- Bill Shankley
When I saw the school weekly magazine advertising sports practice for all graders (after school hours), I was quite elated. Apart from gaining a few more hours of respite from nagging kids, I was also happy that my offspring cast in the same mould as her couch-potato mum would really benefit from a bit of intense action. Both Anna and I made up the crowd of spectators at any sport right from our own school days - him given his rather dense myopic eyes and I being the only child of overprotective parents. Frankly said, most days I believed my shadow was made up of three figures - I could not even compete in 50m races without their chants of "be careful baby", "don't trip", blah blah so much so that I considered physical education to be more mentally stressing than physically exhaustive :)
So right from the day Madhu started school, I was intent on getting her started in some kind of sports but never got around to doing it given my own absence from home and other zillion things to take care of. Like most of my plans with respect to health and fitness regime, this one too never got to see the daylights. So it was indeed a blessing to see that the school had organised sports sessions and that too free ones ( as part of the state's student health awareness programs) for their students.
I signed her up for football and netball and the day I take her to the football session, I see only two girls (including Madhu) at the turnout. With slight apprehension gnawing at me seeing several boys milling around, I hastily look around for their sports instructor for some reassurance. To the contrary, I see him chuckling at the girls and asking me "so your girl wants to play football?" I then confess quickly saying she wasn't too keen but that I would like her to have a try at the game. I then leave the playground to come and pick her up an hour and a half later.
Later, I sense a slight prickling of guilt when I see her dejected form at the gates and her rather sullen reply that she was finding it hard to kick the ball. As we enter the garage, I tell her that I will buy her a football and we will take it from there. She then rushes inside the house, rummages some boxes in her closet and I hear her crowing winningly "we already have it". I peek into the room to find her brandishing a rugby ball and look at her questioningly as I was expecting to see the familiar spherical shaped ball. She answers quite laconically "the football" and then realisation dawns on my rather embarassed face.
Having grown up in a country that always labelled soccer as football, I was having daydreams of my girl becoming the new Beckham kid in the block. Little did I realise my adopted country with all its terminology reversed, had me sending my very feminine looking and delicate Barbie girl to Australian football, fondly called "footy". Not that soccer would have been any better but footy was very much a contact sport and no wonder the instructor was having a chuckle behind my back when Madhu turned up at the session with an equally sports ignoramus for a mother :(
I look at her sheepishly and tell her I thought it was soccer that she was playing - she then explains the game to me and though I wonder why the name football for a game that uses all parts of the body to pass the ball around, I keep my musings to myself lest she gets annoyed at any interruptions from me. Later that weekend I narrate the incident to some of our Aussie friends and despite their attempts to explain the game to us and the difference between its close-cousins rugby and soccer, Anna and I, with eyes glazing over, ruefully shake her heads and give up on understanding Aussie sports.
Meanwhile my daughter still continues to plod in her footy sessions and despite being her mother in most games happily standing at the bleachers than actually playing, she sometimes comes home excitedly chattering about the kicks she had done or the wins she helped her team achieve. I look at this very sensitive and dainty girl who has started enjoying her footy sessions and could not but help feel proud when she recounts incidents where she had grudgingly won the admiration of her fellow players. I feel an overwhelming sense of achievement knowing that I have gotten her started into sports, something that I never managed to do for myself.
Sometimes as parents, we do tend to live our dreams through our kids. Though I know from my own experiences, the enormous pressure it places on the kids, in this instance I am willing to make a concession for myself knowing that I am making the right decision by getting her interested in sports. If nothing, atleast decades down the track, she won't be blaming us in her blogs, fair enough :)
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