Tag Archives: Childhood

Take This Pink Ribbon Off My Eyes

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When I was about 5 years old I awoke one Christmas morning to find many a gift under the Christmas tree for my brothers and me. I wish I could wax nostalgic about all of those gifts and what we each received that year, and how much they meant to me, but to be perfectly honest I only remember one gift that year. And what a glorious gift it was. My uncle had gotten me a Nerf Master Blaster. Purple-double-barreled-Nerf-ball-shooting-goodness, and it was all mine. My older brother Mark already had the Nerf Blast-A-Matic, but it was a single-barreled-wussy-weapon-that-could-only-hold-up-to-four-Nerf-balls-at-a-time…mine could hold six. I couldn’t wait to unleash my Nerf wrath on my brothers, and become the champion of Nerf in the Ruby household, just like I knew I should be. There was however a slight problem, I was tiny, and this Nerf Master Blaster was a bit cumbersome for my 3’5” frame. (Seriously I was tiny tiny, and I still think I’m giving myself the benefit of height here) I could still lift the gun and pump the handle, but the problem was that to get the double barrel action to work properly, I had to be able to pull back on the handle with enough force to get the air pressure to pop the ball out of the  other barrel. This was something I just couldn’t do…I didn’t have the leverage. So I tried to win the Nerf war with just one barrel, and found myself woefully wanting, dreams of my victory quickly dissipated and I was heartbroken, my head hung in shame and defeat.

     Eventually my parents made a compromise, Mark could use my Master Blaster and I would use the Blast-A-Matic, the caveat was that Mark could only ever use four balls and no more. It was a compromise I could live with, and I just bided my time, until I was big enough and strong enough to be able to use my weapon. I practiced. A lot. (I am not kidding). I would sit in the basement and just pump and pull the handle until one day I was just strong enough to make it work. Just like Christmas morning, I remember the day I was able to put to full use my Nerf Master Blaster. It was awesome. I was a champion.

Pictorial evidence of what the Master Blaster and Blast-A-Matic looked like.

MB1_zpsddbb2294nerf_blast_a_matic

A little under a year ago, while going to a movie with a friend, I saw an ad before the movie (don’t even get me started on advertisements at theaters) for a new line of Nerf guns, targeted specifically for girls. Nerf Rebelle. I remember watching the ad; filled with young girls finding their own purple and pink Nerf weapons and employing them in a way only advertisements for girls can; too girly and not realistic.  By the end of the commercial my hands were in fists and I was truly disgusted. Really? Someone in the Nerf marketing department decided that they needed to create an entirely separate line of Nerf weapons for girls? And this was they way they went about it?

Here’s the deal, I am a girl, granted I am not the most girly of girls…in fact far from it, but come on, since when do girls own the colors pink and purple and any shades therein? Since when do we need our own special line of Nerf guns? Yes they may be smaller and easier to handle…hey that makes sense, five year old me would have appreciated that, heck five year old Chris (my younger brother) would have appreciated that. But since when do girls have to be defined by a color scheme and cutesy names. Seriously don’t even get me started on the name REBELLE. The names of the weapons are obnoxious too, the Heartbreaker Bow…I wish I was making this up. Honestly I don’t care about the colors, if they want to make pink, purple, and teal Nerf weapons go ahead, but don’t label them as girls toys. Put them in the Nerf section of the toy aisle, make them available to everyone with no stereotypes attached. Also how about just making Nerf commercials with both boys and girls using Nerf guns together!

I understand that there are differences between boys and girls and I think that’s great and wonderful and incredibly special, we’re complex and intricate creatures. However, there are just some things that don’t warrant special toys and labels and marketing strategies. Nerf guns are fun for all ages, for all people. Unless someone doesn’t like them, and that is their prerogative, and I respect that. Stop putting people into boxes marked male and female, liberal or conservative, believer or non-believer. We are all individuals with gifts, talents, and personalities of our own, and I know personally I’d love to just be seen as me.

I was ten by the time I could master my Nerf Master Blaster, it took me five years of being able to make that Nerf gun fully functional, but in that time I still played dress-up, and make believe, still engaged in endless Nerf, water-balloon, and water gun fights, climbed trees, rode a bike, and skinned my knees. The best part about all of that was, the Nerf guns, trees, dresses, water balloons, bikes, didn’t care if they were being used by a girl or a boy, but just that they were being used at all.

Dear Hasbro, maybe you can remember that when you’re planning for your next line of Nerf Weapons or board games, perhaps just make them enjoyable and usable for years to come.

My mom still has all of our Nerf guns, and for the most part they are all still usable, and I can’t wait to get to pull them out again in the future and wage all out war with them. That Master Blaster still has my name on it.

These pictures are just to give you an idea of what my childhood consisted of when it came to Nerf Wars.

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The Worst Question

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“What’s your favorite movie?”

That’s it. Right there, those four words (five if we didn’t have the contraction). Yup. That is the WORST question you could ask me.

When I a senior in high school I thought nothing could be worse, than someone asking me, “What I was going to do with my life?” But that quickly went away, and what was left in it’s place, was the inevitable unanswerable question. “What’s your favorite movie?”

Now when I was a kid, this answer was always easy to answer. Between the ages of 3-8 it was probably a tie between The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and whatever Disney movie was recently released. From about 9-10 it was whatever Ninja movie my mother would rent for my brothers and I, so any of the 3 Ninja movies and Surf Ninjas.

These are all classics, but if you’ve never seen them and they are not a part of your nostalgic repertoire, don’t watch them, because you’ll think I am crazy

The summer of my fifth grade year on, if asked this most probative and obnoxious question, my answer was always the same, Newsies. That summer my mom had received a free movie of her choice from our favorite video store (Rest in Peace Video Excitement) and even though my younger brother denies it, we both chose Newsies. We then proceeded, he and I, to watch that movie everyday for the rest of the summer. It may have been a flop at the box office, it may be the movie Christian Bale (yes that Christian Bale), regretted making the most. But it had some seriously catchy tunes and could make me smile every day.

Eventually as time wore on, saying that Newsies was my favorite movie, became more of a knee jerk reaction. It had long become a fond memory and watched seldomly, but it was an answer, and one I could easily defend when necessary, or was so baffling that it shut the person up rather quickly.

In college I quickly came to realize that answering this question was like navigating a mine field. Depending on who was asking the question, you had to an answer that was either just pretentious enough to satisfy the cine-files, just jock-y enough to satisfy the athletes/frat brothers, just rom-com-y enough to satisfy the gal pals, or just independent/musical enough to satisfy the theatre peeps.  Though in all honesty the theatre people were always a mixed bag, you just have to play it one on one with them and when in a group setting best to just ignore the question or defer to someone else’s answer.

So I developed a hard a fast way to answer this question. I never classify my answer as my favorite movie.  For example:

Them: “Kelly, what’s your favorite movie?”

Me: “Huh, well currently I’ve been on a Marvel kick and I’ve really enjoyed Iron Man.”

Them: “Oh yeah, I really liked that movie, but I think I prefer RDJ in Sherlock Holmes.”

Me: “He’s also really good in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang and I can’t wait to see Chef. I mean it’s really just a small part, but between him and Jon Favreau there’s really nothing that can go wrong…”

See how that works? I just deflect, then overwhelm with information until we’ve steered the conversation into a safe zone, or I’ve bored them to death.

However, you have to be ready to defend your answer, because sometimes people won’t like your answer and they’ll be sure to let you know. Last summer, over dinner with friends I was asked to name my favorite movie.  I made mention of the fact that though it wasn’t my favorite movie, it was the movie that was most representative of how I felt about that time of the year. The movie I picked was  A River Runs Through It.  Apparently that was not the correct answer because it sparked a debate among the table as a whole. I defend my answer and I moved on.  At the end of the conversation, I had answered the question to my liking, albeit I had tweaked it a little bit, but I was comfortable with it, regardless of how my friend felt.

So here’s the deal, if you’re going to ask me that question, please be okay with the fact that I may just ignore you. Also I may answer without answering you and talk you in circles. But please know that if you ask the question with the intent of belittling the answer that I give you. Just save your breath, after all you’ll spare me the teeth grinding frustration of having to answer, in my opinion,  an unanswerable question.

So what’s your favorite movie?

Kidding! 

P.S. Props to my mom for always saying that Newsies would be way better as Broadway musical than a movie. You win again mom.

 

Sorry Not Sorry

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First, let me just start off apologizing for this title. I truly hate this phrase, it started out as just a working title, and then I legitimately couldn’t think of anything better. The only redeeming quality there is to this is that I didn’t hashtag it. Though just using the word hashtag, feels like I just cheapened the moment. My deepest apologies for being so modernly cliche.

I joined Twitter back in the dark ages of 2008…which by the way is a fairly big accomplishment considering Twitter was really just starting to take off at that time in larger metropolitan areas like NYC. Upon signing up I had to pick my Twitter name, a profile picture, and write something in the “about me” section. All of that was relatively easy, my picture is one of my all time favorites…me riding the wooden escalator in the NYC Macy’s in homage to Elf, my username, is basically a nickname from high school with my favorite number attached, and my bio was short to the point, and I thought represented my existential self perfectly. 

“Live, Laugh, Love.”

In other words, my bio, was stupid, cutesy, cliche, and safe.

When I was a kid in elementary school I had no problem liking what I liked and telling everyone in the whole world about it. Heck, I got “married” while on a family camping trip when I was four, and my groom and I skipped around holding hands telling the whole wide world that we were getting married.

Don’t worry, pretty sure it wasn’t legal, unless there is some weird loophole in Montana State Law that says marriages between 4 year old are only made legal if the wedding was witnessed by both families, was presided over by an elder sibling, and a Berenstein Bears book was used in place of a Bible…stranger things have happened.

I was labeled the “weird” girl in 4th grade (Weird by the way was the outcast label of the time…so much has changed) and I was proud of it! I liked listening to the Beatles, and watching old black and white movies with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, I loved watching Star Trek Next Gen, and I lived for the Batman animated cartoon everyday after school and X-Men the animated series every Saturday morning. I also liked watching the Power Rangers…but that wasn’t cool so I blamed my watching it on my younger brother. 

It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized the proper terminology for what I was. NERD. I was and am a huge nerd. However, for some reason, one that I am still trying to figure out, I buried the nerd flag. I was still nerdy about a lot of things, but I wasn’t being truthful about myself and who I was. 

I now strive to be myself all the time, I love the things that I love, and I shouldn’t be ashamed of those things. I know some people will laugh when they find out that I am a proud Kickstarted backer of the Veronica Mars Movie,and others will just pretend they didn’t read that I have recently become addicted to the MTV show Teen Wolf because it’s freaky and amazing and certain character arcs are all the reason you need to watch a teen soap about supernatural beings living in a fictions town in California.

Are you beginning to get my point?

At the end of it all I don’t want to have any regrets, I don’t want to be ashamed of who I was created to be. Which as my new Twitter bio states:

“Pop Culture Nerd, Comic Book Lover, Baseball Fanatic, Middle Child, Youth Minister. ”

In my last post I talked about not being afraid, and this follows right in that same vein. At the end of the day I am not afraid to be me. 

I am unapologetically, 100%, authentically, genuinely, me. And I am not sorry for that. (I also think that somewhere in the space time vortex 10 year old Kelly is cheering and punching the air for me now)

Speaking of Nerdiness…

This is a thing if you like nerds, comics, movies, celebrities, pop culture, ect. that you should check out.

www.iwantmynerdhq.com

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Landshark

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Growing up I had an overwhelmingly vivid and overactive imagination, the only time that this became a problem was when I was going to bed…or to a lake…or to the ocean. 

We’ll get to the lakes and ocean later, but when it came to bed time, there were a few bedtime rituals that had to be adhered to. 

1.) Closet doors completely shut…no cracks allowed.

2.) Everything cleared out from under my bed and a 5 foot radius around my bed.

3.) Night prayers…I couldn’t go to sleep until my mom or dad had come in to hear my night prayers. 

The reason for all of these rules, was fairly simple. Monsters. I don’t really know what they were supposed to look like, but I knew that they were up to no good, and they all but relished the thought of my paralyzing fear. I’m not entirely sure where they were coming from, but I also knew that they could get in through the closet, but they couldn’t enter the sanctity of my room if the doors were shut, they just had to stay in the closet all night. (Which now that I think about it, isn’t such a bad deal…I had all sorts of awesome in my closet, those monsters probably had a blast spending every night playing with my Disney Farm, and be-headed Barbies).  

The bed thing was different…I just didn’t like the idea of having anything around my bed, that I could step on in the middle of the night…and when I did wake up in the middle of the night I would stand on the end of my bed and then jump as far away from the bed as possible, you know just in case one of those closet monsters was sneakier than I knew. Finally the prayers were just a comfort to know that my parents were there for me, and would be all night, and so would Jesus. 

Now when it comes to bodies of water I was afraid of all sorts of things, but especially sharks. I mean seriously have you seen some of the marine life that exists? Terrifying. It didn’t help that my brothers thought it was funny to pull me under the water when we were swimming, or to yell “Shark!” just as I was jumping in. Fear of sharks is fairly rational, they’re scary. What’s irrational about this was I was afraid of sharks in all bodies of water…yes even swimming pools. 

My brother use to tell me that when he would yell, “shark!” I would immediately try to get out of the water, and I hadn’t even touched it yet, apparently it was the most cartoonish I’ve ever looked. 

Thankfully I’ve outgrown the closet thing, and the bed thing (under the bed is important storage space, especially in a college dorm room). I still have a fear of large bodies of water, I still freak out when someone swims up underneath me and pulls me under, which some of my former summer camp co-workers can attest to first hand. (I am not sorry for the bruised faces and bloody noses).

Talking with my roommate about these childhood fears, I had a realization, how did I ever become afraid of monsters in the closet? It’s not like my parents put me to bed as a child and told me to not open the closet or the monsters would suck me back into their circle of hell. So how is it that seemingly all children have some innate fear of the dark, and the monsters that lurk in the shadows?  Is it human nature to fear darkness and the things that can hide there? Is this fear something that is ingrained into our DNA? Can we escape it?

We seem to spend a lot of time fearing things that are inevitable, such as change, we cannot stop change from happening. Sorry team. It’s not possible. But the things we fear as children, like monsters and the dark, we tend to outgrow. Or maybe a better way to say it, is that our fears evolve to suit our maturity. 

Fear is a natural part of life. We should have a healthy fear of certain things. One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is Fear of the Lord, but not so much in a way that we may fear a spider, or for drastic measure, a serial killer, but more so to be in awe of God’s power. Because the things He can do, should illicit a reaction that is nothing short of jaw-dropping-loss-of-speech awe, and naturally that should also scare us a bit, simply because we cannot begin to wrap our heads around all of His power and mystery. And that is a beautiful thing.

Scripture is filled with different verses about darkness, and Christ being the light of the world (for example check our John 9:5), and most prominently the words “Do not be afraid” appear 365 times in the Bible (that’s basically one for every day of the year-I say basically because we all know that a year is technically 365.25 days) We’re not supposed to fear the monsters that lurk in our closets or in the shadows, because we know that Christ conquers all, but just because we’re not supposed to be afraid, doesn’t mean we aren’t and shouldn’t be wary of what is out there. We know the devil exists, we know he plays on our fears, we know that there is some force of evil in this world that seeks our destruction. AND we as Christians know that evil is fighting a battle that has already been lost. (Hello crucifixion and resurrection)

You might be reading this and thinking, we don’t KNOW any of those things you just stated about evil, but I would ask you to go to the nearest website that shows movie trailers and take a look at the most recent and popular trailers. I bet you see at least 5 trailers for horror movies that deal with the supernatural, and there are at least two of those that talk about some sort of demonic possession. We as a culture are fixated on evil, but that is a conversation for another time. But I do believe society as a whole embraces the idea of evil being present in our world in some way or other. 

As long as we face our fears, and do not let them control us, and we always remember the words of Christ. Our fears cannot conquer us, we will conquer them. 365 days a year, wake up and say it in the mirror and mean it, “Do not be afraid.”

But seriously this is a real thing…Who wouldn’t be afraid of this?

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This is not an April Fools joke…read about it here 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070124-sharks-photo.html

Scar Tissue

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*Warning* This story may not be for the squeamish 

When I was about 4 years old, I had this toy, I refer to it as the rolling lion toy. Basically it was one of those toys that is supposed to help infants scoot around and then when they’re toddlers they can push it because it has a handle on the back. As a four year old I mainly used it like a shopping cart, but on one particular evening I was running around our house pushing the lion like it was a race car. Our house at the time was really a giant square with hardwood floors, so it was perfect for running laps at maximum speed. At some point my four year brain decided we had had enough of running in circles and would change it up, so as we rounded the corner from the kitchen to the living room I decided that instead of taking the next turn, I would instead go straight through the doorway into my bedroom. As I sped through the doorway, and onto a new race surface (carpet) I stayed the course and careened into the far wall. Upon impact I flipped over the handle bar landing seated on the lion and snapped my head forward, biting my tongue.

I don’t know if this was the same for everyone, but when I was little, the worst pain I could experience was biting my tongue. It was an awful sharp pain, and it was really only happening because I was eating or talking too fast and my tongue just got in the way of my teeth.

I remember immediately bursting into tears and running from the room to find what comfort I could from my mother. As I rushed into the kitchen, I got my mother’s attention by tugging on her shirt and my stifled closed mouth whimpers. I clearly remember my mother looking at me while I pointed frantically at my mouth, she cracked a smile and in a kind, yet mocking tone said to me, “Oh did little Kelly bite her tongue?” I nodded vigorously and then stuck my tongue out going “aaahhhh.” In an instant my mom’s face went from a smiling joke to abject horror! She quickly rushed me to the bathroom and told me to lean over the sink, keep my mouth shut, and not swallow. As I waited for her to return, curiosity got the best of me and opened my mouth while looking in the mirror. Immediately blood poured into the sink, I couldn’t really see much, but pain was telling me that the blood was coming from my tongue. As I was continuing to examine my mouth in the mirror my mom came back in with a glass of warm saltwater and told me to sit on the toilet and put my tongue in the cup. I did as I was told  and was then immediately rushed to the car, while my mother yelled at my brother Mark to be good and help dad finish dinner.

Upon arrival at the E.R. we hurried inside, being careful not to spill my now bloody glass of salt water – which, can I just say, tasted awful – The nurse at the front desk  immediately ushered us into a room and a doctor was not far behind. –Please note this was the fastest service I have received at the the ER to date – After a lot of cotton balls and gauze the doctor finally stemmed the bleeding enough to take a look and see what the damage was. The good news, my tongue was still intact and connected, the bad news I had bit all the way through. In reality there wasn’t any bad news, in fact I didn’t even need stitches, the doctor decided that he would bind my tongue and if, in a couple of days it wasn’t healing, then he would stitch it up. –I am eternally grateful not to have had stitches and that the tongue is the fastest healing organ in the body-  I was charged with no talking, and only eating of soft foods, which in my mind translated to pancakes! This was the best news I’d heard all day…I love pancakes.

My tongue eventually healed and yielded a fairly significant scar that covered most of my tongue when I was younger, over time the scar has gotten much smaller, which makes sense considering how your tongue grows from the time one is four years old to adulthood. Though smaller, the scar remains as a reminder of one of my many childhood ER visits and for all intents and purposes an entertaining story.

When I was a summer camp counselor, we used to use scar stories as a small group discussion ice breaker, and they yielded some of the most interesting stories, not to mention the kids became comfortable with the idea of small group sharing. We just asked the kids to tell the group an interesting story about something that happened to them that gave them a scar or even a broken bone (it is a scar in a way). It may seem bizarre that we were asking kids to tell us about a time when they hurt themselves, but there’s a reason we started things off that way. We all have scars, physical and emotional, it takes time, courage and strength to accept the scar and move past it. Scars can remind us of a time when we were vulnerable, and got hurt. And yet moving past those pains and scars are what make us stronger individuals. We were made to heal, a scar is just a reminder that we did heal. The kids loved telling their harrowing stories to a captive audience who “oohed” and “aahhhed” in all the right places, what they may not have realized at the time was that these kids were taking ownership in their life experiences, their pain, and most importantly, that they came back stronger.

I think scars can be a beautiful thing and I wouldn’t trade mine for the world. I hope you all can see the beauty and strength in your own scars.

Happy Wednesday!

Don’t Put Off Until Tomorrow…

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“…what you could do today.” 

Have you ever heard this quote? I know I have, and yet to be perfectly honest when I originally sat down to type out this age old adage I legitimately couldn’t think of the actual quote…so I Googled it.

In fact that right there is very telling about how I choose to work. I Procrastinate. A lot.

Now comes a story that may seem as if it has no place in this entry and yet I will bring it all back around, and hopefully before you become wise to my plot twist.

I always wanted to become an escape artist. Seriously I was in awe of Houdini and all those illusionists who could seemingly never be tied down. When I was younger I went through a phase where every chance I got I would beg my older brother Mark to tie me up and then time me to see how long it would take for me to escape. He gladly obliged if only to keep me out of his hair for a little while longer. I would do this over and over until either my brother locked me out of his room, or I decided I wanted to do something else. But over time, I got really good. So good that I cocky. I started bragging to my brother’s friends that I could escape any knot in under 5 minutes (hey, that was a long time to 7 year old).

One summer’s evening my brother and his friend Travis decided to put me to the test. So they tied me up to a chair in our basement and walked away. Piece of cake. I was out and bothering them within minutes. So they upped the ante, two different ropes. Again I escaped within minutes. Then came the final test: three different ropes duct taped to the chair. This was outrageous! How was I supposed to slip my wrists free of their bonds when all the rope around them was duct taped? So I did what any 7 year old would do in this predicament. I started to complain, loudly. Calling my captors back to taunt me, however they quickly grew weary of my whining and so instead of releasing me from my bonds, they added insult to injury. My brother upon scouring the basement for rope, had come across a used diaper from my Baby Alive doll. To silence my annoying complaints they promptly taped the diaper across my mouth.

I swear this was a real toy, and I am pretty sure they still make them. Google it.

This effectively shut me up, I wasn’t about to get fake baby poop in my mouth! Travis and Mark exited upstairs where they continued to enjoy their summer evening. About ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and my brother greeted my friend Sydni and told her I was downstairs. To my embarrassment Sydni walked into the room and all she saw was me tied to a chair, with a diaper over my mouth. She gaped at me then said, “I guess you’re busy, talk to you tomorrow.” And then she walked away leaving me gagged and humiliated. What felt like hours later but perhaps was only about 5 minutes. My brother and Travis, after realizing that Sydni had abandoned me, came down stairs and let me go. I never asked to be tied up again.

Over the years I’ve come to learn something about myself. I enjoy a good rush of adrenaline. It doesn’t need to be overwhelming, I don’t put myself in dangerous situations just to feel the blood pumping in my veins, but one thing that will always give me a jolt, without fail, is the pressure of working under a clock. I like to put things off, because I have convinced myself over the years, and trial and error, that I work better under the pressure of having to get something done in a short amount of time.  Which means that most of the time I tend to put things off. However, I have grown and learned that there are some things that you just can’t put off because they take time. So I try to live a balance of longterm planning and work, and the short term. My seven year old self wanted to be an escape artist because for me that was the height of an adrenaline rush that I could get on fairly regular basis and in a somewhat safe manner. I put myself on a clock and the pressure was to make my escape in a timely fashion.

I know that there are times that I would be happier and less stressed if I didn’t put something off, and yet its a habit I cannot seem to break completely. Sometimes being ahead of schedule feels good, and other times I just find it incredibly boring. There is no moral to this story (with the exception that a diaper is the worst possible way to be gagged ever), no lesson learned, mainly because I haven’t learned it yet, and I fear that I may learn it the hard way. Yet that fear of failure gives me just enough pressure to make sure that I continue to push myself to succeed.

It’s a vicious cycle.

Now I know you may be wondering where my parents were that they were seemingly okay with me being tied, ducted taped and gagged. This particular evening they happened to be out and our babysitter (Travis’ older brother). Was in my dad’s office 15 feet away from me, with the door shut working homework he was doing for a summer course at the community college.

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See it does exist and they are still being made and there are more of them…just check out hasbro.com.

I Wanted To Do It All…An Unrealistic Expectation

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So it’s been awhile. I mean a long while, since I’ve posted anything to this blog…I had such good intentions of posting weekly, and I have all these great ideas of things to write about, but like all well meaning New Year’s Resolutions, I failed…I posted regularly for about a month, and now here I am 3 months later, asking you all to tune back in. Sorry. I could give you all the excuses, I was busy, work was crazy, and just life. But really that’s all they are, excuses and the only person that they are really working on is me. Because let’s be honest, I just stopped dedicating time to sitting down and hashing something out. 

Eventually I’ll finish all those half written blogs I’ve started since October. Alright who am I kidding, no I won’t. 

When I was a kid, I wanted to do everything. No seriously, if you asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I was going to be an actress, a singer, an astronaut, cure the common cold, and become the first female president. On top of that I wanted to do everything my friends did. I wanted to be in dance, take piano lessons, ski school, and girl scouts, and do all the things my brothers did, play soccer, basketball, baseball, and hunt. Then there were the things that I wanted to do simply because I thought they would be great like gymnastics and figure skating. Overall I wanted to not have a life, because activities would be my life. 

Thankfully my parents were very good at managing my expectations and grand ambitions. Most of the time I would bring something up and my parents would respond, “Mmmhmm, yeah, we’ll see.” After that I would hold out hope for these activities but would quickly lose interest and my parents were never bothered again. However, on the rare occasion that I remained persistent, they would either make me a deal, or say no. 

For example, piano lessons, I think my parents would have gladly signed me up the first time I pushed the issue if we’d actually owned a piano. However, we didn’t, and therefore how would I practice? But I was oh so persistent, because all my friends were taking piano, and so my parents struck a bargain, they signed me up for a six-week course on the keyboard. A family friend, lent us her keyboard and I began my training to become the next piano virtuoso. That dream lasted about a week and half. I was expected to practice, what is this madness?! On top of homework after school I was supposed to spend 45 minutes a day practicing on the keyboard and then twice a week I gave up 90 minutes of my evening to go to class. It was eating into my Batman and Star Trek watching and it was awful. Looking back, I’m not sure how that keyboarding course was really going to help me with piano, because on a piano you don’t have different programable sounds that you use to achieve the desired tone for the melody you’re playing. I mean come on, have you ever heard of a piano piece called the Galaxian March? (Seriously, I’m not making that up, that was one of the songs we played, I can recall it from memory. Do, So, Fa, Mi, Re, Mi, Do, Do, Mi, So, Do, So, Fa, Mi, Re, Mi, Do, Do, Do, Do). Needless to say, I wanted to quit, and my parents told me if I wanted to quit before the end of the course I would have to pay for it. So I stuck it out grudgingly and never wanted to play piano again.

 Then there was soccer, I had wanted to play soccer from the time I could walk, and this is one of those activities that I wanted to play, mainly because I was a daddy’s girl and this was his sport of choice. This activity also had the added benefit of social interaction with my friends, my parents were happy I was doing it, my brother played, and it was something I wanted to do so it hit all of my criteria. Every fall from the time I was 4, I was playing Fall Recreational Soccer. Honestly I wasn’t that good as a kid, in fact early in my career I use to sit in the back field and pick dandelions while the kids all played horde ball. You know when they all just run around the field in a pack following the ball. Then my dad bribed me to play, by telling me that he would give me a quarter for every time I kicked the ball. Let’s just say after that game it went from a quarter to a nickel to nothing, very quickly. Once we all got older and started playing more cohesive soccer I really did love it. And couldn’t wait for 5th grade when I could officially try-out to be on the spring traveling soccer team. Fifth grade and try-outs finally came, I was on the team and it was going to be wonderful, but let’s not kid ourselves, it was really hard. We started practicing indoors in February three days a week. Then outdoor practices four days a week in March with games starting at the end of the month. Practice wasn’t the worst thing, honestly it was the games. Every weekend we were on the road, we’d drive 300+ miles to play two games, and then do it all over again the next week for about three months straight. The hardest part wasn’t even the traveling and playing. I knew what I was committing to, because my older brother had been doing it for years and I traveled with his team, the difference was that we almost never played in the same place. Which meant I was spending all my weekends split from my family, my mom and I would go one way, and my dad and my brothers would go the other. My dad was the assistant coach for my brother’s team, which meant he never got to watch me play. For me personally, that was the biggest reason I only played one year of spring soccer. My dad had been my coach, and even though I didn’t always appreciate his commentary on my playing, he always wanted me to get better, because he knew that if I was playing better than I would have more fun. Don’t get me wrong the mother daughter bonding that happened that year was wonderful, but sometimes moms can be too supportive. 

The other reason for quitting was that I wasn’t enjoying myself, the team had a lot to do with it, we were on the brink of middle school and my 17 other teammates were not always the kindest bunch, in fact I was told fairly consistently that the only reason I was on the team was because there was only one team and all the girls that tried out had made the team. Now mind you this never happened in a public forum, but was whispered to me during meals on weekends or in the backs of minivans as we traveled with another family. Along with that I was constantly being played as a left fullback. In my11 year old mind, that is the equivalent of being put in center field during tee ball, it’s like I was being told that I wasn’t really useful on the field, they just needed a place to put me where I couldn’t do much damage. I was never to cross mid-field, unless I was, by some miracle playing a mid field or even a forward position.   

Of course these were not the reasons that I revealed to my parents when I told them that I wasn’t going to do another spring season, in fact I just told them, that I would prefer to play rec soccer in the fall and rec volleyball in the spring. They shrugged their shoulders, said okay and honestly were just happy that I had played the whole season without begging to quit halfway through. 

I will admit though, that during my last three weeks of play that season, our regular sweeper was moved to mid-field after one of our players was taken out due to a spread of Hepatitis A (it was a thing that year), and I was put in as sweeper. That was where I really learned to love playing defense. There’s more pressure, and your team and fans are depending on you to do your job. That was probably one of the best things that came out of the season, that and realizing that for the sake of my self-esteem, I was never going to play soccer competitively, I couldn’t deal with the constant gossip, and false friendships.  

For all the things that I wanted to do and be when I was kid, I can tell you that as I grew and with some help from my parents I realized that dreams and wants change and some even drop off the map (I never want to be the President, seriously politics is not a game I’m interested in playing). However, the things that you want to pursue won’t come easily and sometimes you’ll just have to stick it out, but they will be worth it. Commitment is important. I won’t promise that I’ll post on this blog every week. But I will commit myself to more time in my life to be more diligent in writing and editing my thoughts to share with those of you who are still interesting in reading about what I have to say. So thanks for sticking with me, there will be more humorous anecdotes soon.