Saturday, November 15, 2014
Friday, November 14, 2014
Pantser Panic
It's unlike me to prepare for anything, but I figured I should at least skim the coaching manual policies and playing rules a few hours before the first game. I accidentally read that after the end of each game the coaches get rated and that "disciplinary action may be warranted for multiple below average ratings."
Holy shit! I didn't know I was being tested. I can't even remember all my girls' names, let alone the rules. Am I going to be the first 3rd grade basketball coach to get fired from a volunteer gig after their first game?
See, my friends. This is why it doesn't pay to plan. When you just wing it, you don't have time for any sort of pantser panic to set in. Isn't that a great word? Pantser. As in, a person who does things by the seat of her pants. I recently read it and decided it describes the anxiety I experience when I try to plan things. I am a total pantser precisely because I'm an obsessive planner. I get too bogged down in worry and give up too easily if I plan things out. If I show up unprepared, I can blame my awful performance on my lack of preparation and just have fun.
But I guess when you're a supposedly responsible adult coaching your daughter's basketball team it's different. There are so many freaking rules.
I don't remember there being many rules when I played on teams as a girl. I just remember running back and forth across the wooden floor, dribbling, and passing, and catching, and shooting and having a lot of fun. I thought that's what it's all about. Fun.
So what's my plan for the first game? I'm going to try to remember what it was like to be a girl on a team having fun so I can understand how my girls out on the court feel. It's about them. Not me. Not the parents. Not the officials. It's about them, and making them love to work together and have fun.
Holy shit! I didn't know I was being tested. I can't even remember all my girls' names, let alone the rules. Am I going to be the first 3rd grade basketball coach to get fired from a volunteer gig after their first game?
See, my friends. This is why it doesn't pay to plan. When you just wing it, you don't have time for any sort of pantser panic to set in. Isn't that a great word? Pantser. As in, a person who does things by the seat of her pants. I recently read it and decided it describes the anxiety I experience when I try to plan things. I am a total pantser precisely because I'm an obsessive planner. I get too bogged down in worry and give up too easily if I plan things out. If I show up unprepared, I can blame my awful performance on my lack of preparation and just have fun.
But I guess when you're a supposedly responsible adult coaching your daughter's basketball team it's different. There are so many freaking rules.
Left: Becky, age 13, seventh grade. Right: Katie, age 8, third grade.
I don't remember there being many rules when I played on teams as a girl. I just remember running back and forth across the wooden floor, dribbling, and passing, and catching, and shooting and having a lot of fun. I thought that's what it's all about. Fun.
So what's my plan for the first game? I'm going to try to remember what it was like to be a girl on a team having fun so I can understand how my girls out on the court feel. It's about them. Not me. Not the parents. Not the officials. It's about them, and making them love to work together and have fun.
Teammates
Katie started crying during a practice basketball game. She said she was afraid the ball was going to hit her in the face. One of her teammates stopped everything and went to her to give her a hug. Then two other teammates went to her and started telling her about how they were scared and cried their first time on a team too. Now they've played a couple of years and they have fun. Katie immediately returned to the game and was laughing and running around having a good time.
I love coaching these girls. I'm going to learn a lot from them.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
This Is You
Our eight-year-old daughter, Katie, handed this piece of paper to me and said, "Here, Mom. This is you."
"Just trim it and shape it up a bit," I said.
As she trimmed my hair, we heard the other hair stylist, who was working on Katie's mop, say, "Wow, you have such thick hair."
I remember my mom saying the exact same thing to me when I was Katie's age. I looked around my stylist's station and saw a pair of thinning sheers. I hadn't seen a stylist use them on me in years.
I looked into the mirror at my long hair. I like the way it hangs around my face, accentuating my bone structure. I remember always hearing when I was kid that women over the age of forty were not supposed to wear their hair past their shoulders. Like wearing white after Labor Day.
"Long hair makes an older woman's face look saggy," I'd hear my mom and my grandmother say as if they were discussing sky blue refraction.
I looked into the mirror at my own over-the-age-of-forty face. My face doesn't look saggy. It looks well-defined. I'm going to be forty-four this month, and this is the finest I've ever felt.
Katie's hair stylist suggested "texturizing" her hair so it's not so prone to becoming a tangled mat under the top layer of her hair. I know that this is a modern way of saying that she's taking the thinning sheers to Katie's hair, just like my mom once did to mine.
"Do you want her to thin out your hair so it's easier to brush?" I called out to Katie, across from me in our spinning seats.
"Yeah!" Katie said.
"Does your husband have thick hair?" the stylist trimming my hair asked me.
"Oh yeah. He shaves half of it--in an undercut--and it's still really thick. Katie gets her thick hair from both of us," I said.
"Oh?" the stylist looked perplexed. "Did you used to have thick hair when you were a kid?" she asked.
I put my hand on top of my head and felt my part. It hasn't grown any wider over the years, but now that she mentions it, I realize the reason I like my long hair now is because it has gotten so much thinner that it doesn't grow out like an inverted triangle. I had long hair as a teenager, but I cut it off my senior year of high school because I got tired of fooling with it. In this last year that I've been letting my hair get long again, I thought I was just being feisty.
Women over the age of forty can't have long hair, you say? Let's see about that!
I thought growing my hair out long was primarily in protest to all the people who have ever said it shouldn't be done. But looking into the mirror at Great Clips, I realized the stylist was working on my hair in its current state with no awareness of the ultra-thick hair I once had. I had come to think of myself as a person with thick hair, just as I'm a person with green eyes or a person with blonde hair.
Oh wait. My hair started turning brown when I was ten, and it's gotten progressively darker over the years. Katie calls my hair "black" and I'm always like, really? I don't think of myself as a dark-headed person because my formative years were spent as a blonde.
Similarly, I was a tall kid. Always either the tallest or second tallest in the class. By fourth grade I was 5'3". At nearly forty-four, I'm still 5'3". I was a tall kid who stopped growing early, so now I'm a short adult. I was a blonde kid, but now I'm a brunette, and as the aging process continues, I find more and more silvery shimmers in my hair.
I like the way I look for the first time in my life. I'm myself, whoever that is, and it feels good.
"Mom" by Katie Carleton, age 8
The first thing I noticed about the drawing is that my shirt says I love daughters, plural. Because I have but one daughter, I wondered if Katie is including an imaginary sister, or if she's including our female pets. Or, is she thinking more broadly, along the lines of my "daughters" being all the girls in the world. It wouldn't surprise me, since I often talk about how we need to help improve the lives of girls around the globe as if I'm a concerned mother.
Once, when Katie was complaining about having to go to school, I shut down her negativity by saying, "Well, at least you don't live in a country where eight-year-old girls don't go to school because they are forced to marry middle-age men."
Kind of a modern-day clean your plate because there are starving kids in Africa.
When Will and I found out we were having a girl, the first thing to come out of his mouth was this:
"Good. I'm glad this baby will have you for a mother, because you'll raise her to be a feminist."
Beats my own father's reaction to being told I was a girl. My mom said the only two times she ever saw my father cry was when his mother died and when I was born. Dad already had a daughter from his first marriage. His first wife also gave birth to two other girls, and one boy, but none of them survived past the first day or two. When he married my mom, already the mother of two boys and two girls, I imagine he thought he'd struck uterus-gold. But alas, after I popped out of Mom's golden uterus, as Mom and her obstetrician smoked cigarettes and discussed how much damage I'd done to her body, the doctor chiding my mother, telling her that she shouldn't have any more children, Dad was wiping away his patriarchal tears.
When I became pregnant, I vowed to love and cherish our child regardless of how things turned out between its legs. I honestly didn't care if the child was a boy or a girl, or somewhat both, someone with ambiguous genitalia. In fact, my reaction to Will's awesome comment about how our girl would be lucky to have me for a mother so I could raise her to be a feminist reflected how I feel about gender in general. I said, "Whatever. I'd raise our son to be a feminist, too."
More than anything, my wish for all children is to just be themselves. Whatever that means.
My boss started this team-building exercise at work. She posted pieces of paper on the wall, one for each of us in the department. Everyone who walks by is supposed to write a positive description of the person on their sheet of paper. On mine, someone wrote, "herself."
What is that supposed to mean, I thought. Since we were told not to use any negative descriptors, I did not take offense to the comment, which would have been my knee-jerk reaction to someone describing me in a way I didn't understand. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.
"Just be yourself," we're told by people who love us when they want to encourage us to be our best.
Because I like to question everything, I decided to do a little research. I asked Google, "What does it mean to be yourself?" Here's what Google said, "Our true self is who we really are when we let go of all of the stories, labels, and judgments that we have placed upon ourselves. It is who we naturally are without the masks and pretentiousness."
Oh, I like that. I like that a lot. It reminds me of this head-trippy video Will and I watched recently:
The second thing I noticed about the portrait Katie drew of me is that, while my hair appears to be long on the sides, I'm completely bald on top of my head. Upon further inspection, my feet have been lopped off, but I focused on the bald head.
When I was about Katie's age, my grandmother told me that when I grew up I'd probably go bald like my dad. "But you can grow your hair out long on the sides," she said, cackling.
My grandmother was not ignorant, just mean. As the owner of a beauty shop, my grandmother knew that female baldness is rare, and that even though my dad started losing his hair when he was in his late teens, and that baldness is hereditary, it's generally only the male children whose bald genes get expressed. I didn't know this when I was eight, so I stared at my part in the mirror for years, wondering when it would start getting wider.
I actually had extremely thick hair when I was child. I remember my mom using "thinning sheers" on it so I wouldn't look so much like Roseanne Roseannadanna. Each time she'd thin out my hair, I'd worry that when I looked in the mirror I'd see Mom had gone full Telly Savalas on me.
She never did. Mom's not mean like her own mom was. Whenever Mom would take out the thinning sheers, I'd remind her that my grandmother warned me I'd go bald someday like Dad.
"Oh, don't listen to her," Mom would say. The fact that Mom survived her childhood with an abusive mother and she herself turned out to be a good mother was enough for me to heed her advice. She must know what's what.
I stopped listening to obviously mean and crazy people as a kid, but it's taken a lifetime for me to learn to stop listening to anyone but myself. I don't know if it's my innate personality, or the fact that I'm the youngest of six kids and so I've never known what it's like to not be compared to my siblings, but it's hard for me to not judge myself against everyone around me.
I'm getting better. It's taken a long time.
A couple of months ago, I took Katie to a chop-shop to get a professional haircut the week before school pictures. While we were there, I glanced at the ends of my own hair and decided to have them give me a trim, too. I hadn't had it cut in about a year, so it's longer now than it has been since I was in high school.
"How do you want me to cut it?" the hair stylist asked.
"Just trim it and shape it up a bit," I said.
As she trimmed my hair, we heard the other hair stylist, who was working on Katie's mop, say, "Wow, you have such thick hair."
I remember my mom saying the exact same thing to me when I was Katie's age. I looked around my stylist's station and saw a pair of thinning sheers. I hadn't seen a stylist use them on me in years.
I looked into the mirror at my long hair. I like the way it hangs around my face, accentuating my bone structure. I remember always hearing when I was kid that women over the age of forty were not supposed to wear their hair past their shoulders. Like wearing white after Labor Day.
"Long hair makes an older woman's face look saggy," I'd hear my mom and my grandmother say as if they were discussing sky blue refraction.
I looked into the mirror at my own over-the-age-of-forty face. My face doesn't look saggy. It looks well-defined. I'm going to be forty-four this month, and this is the finest I've ever felt.
Katie's hair stylist suggested "texturizing" her hair so it's not so prone to becoming a tangled mat under the top layer of her hair. I know that this is a modern way of saying that she's taking the thinning sheers to Katie's hair, just like my mom once did to mine.
"Do you want her to thin out your hair so it's easier to brush?" I called out to Katie, across from me in our spinning seats.
"Yeah!" Katie said.
"Does your husband have thick hair?" the stylist trimming my hair asked me.
"Oh yeah. He shaves half of it--in an undercut--and it's still really thick. Katie gets her thick hair from both of us," I said.
"Oh?" the stylist looked perplexed. "Did you used to have thick hair when you were a kid?" she asked.
I put my hand on top of my head and felt my part. It hasn't grown any wider over the years, but now that she mentions it, I realize the reason I like my long hair now is because it has gotten so much thinner that it doesn't grow out like an inverted triangle. I had long hair as a teenager, but I cut it off my senior year of high school because I got tired of fooling with it. In this last year that I've been letting my hair get long again, I thought I was just being feisty.
Women over the age of forty can't have long hair, you say? Let's see about that!
I thought growing my hair out long was primarily in protest to all the people who have ever said it shouldn't be done. But looking into the mirror at Great Clips, I realized the stylist was working on my hair in its current state with no awareness of the ultra-thick hair I once had. I had come to think of myself as a person with thick hair, just as I'm a person with green eyes or a person with blonde hair.
Oh wait. My hair started turning brown when I was ten, and it's gotten progressively darker over the years. Katie calls my hair "black" and I'm always like, really? I don't think of myself as a dark-headed person because my formative years were spent as a blonde.
Similarly, I was a tall kid. Always either the tallest or second tallest in the class. By fourth grade I was 5'3". At nearly forty-four, I'm still 5'3". I was a tall kid who stopped growing early, so now I'm a short adult. I was a blonde kid, but now I'm a brunette, and as the aging process continues, I find more and more silvery shimmers in my hair.
I like the way I look for the first time in my life. I'm myself, whoever that is, and it feels good.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Happy Birthday, Mr. Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut's U.S. Army portrait
Happy birthday, Mr. Vonnegut! Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers, but he's also one of my favorite humans. Too often I'll have the utmost respect for an artist's work but feel the bile belches coming up my throat when I think about the artist's personal life. See: Woody Allen.
Vonnegut died a few years ago. So it goes. I will forever be inspired by his soul. Especially today and every November 11th, on both Vonnegut's birthday and Armistice Day, the day the participants in The War to End All Wars chose peace. So fitting for a humanist pacifist such as Vonnegut. Here's one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, from his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions:
"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
"It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind."
Tolkien and Post-Traumatic Growth
Happy Armistice Day!
One veteran of World War I--J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series--used his traumatic experiences in the war to create amazing works of literature. Hank Green calls it "post-traumatic growth". Green explains it in this fascinating episode of Crash Course Psychology:
"Tolkien 1916". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg
One veteran of World War I--J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series--used his traumatic experiences in the war to create amazing works of literature. Hank Green calls it "post-traumatic growth". Green explains it in this fascinating episode of Crash Course Psychology:
Monday, November 10, 2014
Step Stool Sister
Thatcher (12), Annie (7 months), Sawyer (12)
Our cat Thatcher, and our puppy Annie got all excited when they saw a neighborhood cat outside in our front yard. Evidently our old dog Sawyer couldn't care less. She's been roommates with various felines over her twelve long years as the sweetest dog on the planet. She simply cannot be fazed by one more cat. I imagine Sawyer saying to her fur-brother and fur-sister, "Big deal. Wake me up when there's something worth looking at." Sawyer is so hardcore into her nap, she doesn't even mind being a step stool for her baby fur-sister.
Friday, November 7, 2014
Coach Carleton: First Night of Practice
Well, I didn't finish the Universal Class on How to Coach Youth Basketball before it was time to head to our first practice last night. You didn't really think I would, did you? We had fun anyway. And that's the goal.
It was my first time coaching, ever. Our eight-year-old, Katie, wanted to join a team. Soon after we signed her up, the league sent me an email asking if I could coach. Assuming other parents with more experience would volunteer, I said, Sure, sure. Sign me up. I've never coached. I haven't played basketball in thirty years. I probably haven't even watched a basketball game in at least a decade. But sure, if no one else can do it, sign me up.
Nube mistake number one. Never say yes when you really mean are you fucking kidding me?
Fortunately for me, when I'm on my meds and keeping my symptoms of PTSD at bay, I'm quite adventurous. I'll try anything (that will cause no harm to anyone) once. What harm could I do to these eleven third-grade girls? I figure the worst that can happen with me as a coach is we won't learn the rules, but no matter what, we'll have fun.
When we arrived at the gym there were already several girls running around shooting hoops. An incorrigible procrastinator and usually late to everything, I had thought arriving ten minutes early was good, but evidently my team leans uber-punctual. When the other couple of girls arrived, we sat in a circle in the middle of the gym and talked.
"When are we going to start practicing?" one of the girls whined.
"We are practicing. This is the first part of building a team," I explained. She didn't roll her eyes at me, so I marked that one a win.
"I want us to get to know each other so we can be a great team. I'm gonna ask you some questions about yourself, and we'll go around the circle and answer. I'll start," I said.
I told them that it was my first time coaching, but I was excited, and that I had played basketball on a couple of teams when I was a girl, so I know what it's like. I told them that I'm Katie's mom and Will's wife, that I work at the library and I like working with kids.
"And the one thing I want to get out of this experience is to have fun," I said, smiling. Surprisingly, they all smiled back. Beamed really. I'm lucky I got assigned to coach third graders rather than eighth graders. Too much teenage angst might trigger my anxiety.
We went around the circle and each girl gave their answers. Their name, what school they go to, have they played on a team before, and if so, how many years? That sort of stuff. The answers got more exciting after I asked them the two BIG questions:
The first big question was: "What do you want to get out of this experience, by the end of the season?"
I wanna have fun!
I wanna see how many goals I can shoot!
I wanna see how fast I can run across the court!
I wanna do my best and have fun!
I wanna make friends!
I wanna shoot more hoops!
I wanna do my best and have fun! (The copycat is my kid.)
I wanna have fun! (It was clear the girls were running out of ideas until...)
I wanna make friends and learn how to SLAM DUNK!
We all giggled at that last one.
"Well, that's a lofty goal," I said.
"What's lofty?" Slam Dunk Girl said.
"It's a big goal, something that will take you years of practice to achieve," I explained.
Slam Dunk Girl's shoulders sank.
"But it will be fun to watch you practice! It probably won't be this year, but I'd love to see you slam dunk some day!"
Slam Dunk Girl sat up straight and proud, smiling wide.
The second big question was: "What kind of coach would you like me to be?"
Funny!
Hilarious!
Nice!
Nice, but make us work hard!
Nice and encouraging!
Honest, reliable, smart! (Guess which weirdo kid said that? Yep. Katie.)
Nice, and you can help us learn more!
I have a feeling that interviewing these girls about what they want to get out of being on a basketball team, and what kind of coach they want me to be, will be just as important as studying the rules of the game.
Still, though, I need to figure out the basics. It's two points per shot, right? What I remember most from playing basketball on a team when I was a kid was the fun, not the rules. Hopefully the girls and I will learn just enough of the rules that we'll feel comfortable and have fun.
After our mini group therapy session in the middle of the court, Will and I had the girls do dribbling drills where they weave in and out of the cones, shooting drills from both the left and the right, and passing drills.
Probably the harshest thing I said to one of the girls all night was, "Remember, you're passing the ball to your teammate. You want her to be able to catch it so she can score a point for the team. Yeah, it's cool that you can bounce the ball over her head, but that's not gonna help the team win."
No crying. No yelling. No one yelling "hustle!" No one pointing at me and laughing. It was about as chill a practice as I could imagine.
When we were picking up our coats to leave, I asked Katie if she'd give my first day of coaching a thumbs up or not. She said, "A quadruple thumbs up!"
That was awesome, but my kid's partial to me. The best compliment I got was as we were leaving the gym, one of the girls said to me, "You're a really nice coach!" My heart exploded with joy.
One more practice and then we'll have our first game. I'm excited.
It was my first time coaching, ever. Our eight-year-old, Katie, wanted to join a team. Soon after we signed her up, the league sent me an email asking if I could coach. Assuming other parents with more experience would volunteer, I said, Sure, sure. Sign me up. I've never coached. I haven't played basketball in thirty years. I probably haven't even watched a basketball game in at least a decade. But sure, if no one else can do it, sign me up.
Nube mistake number one. Never say yes when you really mean are you fucking kidding me?
Fortunately for me, when I'm on my meds and keeping my symptoms of PTSD at bay, I'm quite adventurous. I'll try anything (that will cause no harm to anyone) once. What harm could I do to these eleven third-grade girls? I figure the worst that can happen with me as a coach is we won't learn the rules, but no matter what, we'll have fun.
When we arrived at the gym there were already several girls running around shooting hoops. An incorrigible procrastinator and usually late to everything, I had thought arriving ten minutes early was good, but evidently my team leans uber-punctual. When the other couple of girls arrived, we sat in a circle in the middle of the gym and talked.
"When are we going to start practicing?" one of the girls whined.
"We are practicing. This is the first part of building a team," I explained. She didn't roll her eyes at me, so I marked that one a win.
"I want us to get to know each other so we can be a great team. I'm gonna ask you some questions about yourself, and we'll go around the circle and answer. I'll start," I said.
I told them that it was my first time coaching, but I was excited, and that I had played basketball on a couple of teams when I was a girl, so I know what it's like. I told them that I'm Katie's mom and Will's wife, that I work at the library and I like working with kids.
"And the one thing I want to get out of this experience is to have fun," I said, smiling. Surprisingly, they all smiled back. Beamed really. I'm lucky I got assigned to coach third graders rather than eighth graders. Too much teenage angst might trigger my anxiety.
We went around the circle and each girl gave their answers. Their name, what school they go to, have they played on a team before, and if so, how many years? That sort of stuff. The answers got more exciting after I asked them the two BIG questions:
The first big question was: "What do you want to get out of this experience, by the end of the season?"
I wanna have fun!
I wanna see how many goals I can shoot!
I wanna see how fast I can run across the court!
I wanna do my best and have fun!
I wanna make friends!
I wanna shoot more hoops!
I wanna do my best and have fun! (The copycat is my kid.)
I wanna have fun! (It was clear the girls were running out of ideas until...)
I wanna make friends and learn how to SLAM DUNK!
We all giggled at that last one.
"Well, that's a lofty goal," I said.
"What's lofty?" Slam Dunk Girl said.
"It's a big goal, something that will take you years of practice to achieve," I explained.
Slam Dunk Girl's shoulders sank.
"But it will be fun to watch you practice! It probably won't be this year, but I'd love to see you slam dunk some day!"
Slam Dunk Girl sat up straight and proud, smiling wide.
The second big question was: "What kind of coach would you like me to be?"
Funny!
Hilarious!
Nice!
Nice, but make us work hard!
Nice and encouraging!
Honest, reliable, smart! (Guess which weirdo kid said that? Yep. Katie.)
Nice, and you can help us learn more!
I have a feeling that interviewing these girls about what they want to get out of being on a basketball team, and what kind of coach they want me to be, will be just as important as studying the rules of the game.
Still, though, I need to figure out the basics. It's two points per shot, right? What I remember most from playing basketball on a team when I was a kid was the fun, not the rules. Hopefully the girls and I will learn just enough of the rules that we'll feel comfortable and have fun.
After our mini group therapy session in the middle of the court, Will and I had the girls do dribbling drills where they weave in and out of the cones, shooting drills from both the left and the right, and passing drills.
Probably the harshest thing I said to one of the girls all night was, "Remember, you're passing the ball to your teammate. You want her to be able to catch it so she can score a point for the team. Yeah, it's cool that you can bounce the ball over her head, but that's not gonna help the team win."
No crying. No yelling. No one yelling "hustle!" No one pointing at me and laughing. It was about as chill a practice as I could imagine.
When we were picking up our coats to leave, I asked Katie if she'd give my first day of coaching a thumbs up or not. She said, "A quadruple thumbs up!"
That was awesome, but my kid's partial to me. The best compliment I got was as we were leaving the gym, one of the girls said to me, "You're a really nice coach!" My heart exploded with joy.
One more practice and then we'll have our first game. I'm excited.
Coach Carleton: The Beginning, Before the First Practice
My husband Will took a photo of me wearing my Halloween costume so I could Facebook-fish for compliments. In the caption I asked my friends to guess who I was.
"A sexy librarian" was the top pick, which made me smile, since that's what I was going for. I basically wore my day-to-day wardrobe of a cardigan over a dress, knee high socks, and clogs, with my hair up in a messy bun held together by a pencil. Only, to make it "sexy," I wore an industrial strength push-up bra, size 42DDD, mind you, and a tight dress.
That's one good thing about having a Venus Figurine body type: slap on a fancy bra and a tight dress and you're ready to go out for the night. No need to fuss over your hair or makeup. Manicures and pedicures? Don't waste your money. You really think people are going to be looking at your hair and nails and not at your monumental mammary glands? Haven't you seen that episode of SNL where the women evolved to have eyes on their breasts so men would finally look them in the eye?
Not everyone agreed with the "Sexy Librarian" guess, though. One friend suggested I looked like someone else, someone I never would have thought of: the awful Miss Trunchbull from Roald Dahl's Matilda.
Sexy Librarian or Miss Trunchbull?
Ouch. Just when I start feeling sexy, I'm compared to that monstrous hag? I'm stocky, yes. I wear knee high socks like Miss Trunchbull, yes. But I'm no monster. I'm about as much of a stern disciplinarian as Miss Honey. Not at all like the sadistic headmistress who abuses children--the one my friend thought I had dressed up as for a kid's holiday.
Miss Trunchbull from Roald Dahl's Matilda
image source
I can kind of see it, now that she mentions it. I've been a librarian for twenty-one years, and just recently I was picked to volunteer to coach my third grade daughter's basketball team. No, stop laughing. I'm serious. Yes, they most certainly are that desperate, and yes, I do have delusions of grandeur so much I'm willing to try anything once. Remember? I'm the spiritually ambivalent non-churchgoer who somehow got suckered into joining a progressive Presbyterian church with my daughter last year. I absolutely love it. Now they've got me teaching Sunday School. I keep telling them that the kids know more about the Bible than I do, that they are teaching me more than I am teaching them, but they don't seem to have a problem with the concept of an adult learning from a child.
A Baller Librarian, that's me. So I see my friend's point about my Halloween costume. Miss Trunchbull looks like a Baller Librarian. Only the scary old-fashioned stereotypes of the cranky, shushing librarian and the gruff, verbally abusive coach.
Katie, age 8, third grade.
Katie just finished "basketball school" and now she's ready to join a team.When the league emailed the parents to beg for a coach, I half-jokingly agreed, but I explained that I haven't played basketball in thirty years. I probably haven't even watched a game in a decade. Generally, when my Facebook timeline blows up with images and videos and conversations about most sports, I close my screen and pick up a book. I've always thought sports were more fun to play than to watch.
I used to be a great basketball player. I was on the all-star team two years in a row, and in seventh grade I won the layup contest by making 24 out of 25 baskets.
I had to quit basketball because of my boobs. Not because I'm a woman who has boobs in general. Just my boobs in particular. You see, I was an extremely early developer. I got my first bra in third grade. By high school I looked less like a baller and more like a Babushka. I had to quit playing basketball because my swollen breasts hurt every time I'd run down the court. Either there weren't sports bras back then or my mom didn't know about them, because when I finally told my mom about how much it hurt to run, she said it was OK for me to drop out.
I've played a game of HORSE here and there over the years, but for the most part, I haven't played basketball since I was 13, thirty-one years ago. I'm still fairly active in my own middle-aged way. I even own a sports bra now. I walk around the neighborhood, with my dogs, at the dog park. I play games with our eight year old in the back yard. I take walking breaks at work. I'm not a total slacker.
By the looks of my body, you'd think otherwise. I've been back on sertraline, used to treat my post-traumatic-stress-disorder and clinical depression, for about a year now. I feel more alive, more like myself. I love it. I never would have had the energy to get out of bed and coach a girl's basketball team, and teach Sunday School, and work at the public library, if it weren't for my meds. But I've gained almost thirty pounds, which is a lot on any frame, but especially a lot because I was already fat. My weight keeps creeping up over the years no matter how much exercise I get or how much food I eat or how many carbs or protein or fat or sugar or anything is in the food I eat. My doctor and I know weight gain is a side-effect of this medicine that makes me feel alive, and my weight gain hasn't hurt my good biometric ratings. My blood pressure, glucose, and cholesterol are all within the healthy range. I might look pudgy and quite wobbly running along the sidelines, coaching my badass baller girls, but hopefully they can soon learn that health comes in all sizes and Coach Carleton will prove it.
Being a Health At Every Size activist these last three years, I'm not supposed to worry about my weight gain. I know better. I should practice what I preach. But body acceptance is hard in our culture. When I pull on a slightly tight t-shirt and sweat pants and a hoodie I have to give a pretty good heave to zip up, I worry what people will think when they see me. I love my body. My husband loves my body. My daughter is thankful for my body and loves it. Why should I care if a bunch of 3rd grade girls and their parents think my body is uncoach-like? One of the tenets of the Health at Every Size philosophy is to move your body in pleasurable ways. Not when you're ten pounds thinner. Not when you're fifty pounds thinner. Now. Right now.
That's my personal goal. This basketball season, I would like to learn to feel good about my body, to move my body in pleasurable ways in public, away from the safe walks around my neighborhood and under the sheets in bed with my husband. I'm ready to start coaching these impressionable young girls on not just how to play a game and love it, but how to feel good about your body. Right now. Growing up is hard. Bodies change at different rates. Lots of kids get pudgy around third grade, or else they can't put any meat on their bones no matter how many seconds or thirds they take at the dinner table. It shouldn't matter. Fat kids. Skinny kids. All kids should know they are allowed to have fun with their bodies.
So as of today, you can call me Coach Carleton, or, Becky the Baller Librarian, if you're not into that whole brevity thing.
I'm ready to reinvent what it means to be a badass Baller Librarian. I told a friend at work, who was chuckling at the idea of my nerdy ass coaching a bunch of little jocks that, just as I never shush people at the library, I will never yell at any of the girls to "hustle" on the court. Hustle. When I played, from age 11-13, I always hated it when my coach would yell, "hustle!" I felt like yelling back, "Damn, old man! Why don't you get out here and run beside me and see how much hustle you've got in you?"
Like I do at the library with noisy patrons, I'll approach a girl who seems like she hasn't got much hustle left in her, and we'll have a conversation, instead of me embarrassing her in front of a crowd.
At the library:
"Sir, some other library patrons have been complaining about the noise around here. Please be considerate of those around you..."
On the court:
"Chin up! It's a game, not an endurance test. Are you having fun? Do you think your teammates are having fun?" You know, that kind of uplifting affirmation type shit that calms kids down instead of the yelling approach, which heightens anxiety.
Like I do at the library with noisy patrons, I'll approach a girl who seems like she hasn't got much hustle left in her, and we'll have a conversation, instead of me embarrassing her in front of a crowd.
At the library:
"Sir, some other library patrons have been complaining about the noise around here. Please be considerate of those around you..."
On the court:
"Chin up! It's a game, not an endurance test. Are you having fun? Do you think your teammates are having fun?" You know, that kind of uplifting affirmation type shit that calms kids down instead of the yelling approach, which heightens anxiety.
I'm going to be an empathetic coach. I have one goal: to have fun. Our team might never be basketball stars--heck, with me as a coach, we might never learn all the rules--but we'll have fun.
So, how do we get to that point? First, I need to learn the basics of how to coach youth basketball before I can evolve into an empathetic coach. Because I am a librarian, I know how to find information. Haven't played basketball in thirty years, yet somehow got wrangled into coaching your kid's team and you have no idea where to start? Just ask a librarian. We'll point you to where you need to go.
Me, age 13
1983-1984, seventh grade girls' basketball
I found a self-paced online class through the library. It's called Universal Class, and through my library you can access it for free with a library card anywhere with internet service.
Today's the first day of practice, so naturally I haven't finished the course. In fact, I've only gotten through the introduction. I like it already. Which is why I'm taking it in so slowly. That, and I'm a natural procrastinator, so if I don't get through the whole course before I have to go coach tonight, and I royally screw something up, I can blame it on my ignorance of the subject matter due to a lack of time spent studying it instead of just my innate slacker awkwardness whenever I find myself in any sort of leadership role.
What I like best about the online class, so far, is that I feel like the teacher has empathy for my plight. Right from the beginning:
Today's the first day of practice, so naturally I haven't finished the course. In fact, I've only gotten through the introduction. I like it already. Which is why I'm taking it in so slowly. That, and I'm a natural procrastinator, so if I don't get through the whole course before I have to go coach tonight, and I royally screw something up, I can blame it on my ignorance of the subject matter due to a lack of time spent studying it instead of just my innate slacker awkwardness whenever I find myself in any sort of leadership role.
What I like best about the online class, so far, is that I feel like the teacher has empathy for my plight. Right from the beginning:
"Your child has just come home and starts talking to you about how much they want to join the basketball team. Tryouts are next week. They are waving a brightly colored flier in one hand and looking at you with those big excited eyes. All you want to do is take your shoes off, check your messages and have dinner. But, your offspring is relentless...They will work extra chores and be nice to their siblings. You know this won't last, but you succumb anyway...
"You start filling the forms out and notice a block on the bottom of the page asking if you are interested in becoming a coach. You think to yourself, 'Do they have a coach? Surely they wouldn't have tryouts without a coach.' Well, they do have a coach, but he is ready to retire the woman taking the registrations tells you, because he's tired and wants to enjoy his golden years while he can.
"You look over the box again and again, then look at your excited child and tell the woman that if they absolutely can't find anyone else, you'll consider it. Guess what? You get a phone call within three days asking you to become the coach, because they couldn't find anyone else."
--From "How to Coach Youth Basketball on Universal Class.
Amen! This teacher knows what I'm in for. Better get back to class.
"You start filling the forms out and notice a block on the bottom of the page asking if you are interested in becoming a coach. You think to yourself, 'Do they have a coach? Surely they wouldn't have tryouts without a coach.' Well, they do have a coach, but he is ready to retire the woman taking the registrations tells you, because he's tired and wants to enjoy his golden years while he can.
"You look over the box again and again, then look at your excited child and tell the woman that if they absolutely can't find anyone else, you'll consider it. Guess what? You get a phone call within three days asking you to become the coach, because they couldn't find anyone else."
--From "How to Coach Youth Basketball on Universal Class.
Amen! This teacher knows what I'm in for. Better get back to class.
Saturday, November 1, 2014
A Suffragette's Home
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