WHITE Enroll your child in a preschool team sport/dance class/swimming lesson of your choosing. Your family crest shows a skinny disembodied arm swinging a racket and missing need not determine your child’s athletic fate. You must imbue your child’s crest with POTENTIAL.
YELLOW Watch your child–two heads taller than the others–score many goals and become early-adapter for 15 minutes of first practice. Learn to tie your yellow belt, securing your parenting-I’m-doing-it-so-very-right! knot.
ORANGE Watch same child refuse to play for every subsequent game. Bribe child on to field with promise of bunny snacks at half time. Child joins team of crying mouths-stuffed-with-bunnies field-nomads.
ORANGE W/STRIPIES Child needs to dump at field with no bathrooms. Weigh 5 mile jaunt to gas station plus potential shite-in-shorts vs. child becoming dumping-on-subdivision-wisp-of-tree team mascot
BLUE WITH STRIPIES After three games of child non-participation regardless of snack bribe, and complete with Saturday morning tantrum, forfeit season and receive your “no more parent fake enthusiasm” blue belt with stripies.
BLUE Graduate to athletics-denial paired with skinny disembodied arm swinging a racket family crest inevitability and acceptance.
PURPLE WITH STRIPIES Learn kindergarten team sport is recruiting members. Many of the players are in child’s class. Use friends card to lure child back into team sport/dance class/swim lessons. Kiss weekends goodbye and meet your new best friends—the other sideline sitters. They, too, ask themselves how it is their own parents got away with giving them money for a bus pass and saying “see you at dinner.”
PURPLE Child enjoys team sport! Adult pack-n-play chairs take up residence in your trunk. Practices increase to twice weekly plus show up 30 minutes early on game day.
RED WITH STRIPIE Child becomes firmly entrenched in team sport. Command new vocabulary involving “if the team plays in the rain, than you play in the rain.” Sit in the rain in parent pack-n-play eating extras-for-siblings snack bunnies. Younger sibling plays 100 miles away at the playground with no bathroom. You can tell he has to dump.
RED NO STRIPIE Season ends!! Succumb to off-season “children must exercise” guilt and enroll in free-trial karate banking on children’s boredom due to rote commands.
BLACK STRIPIE Children love shouting YES SIR and YES MA’AM and complying to rote commands so long as they come from adults in bathrobes with bellies that are not you.
BLACK WITH MANY MANY STRIPIES Re-up after six months and two belt graduations which conveniently coincide with re-commitment dues.
BLACK WITH INFINITY XRAY SHIELDS GOOGLEPLEX STRIPIES Lack of forced musical instrument introduction doubt plagues your from karate-watching bench as you eaves-drop on piano-practice conversations. Your child’s synapses are closing, his brain plasticity is hardening with age, IT’S YOUR JOB TO INTRODUCE HIM TO AND DRIVE HIM TO AND TASK-MASTER HIM INTO ALL OF THE THINGS. The likelihood grows that he will never Sing You A Song He’s Piano Man. You remember that Hebrew School begins next year because BAR MITZVAH-JEWISH IDENTITY-CONTINUATION OF THE PEOPLE. You don’t garden. You don’t habla to him en Español. Your belt tightens.
Ha Ha! Not sure where I stand. Margaret is a beast on the soccer field, but she hid under the kitchen table when I tried to get her to try basketball. I could not pry her surprisingly strong 6 yr old arms from the leg of our table. Sooo…. soccer it is!
I have so many stripies I’m practically a zebra. Super funny post.
I guess I think that we all need to loosen whatever color belt we are wearing. Our children are going to be grown and gone before we know what hit us and I don’t want to feel any more guilt about what we didn’t do, I just want to be happy spending time with them. My friend said her brother took a dump as a kid behind the goal post…..it could be worse , right?
I’m so striped, I’m solid. (solid as a rock)
What about a belt for the parents who don’t enroll their kids in team sports because they don’t want to subject the volunteer coaches to them!
Brenda, you might be my hero.
Oh dear! Lately I feel like I don’t even have a parent belt, and have been caught with my granny panties hanging out. I do have two orchestra students, so that probably gets me a thin piece of twine at least…I hope!
BLACK WITH INFINITY XRAY SHIELDS GOOGLEPLEX STRIPIES
I just heard myself say today, pleading for money for Discovery Camp: “But he’s ten years old and this is the last year his brain will be malleable.”
My daughter has an hour and 15 minutes of mandatory music theory each week (if you want them to study at the conservatory) plus a half hour mandatory chorale, in addition to the weekly piano lesson. Her classical dance (also at the conservatory) has upped the ante and there are now 2 hour and 15 minute classes a week. My middle son does soccer and will begin his music-theory-choral-instrument sessions this year. My youngest has multi-sports plus “music awakening” at the conservatory. And after all that, I begged my husband to get my daughter on the waiting list for horseback riding because she would love it.
And the chores go undone, they have no time to practice the aforementioned instruments and I take naps every day. Which belt category do I fall in?
What kind of stripes do I have if my kids aren’t enrolled in any summer sports this year???
You are good. I’m afraid if I’d had kids they’d have been couch potatoes.
Hats off to you and your multi-colored, and well-earned belts.
xojj