legs, turned and walked back toward the ice just as Grace landed a jump on one foot. I gasped; Grace turned to me and grinned. She jumped again. And landed on one foot again. She stepped off the ice and gave me an enormous hug. "I'm going to show Jason," she said. "Wait," I cautioned. "He's still giving a lesson." Grace nodded. "I'll work on all my jumps."

Back on the ice, Grace meandered, unfocused now that her goal had been accomplished. Head down, she twirled a bit, got in the way of a few other skaters, then started to backstroke in preparation for a jump. Time seemed to slow down. Sometimes you can just tell when a skater is going to fall -- even if you know very little about the technique she ought to be employing. Grace tried for a lutz and her feet tangled. I watched her go down. She rose from the ice slowly, holding her hand, and skated toward me, her face a mask of shock and pain. As she came close, she held her hand out and it was covered with blood. Through the gore I could see her thumb, torn down the middle by a very deep gash: a to-the-bone slice.

I turned to the Club representative acting as Ice Monitor; she'd been sitting in the stands watching her daughter skate. "I need help," I said. She sat. "I NEED HELP RIGHT NOW." By then I was moving with Grace out into the lobby and the changing area. Grace sat quietly holding her hand as the blood drenched the sleeves of her skating dress. I turned and the Ice Monitor was moving in what seemed like slow motion toward me. "I need help," I said again. "I need a first-aid kit now." I ran to the ice and called to Jason. I ran past the ice monitor to the first aid kit in the skate room. A box of band aids and an old dusty eye-wash kit. I ran to the bathroom and got paper towels. I ran back to Grace. Jason told me to get wet towels. I ran back to the bathroom. Grace sat. Quietly. Holding her hand. Jason had taken her skates off for her. Someone said, "You have time. You don't have to race to the hospital." Someone else said, "Go to St. Elizabeth's. If you go to Bryant and there's a huge crisis, you'll have to wait forever."

Somehow, I got Grace's skates and guards into her Zuca bag and shepherded her out to the car. I'm sure we talked on the way to the Hospital, but I can't remember what we said. I called Mike to tell him where we were and what had happened. We agreed that he would stay to watch Dan's football game and cheer him on. There seemed little reason for both of us to sit in the Emergency Room. Lucy was at a birthday party and well taken care of for the moment.

At last, we were able to see a doctor. Grace's wound had exposed the joint cavity in her thumb and sliced into tendon. The doctor numbed her hand, carefully cleaned the cut, then sutured the edges closed. He had X-rays taken to make sure she hadn't broken her hand and those came back negative. "Well, Mom," he said finally. I always find it funny when doctors and teachers refer to me as Mom. "She's sliced into that tendon. We've got a new hand doctor in town. He's great. You'll need to get Grace in to see him tomorrow..." and on and on... "increased risk of infection..." "growth plate..." "could be quite serious..." "can't tell the extent of the damage..."

I took Grace to see Dr. Cullen the next morning. Dr. Cullen, I figure, is from Philadelphia. Maybe upstate New York. Definitely not the midwest. He wasted no time on niceties. "A serious injury. No way to tell how bad until surgery. Must do surgery quickly to prevent infection. How about tomorrow morning."

That night, Grace's friend and her Mom invited Grace and me over for dinner. They had gifts for Grace, to carry her through surgery: a toy monkey, a pair of pajamas, a snuggy blanket, and peace sign shirt from Justice for Girls, Grace's favorite store. They talked with Grace about the surgery, reassured her, and reassured me too. On the way home, Grace said, "it's a terrible tragedy when children die, isn't it?" "Yes," I said. "What will happen if I don't wake up, Mama?" Grace asked. "You'll wake up, Grace," I said. "I promise. And when you wake up, I will be right there with you." "I saw God the other day," Grace said (she's been listening to my Victor Wooten cd). "Really," she affirmed. "I saw God." In the darkness, I cried. I didn't have the words to comfort, to lift the fear away for her. But Grace had them somehow for herself.

The surgery is over now. Grace never lost her composure, never lost her faith. She woke up woozy and a bit dizzy, but quickly recovered. Dr. Cullen came out to speak with us. "Bad gash on that tendon. Surgery went fine though. Cast for three months. See you in two weeks." And he was off to the next case.

Six hours later Grace was dancing around the house, practicing her axel walk-through in our upstairs hallway. Mike and I looked at each other. "When do you think she should skate?" I asked. "FRIDAY," Mike said. "Sunday," I said.

I think we will follow Grace. She just seems to know somehow.

Zen and the Art of Grace

The weather has turned here in Nebraska; the sky today is a bright, light blue and the air is cool and clear. The leaves are turning just about their edges and those that have fallen early blow easily across streets, forming loose piles against curbs and fences.

Two weekends ago, Grace and I traveled to St. Joseph, Missouri for her first competition of the 2009 - 2010 season. We were both excited not only because of the competition, but also because we've finally made rink friends -- not casual acquaintances, but friends who feel like kindred spirits, as Anne of Green Gables would say. We all stayed in the same hotel, ate meals together, and played in-between events.

On the way to St. Joe's, Grace and I talked about her goals for the competition. I asked her to name three goals for the weekend. Grace's response was, "I want to take first place; that's my goal, my only goal." Sigh. I asked her if she thought she could control what place she takes in any competition. Finally, she admitted that maybe she couldn't control what other skaters do on the ice or how judges perceive her performance or those of other skaters. We talked about goals she could make for which she could control the outcome. Finally, Grace said she'd like to skate to the best of her ability, skate two clean programs, and skate with joy and to give joy to the audience. I thought those were pretty great goals and that the conversation was over.

There was a pause...and then Grace said, "Mom, I think I'm going to just get lost out there on the ice." "What do you mean?" I queried. I was worried. Was Grace so nervous, so stressed about skating that she feared forgetting her program? "Mom," she drawled, "getting lost is like when you go for it. But when you get lost you are going with so much joy and you have no idea what the future holds."

In Japan, there is this concept called wabi sabi. Maybe loosely translated the term signifies transience, imperfect beauty, an aesthetic that not only accounts for the unfinished, the temporary, the flawed, but celebrates these qualities in the everyday.

Life with Grace (with grace) might be wabi sabi; while she didn't skate perfectly clean programs, falling once in each, she did skate beautifully, with joy and courage. She took second in the long program. And she showed her coach and me a little glimpse what getting lost might look like when a child who is both tough and tender is nurtured, supported, and taken seriously as a skater.

More soon!

After a Long Silence

I haven't written about skating for ages. In part I've been silent because I've been so busy. But more than this, I've been silent because I didn't know what to say exactly. I'll give the update in brief and then begin to blog from where we are rather than dwelling in the past.

Grace had a disastrous winter and spring. At school, she struggled to find joy in learning in a classroom where enjoyment was read as a sign of disrespect and disobedience (for crying out loud! Maybe I need to write an entry just on this experience!). At the rink, she struggled to find the kind of everyday discipline that skating demands. After a very rough Winter Fest competition, Grace wrestled with herself on and off the ice. She worked and worked and worked, but seemed to gain little ground. She felt herself to be increasingly alienated from other children at her school and blamed skating, which, she felt, took her away from after-school play and made her different from a crew of popular girls with whom she hoped to be friends. We were driving to Omaha (fifty miles or so) four times a week and something had to shift: either Grace needed a breakthrough or she needed to quit.

After several months of soul-searching and agonizing, Mike and I made the decision to make a coaching change. We wanted a coach who would come to Lincoln during the winter when the Lincoln rink is open. And we wanted a coach who would take Grace's dreams of being a competitive skater seriously, who would push her to skate in her "zone of proximal development," at the outside edges of her ability, and who would give her the kind of coaching support she needs to stay at that outside edge. We made the change in late May and it was PAINFUL, but oddly not so much for Grace. I felt terrible (excited for Grace, but unbelievably guilty about what might be perceived as betraying the old coach); Grace seemed to feel exhilarated.

Grace has been working with Jason, then, for three months. She has a new compulsory program, and new freeskate program, and a new attitude. It's not all sunlight and roses. Grace is skating five times a week, still in Omaha because the Lincoln rink hasn't opened yet (it opens this weekend). She and I have been getting up at 5:00 AM or so to get to the rink for morning skates because ice time has been so limited even in Omaha. BUT...

The changes in Grace's skating are pretty incredible. In my next post, I'll describe them more and put up some before and after videos. She'll be competing this weekend in St. Joseph, MO for the first time as Jason's skater. We're not sure what to expect; it seems even more important than usual, given these dramatic changes, for Grace to really focus her competition goals around skating a clean program and having fun rather than winning or placing. And truthfully, whatever she does this weekend, she's a different and much, much stronger skater now.

More soon...

Preparing for Competition

Winterfest is coming up this week. Gracie is skating her first ever artistic program on Thursday afternoon and her short and long programs on Friday. She's skating at High Beginner level for the first time.

For weeks prior to yesterday she hadn't gotten through any of her programs without falling on nearly every jump and spin. She would run through a program, fall, work a section until it was perfect, run the program, fall...For weeks I've been thinking about whether or how to prep my strong-minded competitive girl for a disastrous competition. I'm still gnawing on that.

But, yesterday Grace practiced for an hour at the Ice Box with energy, focus, and drive. She did fall a couple of times, but she skated aggressively and with an artistry that had been absent for what seemed like months. She looked to be pulling it all together.

There's something about timing, I realize, in all of this. I don't understand the phenomenon very well, but I begin to see the importance of Grace not peaking too soon. When I am watching Grace work with Roxanne leading up to a competition I'm worrying all the time: will this program be choreographed in time? will Grace know the program and be secure in every element (or any element) in time? I worry that she'll be so disappointed if she falls or accounts her performance a failure. How will I help her through? How can I prepare her without undermining her confidence? And then somehow her elements, her speed, her artistry, and her attitude begin to come together and she's skating, as she did yesterday, programs that begin to sing.

I don't know how she'll do this week. But I do have a better sense of what she's capable of doing when preparedness and determination begin to coincide.

The Lull Between Learning and Mastery

Last year at this time, Grace was trying to learn to do a sit spin. She wanted to test in the worst way, but she couldn’t center her spin, balance over her spin, lift her foot high enough, pull her ankles in tight enough. During this time, Grace vacillated between determination and frustration. She worked that spin endlessly; always, I feared, toiling at the edge of giving up altogether and landing on “I can’t,” but never ultimately going there.

Last year at this time, Grace was skating on Thursday nights at Benson Arena, which might be the oldest rink in Omaha. One night before Junior Elite Club, Grace was practicing her scratch spins when suddenly she accomplished a beautiful one. Her face lit up and she looked across the ice toward me to see if I had been witness to her triumph. She did it again. And again. Those scratch spins weren’t all perfect; but there was this singular moment when, as if after considering long and hard the how’s and why’s, her body and mind decided to work with conception and form, memory and physics to accomplish the thing.

Tonight, Grace is skating at Benson again. I love this rink with its ancient concrete boards, the unusable fireplace in the lobby, and the stale smell of anti-freeze from the decrepit zamboni permeating the whole. And this year finds Grace in the midst of another lull. This year, she is wrestling with landing her flip and double loop jumps consistently. When she lands one, it’s huge and glorious and breathtaking…and rare. She lands a jump; falls four times; strokes or spins for a while; lands a jump; falls three times…and teeters once more at the verge. She must choose to go on and she must make that choice on faith, really. She’ll have to choose (she is, in fact, choosing) the work that mastery demands. But she’ll also have to choose to believe that her speed, torque, lift, and grace can carry her through these jumps and sustain her through their landings.

And there’s something I’m thinking I need to learn too. I need to learn to trust, lean in even, to the lulls: Grace’s and mine and my students’ as well. I need to learn to see them not as signs of failure, but as integral to learning processes. I need to learn patience if ever I am to teach it to Grace and to my students. Patience is not my strong suit, but perhaps I am just in a very (very, very) extended lull in my learning of it.

Hockey Fights and Family Values

Well, it's happened. My sweet baby boy (okay, so he's a husky almost-thirteen year old) has had his first hockey fight. I've dreaded this day, known it was coming, and hoped it would never come.

In the final game of a tournament to determine the Midwest Regional Championship PeeWee team, Dan earned a game misconduct for fighting. Apparently, the Omaha players were taunting him by calling him "Condom" among other equally nasty names and Dan lost his temper.

One thing I haven't written about in this blog is the role that faith plays in our lives. We are Quakers. Most people don't know very much about Quakers and tend, when hearing the name, to think of the guy on the oatmeal box or to think of people long ago who didn't wear buttons or dance. Quakers do have a long faith tradition dating back to the seventeenth century. Quakerism is a Christian faith, but differs significantly from other protestant denominations, perhaps most evidently in our belief that every person is a minister; hence, at least in conservative Meetings, we don't have ordained ministers, but sit in silence waiting on the Word of God. Any person who feels moved to speak may do so.

Much has changed in Quaker faith and practice, but four central tenets of our faith remain. These are Simplicity, Truth, Equality, and Peace (I teach my children to remember these by the acronym, "STEP." Mike and I remember them by the acronym, "PEST" as Quakers can be pests when we feel convinced that we must stand firm in our faith.

For our family, Simplicity means being conscious of the mark we leave upon the earth, stewarding our planet as responsibly as we are able and it means holding most dear our shared faith, our love for one another, and God's creatures rather than prizing material gain.

Truth means that we try in every circumstance to speak the Truth as best we can discern it by attending deeply, reflectively, and deliberately to the will of God as it is revealed to us. We talk of listening to the Still Small Voice Within and attending to that voice at every moment in our lives. For this reason, we don't swear oaths but commit ourselves to speaking the Truth in every circumstance.

Equality means that God recognizes no hierarchies among the peoples of the earth. Each of us, regardless of age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, culture, nationality, or faith, is beloved of God and equal in Her eyes. And God may give any one of us some piece of the Truth and ask of us that we minister that Truth.

Peace means that there is that of God in every person and in every one of God's creatures. Therefore, to do harm to another is to do harm to God, Herself. Most Quakers are pacifists.

When Dan first started playing hockey, we were living in Kinderhook, NY and were members of Old Chatham Monthly Meeting. Some of our Friends were, well...not shocked exactly, but curious about our choice to encourage Dan in the sport because of its reputation as a game that values, even encourages violence. I won't speak for Mike, but I felt (and still feel, I guess) that the pleasure that hockey gave to Dan and the athleticism it required of him trumped the predilection of some fans toward a kind of gladitorial culture. I felt that we could teach Dan to play the game well and bring our faith to his playing of the game. I felt, and really do still feel, that faith means little if it is never tested and that the right choice would be to talk with Dan about the violence of the sport rather than seeking to protect him from thinking through how our faith might inform all kinds of choices he might make even and especially under the most challenging of conditions.

While there are certainly fights in professional hockey, the culture of violence in hockey, I think, is most prevalent at the junior level, particularly in leagues like the USHL in which the players are high school aged boys with promising talent. Here, games are preceded by light shows, smoke, and loud music in a style quite akin, I imagine, to the opening of professional wrestling matches. There is, in these games, an endorsement and promotion of a masculinity defined by aggressive physical prowess even, in many cases, at the expense of skills in skating, stick-handling,and strategy. And this culture, I think, is not unique to hockey played at this level, but is, rather, an exaggeration or a kind of excessive performance of masculinities in which boys are steeped in all cultural contexts (including school).

To live his faith off and on the ice is a lot to ask of young Dan. And yet, I think, it is in the imperfections of our faith as lived experience, as choice, that we learn how better to be faithful in our lives. The objective of faith, I think, is to honor God by trying hard and with humility, not to achieve the fact of or some conviction that we are, in fact, perfect in faith.

When we were living in Minnesota, we really stopped going to Meeting. There was no Quaker Meeting in St. Cloud and the nearest gatherings were in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Brainerd (an hour's drive each way). Two weeks ago, though, and largely because Grace has been asking so much about Quakerism, I started attending the Quaker Meeting here in Lincoln. Next weekend, Dan, Lucy, and Mike will, I hope, go with Grace and me. I realize I've taken to much for granted with regard to our faith. We need to be more intentional in our sharing of our faith with our children if Dan, Lucy, and Grace are to be equipped to choose lives of faith even in the face of a culture that espouses and valorizes violence over love, respect, reflectiveness, and compassion.

Girls U-12 in Northfield

I spent the weekend in Northfield MN with Lucy and Grace. The Omaha Lady Jr. Maverick's played a tournament there and took home the third place trophy. Their first game took place at 8AM on Saturday morning and all the girls looked tired and slow. But their second and third games...well...those were a different story...

In the way that I do, I've worried about Lucy. She and Grace are dramatically different characters in all kinds of ways, but they do share one trait in common. They are superbly talented athletes who are not always inclined to push themselves to work at the outside edges of their ability. With some regularity, both girls seem content to skate well within their comfort zones and this, I think, slows their development. Having said that, Lucy played so well in the second (and third games) this weekend. She was stunning.

Lucy plays hockey like a shark when she's of a mind to do it. She circles, watching for opportunities, and then strikes with exceptional speed. Lu scored the first goal of the second game with a sweet shot through a scramble at the net. She played great offensive hockey and was absolutely fearless about working for the puck at the boards. She was fast, confident, and aggressive in the best sense. She scored a second goal later in the game and the team went on to take the game 5 - 1. The third game pitted Omaha against Waconia in a very even match. Again, Lucy played confident, aggressive hockey, scrambling fearlessly against Waconia's #14 (a girl who was probably a foot taller than Lucy). Lucy took a couple of hard hits that probably should have been called (one as checking and one as interference), but she jumped right back up and got right back into the game. One of Lucy's great strengths as a player is the degree to which she keeps her head up and looks for passing opportunities. She has really good puck control and when other players are also playing heads-up hockey, Lucy can keep a passing game going strong. Bella, Connor, Miley, and Taylor also played exceptionally well in the second and third games and the goal-tending for both games was fantastic!

On Saturday night, most of the parents and kids went to a bowling alley near our hotel. I had so much fun watching Lucy with her friends. Off the ice, she is so funny and kind. I think I fell in love all over again with little Lucy Condon this weekend. What a gal! What a weekend!

Other news in Brief: Last Wednesday I passed level four having finally mastered (sort of) my three-turns. On to backward crossovers. Yipe! Grace has a bee in her bonnet about testing. She worked with Mike on Friday morning at the Ice Box on her camel spin. She's working to get her flying leg higher. She also has to land her flip consistently before Roxanne will test her. So, we're in for another intense week of skating as Grace prepares for the Winterfest competition and works toward testing...