Lessons Learned

When I was a kid I dabbled in lessons. Piano for a few years. Tennis, briefly. Art classes, swimming. An all-too-short tryst with horseback riding. (I’m guessing my mom realized the chances of my owning a horse later in life were somewhere between slim and none.)

Looking back, I have two regrets.

One: my parents asked me in first grade if I wanted to play soccer. The answer was an unequivocal Hell to the No. I agonized. I was terrified. Imagine a very small Woody Allen ranting and hand-waving over shinguards and practice drills. “I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake and everyone will laugh,” was my justification. My parents, understandably, didn’t push the issue. And that was it — I didn’t play a team sport until college. (And I’m not sure if my college experience with rugby even counts; it mostly consisted of wearing a mouthguard, lying under the scrum, and singing outrageously lewd songs at parties.)

My little sister was different. When my parents asked her if she wanted to play soccer in first grade, she said okay. She had no oldest-child existential angst. She had no self-conscious paranoia. She just figured she’d run around outside with her friends. And that’s what she did, from second grade through college. And then she coached soccer after that.

So there’s regret number one. I watched my sister from the sidelines, and soccer started to look like fun after a while, but I was too freaked out to try it myself. Ding! Round one goes to my neurosis.

Number two is the whopper. I beat myself up for years over this one; occasionally if I’m particularly hormonal I’ll dredge it up again for a round of self-flagellation. This would be my epic ballet failure at age 11 or 12-ish.

I took ballet with one of my best friends at the time. Now ballet I liked. Ballet I could do. I happily went to dance class for quite a long time until I had the bad luck of getting good at it.

As my mother tells it, it was obvious to our ballet teacher that my friend and I were the best students in the class. The teacher informed us that it was time to move up to the next level. New class, new classmates, harder techniques: the natural progression of learning a skill. At least, it’s the natural progression unless you’re anxious, fearful, and neurotic. We went from being the best kids in the old class to the worst in the new class. And that was how I discovered that success could be more terrifying than failure.

I wanted no part of it. Nope. Done. There was nothing my parents could say that would convince me to go back to ballet. But — here’s where the self-flagellation kicks in — my friend kept dancing. And within six months she had shiny pointe shoes with those gorgeous lace-up ribbons and she was in the Nutcracker.

I kicked myself. I kicked myself with feet that were distinctly lacking in pointe shoes.

For years afterward this was fodder for my own version of Brando’s On the Waterfront speech. I coulda been somebody. I coulda been in the Nutcracker.

As I now guide my own kids through their own choices of afterschool lessons it is hard not to launch into the Brando speech at all times. My talent for quitting activities — or not even trying them — is the perfect springboard for living vicariously through Frances and Gloria. It would be so easy for me to be the evil mom; it’s a quick path to the Dark Side. The driving taskmaster of the Empire.”You will practice your lightsaber until you can kill a Jedi one-handed, young lady.”

The Force is strong in these kids. I don’t want to squash it.