I don’t think I’m a glass is half full kind of guy. Nor am I the pessimistic opposite. I believe that if we at least have a glass, I can and will find something to fill it up with that will satisfy.
*********
I thought I’d found thee silver lining from wrenching my lower back 2 summers ago; a love of soccer. My debilitating injury occurred just before World Cup 2010 and thanks to 1) my inability to move at all and 2) the launch of ESPN 3 (now the WATCH ESPN app and website) I took in every single soccer match live from South Africa. I fell in serious love with the sport, and the passion still dominates my viewing habits (just ask the Mrs. where I am at 7:30am most weekend mornings, and at 2:45pm on many a mid-week day).
But there appears to have been something else silver to outline the shit cloud that was the horrible pain and is the ongoing discomfort & fear of more: stretching. Not for me, although I partake of course, but for the girls.
We’re not an overly limber pair of parents. I really cannot undersell our collective limberness enough. But I have marching orders to become more flexible through a series of stretches and exercises prescribed by my physical therapist. I’d be lying if I said I was diligent with my homework assignments (not much has changed, has it mom?) but the girls know firsthand about what can happen to a human body when it is not cared for in this way (and in other ways – hello, donuts! – but that is a topic I’ve covered previously). The Bear and Mouse are often excitedly (bizarrely so) down on the floor too, running through the battery of positions and moves with me, to my left and to my right. Then pausing to crawl through and under my legs while I continue on.
Maybe I’m grabbing at straws [insert / broke camel’s back joke / here] but I refuse to believe all things for a reason isn’t a valid mantra. As such, there has to be more to what I went through than an appreciation for yet another sport. Right? Maybe it is actually that my daughters will have received a nugget of truth, of wisdom, of life advice that will aid them somewhere down their line. Something as simple as: hamstrings impact lower backs (newsflash!), or more abstractly as: tension in your life, be it physical or emotional; yeah, that sucks. If this is to be true, I’m more than happy to have paid a painful price to ensure there is one less thing that will be able to bite them in the ass later in life.
And that is what this whole parenting thing boils down to, does it not? To absorb, on a child’s behalf, as much as humanly possible before passing the torch, and to have cleared for that child a path more pleasant than the one we ourselves have traveled.
Oh, and to pass on a fondness for the beautiful game. Can’t forget that!
