Very Wordful Wednesday: It's in the Genes

*Linked to Amanda and Angie's Wordful Wednesday posts.

Today was Sam's basketball camp: a two-day course for 4-6 year-olds put on, for free, by the high school basketball coach here in town (bless his heart). As I watched--baby strapped to my chest and two-year old pulling his pants down at my side--frustration was coursing through my veins. Why couldn't Sam just...get it? How hard is it to dribble the ball? I mean...really?

Then I realized he has Coltharp in his genes...and we aren't ones for coordination.

Speaking of which, Sam just spilled his paint water all over the floor, so excuse me while I clean it up...

What was I saying? Ah, yes...coordination. I don't have any, and apparently my son got cursed with that trait, too. It was very apparent to me today that coordination isn't something learned. You're either born with it, or you're not.

And Sam wasn't born with an ounce of it.

Well, I take that back. He has a good throwing arm. But catching, bouncing--pretty much anything involving repetitious movement of the arms--and he looks like one of those large inflatable balloon men in car lots. You know, where their arms and bodies are blowing in all sorts of awkward directions in the wind?

That's Sam.

And me, too.

Poor kid.

Poor me.

Oh well. I will never be am over my bad coordination. I had to get over it in high school. But Sam has his whole life in front of him. And today he was the only kid there that just. Could. Not. Get it. And the coaches tried and tried. And so did Sam.

Poor kid.

And we will continue trying, and continue entering him in sports. So that maybe, some day down the road, he can be a little better than me.

But you can't win them all. He is so smart, and I guess if he was good at everything, life might get a little boring, right?

I love my precious, angelic and dainty Sam.

This was him attempting to dribble. He didn't understand that you have to actually hit the ball down with your hand, so he'd bounce it and put his hand out delicately, and it'd either stop bouncing or get away from him. And we tried teaching him over and over again.

This is the ball getting away from him. And it'd roll all the way to the other side of the gym because as he'd run after it, he'd kick it with his feet. Again, poor kid.

When giving up on the dribbling attempt, he decided to throw it away from himself instead. He was already spending his time running after it anyway.

One of the coach's many attempts at teaching him how to dribble.

Picking up the ball after it bounced off of his foot when trying to dribble.

"Look at this rookie. Some day I'm gonna kick his butt on this court, because I got dad's genes."

Splitting into teams. Sam was disappointed because he really wanted to be on the red team.

Huddle!

Again...poor, uncoordinated, cuter-than-heck kid.
But I sure do love him for the way he is, and wouldn't change a thing.

High School or Hell?

*This post is inspired by Mama Kat's weekly writer's workshop. The prompt was "If you could go back to high school, what would you do differently?"

Anyone who knew me in high school knows I was shy, self-conscious, and just plain dorky…to put it lightly. Don’t get me wrong. I had an amazing, select group of friends who gave me memories I will always cherish. To you girls: I will love you forever.


But for the most part, the first word that surfaces in my mind when trying to sum up my high school experience is...Hell.

Besides to those few who knew me well, I kept myself locked inside—because in all reality, I didn’t know who I was to begin with. Every negative experience, every setback, was utterly traumatic to the emotional teenage girl I was, and since I was shy and closed-off, my teenage years were filled to the brim with them.

Just walking through the crowded hallways between each class was unnerving and gave me anxiety. Being looked at or recognized by anyone was scary—even by the boy I’d been crushing on at the time. Crazy, right? What teenage girl doesn’t thrill at that “cosmic, I’m-gonna-mary-him” eye connection? Well, even though I gushed about it in my journal, I just plain hated it. Hated the vulnerability, hated the exposure. Even from Bill and Bob*, the two guys I was sure I’d end up marrying someday.

And no, I didn’t. (No regrets there, by the way)

*We will give them fake names in order to avoid embarrassment on both parts...or maybe just because these were the actual code names my girlfriends and I used.

To those boys: Even though I’d shrink and run the other way when you’d make eye contact with me in the hall, really I was pathetically, madly in love with you…

Because instead of adoring myself, I put all my emotion into someone I spoke no more than one word to on a daily basis and claimed it “love.”

Atrocious haircuts, awkward-fitting clothes, no sense of self-worth, zero confidence: I was the very definition of the term “crawling in my skin.” It was a sad, depressing time, really. Letting my raging teenage emotions get the best of me, letting them affect friendships, opportunities to branch out, and—back to those boys again—even boyfriends.

Oh wait. BoyFRIEND.

Yes, that’s right. One. And I’m surprised I even had him, though I only had him for a month. I was so uncomfortable and unsure of who I was that I didn’t know how to act in any intimate setting. My dearest friends knew me and loved me, and when with them I could be the strange, silly, and funny girl I was...


...Or even the empathetic girl I was—always the first one there when anyone needed an ear to listen or a shoulder to cry on.

But put me around kids who loved being the center of attention, loved bringing other people down, and insults and glares would brutally throw me back into the dark hole I’d dug since the first day of middle school. The hole that had become home. Home, sweet-nauseating, home.

Gabby girls linking arms on the way to the cafeteria: keep those loving limbs away from me and my insecure bubble.

BoyFRIEND going in for the kiss or the hand, especially while walking through the hall swimming with judgmental teenagers: forget it. Kill me now, and What do I say, and How do I act running in a panic stream through my mind.

What would they—the beautiful, bold, cheerful and sometimes mean students—think of the star basketball player touching the girl with uneven dishwater hair, a baggy sweatshirt, and jeans too short for her daddy-long-leg legs? What would they think of the nobody? Surely they’d see the couple as a misfit, just as she so clearly does.

And so they did. And so did he. Do I blame him? Not in the slightest.

So what would I do differently?

I’d love myself. Pure and simple.

And not for those boys or even those teens who smashed my self esteem into the ground, but for me.