I love my 9 year daughter--but holy crap that kid can test me.
One of the things I've always strived to do ever since we became "public" is protect my kids and try as hard as I can to make them background characters in all of this. They are the reason I will always remain mostly anonymous as a long as I keep posting. First and foremost, some very disturbed individuals said some awful things about them and that scared the crap out of me. But maybe just as important is that I don't want to make a choice for them about their own public persona's that I can't take back. I guess the argument I had with my daughter is a great example of why I feel this way.
As I have mentioned in the past I adore my daughter. When she was born I was 100% convinced that I had given birth to second coming. She was so beautiful and she was such a great baby. She slept, she ate and she was very healthy. But as she started to mature it became pretty clear that she and I have very different personalities. I have to admit that I made the mistake of having fantasies about what having a daughter was going to be like. I liked to imagine that we would talk and we'd we have tea parties and go shopping together (and tell Dad little white lies about how much money we planned to spend), basically that I had a forever built in best friend. Abby is not like that at all. She is quiet, she's studious, she's organized, she's incredibly athletic, she likes what she likes and doesn't enjoy a lot of drama in her life. I love her and I've come to realize that I was given the gift of a girl who I will not have to worry about when it comes to being independent and making the right decisions. At 9, she is more mature than most grown women I know. But it means we butt heads--a lot.
What's very funny is my mom always warned us that her side of the family has a long history of mothers not getting along with their first born daughters. The only memories of my great grandma Ila are fighting with my grandma over the most random things--and they were in their 80s and 60s if I recall correctly. My mom and my grandma would get in these huge shouting matches and dredge up things from the distant past that neither one of them was ever going to get over. One of the reasons I am so close with my niece Maddie is because she and my sister Jennifer are always on the verge of strangling each other. And I guess the same is true for me and Abby. There is something about our genetics combined with living with another female at a different stage of life gears us up for friction..
I have mentioned many times that Abby is somewhat of wrestling savant. She watched an MMA fight with bubs when she was 5 or 6 and she was absolutely hooked. I couldn't imagine her getting punched in the face so after some research we compromised and found her a Brazilian Jiujitsu gym and she loved it from day one. We let her enter her first tournament maybe a month after starting and she got absolutely destroyed in both of her matches and cried the entire way home. I figured that was the end of Jiujitsu but Abby took the losses and determined to be the best she could be...she was 6 and at least in her age group and weight, she hasn't lost a match since. Every once in a while she'll get moved up at a tournament where she will lose against a bigger kid but she and Bubs always talk it after as to what mistakes she made and how she can adapt for her next match. As a teacher, I've been around hundreds of kids her age and I have never seen any be as stoic and dedicated as she is to doing well at her sports, sometimes I worry that she's going to regret not ever being a "kid."
When we found out we were moving to Arizona, I figured we would just continue with Jiujitsu but after the Olympics this past year, Abby got her sites set on becoming an Olympian someday. She fell in love with Judo (which to me looks exactly like Jiujitsu--did that ever earn my a tongue lashing) but she started to research and there really isn't a Judo facility in Tucson that gave her a good feeling so she found a junior traditional wrestling club that is very close to where we now live. Without our knowledge Abby was sending emails asking questions to the coach to make sure they would take girls and how often the practiced and if she could expect to be able to wrestle when she gets to high school. The coach is a great guy and thankfully didn't answer any questions and made sure that she get her parents involved in the discussion.
The club's season didn't start until a few weeks ago and to say that that kid announced her presence on the scene is an understatement. Other than the outfits, I have a hard time seeing the difference between Jiujitsu and wrestling but apparently they are different enough that Abby was worried that she would be so far behind. Not so, she was like a little monster from the first day and I think actually made some of the other kids nervous with her intensity. The wrestling program is a a real athletic program and Abby is hooked. She comes home a sweaty mess (with bruises all over her), she takes a shower, devours more food than I thought was possible, does her homework and then falls asleep like I've never seen. And wakes up excited to do it all over again.
So this is where I will finally tie in my experience in the "public" space with the fight Abby and i had this week. Because she is super internet savvy, Abby has researched and found out that one of the ways girls get popular in wrestling to do things like go to college and potentially the Olympics are to become social media stars. Abby has shown me videos in the past and I have to admit some of the girls are adorable and videos of a cute little girl humbling a boy her size get millions of views and thousands of likes. And if this is her passion and that's what it takes to succeed, than I'm not opposed to it. She is an adorable kid and with strawberry hair and blue eyes--she takes gorgeous pictures. Combining that with her beating up on boys, she could very well be a social media celeb.
But as we found out this week that Abby took it upon herself to create an Instagram account and made it very public to document her wrestling journey. We would have never seen it but a friend from back home in Texas found it and let us know. Now again, I am not opposed to her doing this in some sort of controlled way but I am livid that she went behind our back to do this. It breaks my heart that we live in a world where a 9 year old girl in a wrestling singlet can bring out the worst in people. Maybe I'm overreacting but images of what some of the awful redditors said specifically about my kids makes me want to hide them away forever--I know there are creeps who will come across her Instagram account and it makes me sad for the world and terrified for her.
Bubs and I sat her down last night and told her how disappointed with her we were that she went behind our back to do this and didn't let us know and that while we aren't going to make her delete the account, she has to set it to private and we have to approve anyone who asks to follow her. Of course because I'm the mom, she took all her anger out on me and blamed me for not wanting her to succeed and what a hypocrite I am for being proud of my time in gymnastics and not letting her do the same. No matter how much I tried to explain that she's 9 and there is plenty of time for her to build a responsible social media presence when she's more mature and capable of handling it, she wasn't hearing it. To his credit, Bubs tried to deflect some her anger away from me, but because Abby and I have that natural friction he was off the hook and I was the most evil parent to ever have existed.
She hasn't spoken to me since last night and as Bubs was taking her out the door to her open mat Jiujitsu session I told her that I really hoped she did well today and like a razor she responded with "I'm sure you want me to fail at that too MOM!" That really stung and while I could hear through the front door that Bubs had a stern talk with her, I'm glad he took her to hopefully burn off some off this resentment that she has against me by grappling with other kids. If she's as angry as she seems, I would not want to be those kids today.
I know Abby is a little resentful because I haven't been able to give her as much attention as I was before I went on the modified bed rest and I feel bad for both kids. I know I have to be patient with them and allow them to express themselves because their lives around to change just as much as ours, maybe more so. TJ has been like my little maitre'd and even put a little bell on my night stand so I can call for him if I need anything. Abby has been much more standoffish and I think part of her outburst from this morning is that she knows how much things are changing and she can't control it.
She's a great kid and I can't even begin to say how proud I would be if she can turn her passion for wrestling into a college scholarship (or even more) but I've seen first hand how ugly the internet can be and I have to protect her. Sucks but it's true.
You know you did everything right. I have prides myself in not being naive in my Outlook on life, politics and whatever. But meeting reddit I saw new levels of human vileness and it seemed much more common than I thought. The comment section of social media is not a good place for a 9 year old. She will understand.
ReplyDeleteI'm still lost as to whether the guy who created hundreds of accounts (and that's not an exaggeration at all) was one person or many but I did not know that people would say such things, even under the cover of anonymity. I have to think that even though most of their accounts were permanently banned that reddit has record of what they said and it can't be hard to trace it back to them. I know it's probably a small drop in huge bucket but the comments were really that bad.
DeleteI don't envy the parents of your generation having to raise kids in the world of social media. You and Bubs did exactly the right thing. A 9 year old has no business on social media in any manner. I remember one of my boys asking if they could go jump off a rope swing into a flooded river. I told him to just go to his room and start getting pissed off because he wasn't going. It's called being a parent. She will get over it, and someday when she has a 9 year old of her own she will thank you
ReplyDeleteThe part that's so hard is she's not wrong--I've been looking into all weekend and there are so many sports parents who have social media accounts for their kids (or allow the kids to have their own accounts) with the near explicit purpose of getting their kids exposure for sports in college and beyond. But no, as a 9 year old its not going to be for her, we may slowly allow her if she's interested when she's older but Bubs had kind of the best take--if she's good enough to get a college scholarship for wrestling, all they will care about is her skills.
DeleteYes...she is wrong. Just because other parents are doing it or allowing it does not mean it is good parenting. I have mentioned that I am older (71M). I have spent the last 35 years involved in youth sports first coaching my children and then helping run a baseball and basketball league. Trust me there are a lot of crazy parents out there. They think their child is going to be the next Derrick Jeter (sorry Bubs, I know you hate the Yankees). They spend thousands of $$ on equipment (I recall you writing about this) and travel teams. There 8 year olds playing 80 -100 baseball games a year, playing tournaments with ungodly amounts of pressure on them. Then the kid turns 14 or 15 and either burns out or their interests change. Not all of them but most. Parents would actually get mad at me when I told them that their kids were more likely to get an academic scholarship to college than an athletic scholarship.
DeleteMy nephew had a son who was a dominant baseball player growing up. When he got to high school he got cut from the team. I was was really surprised because of all the stories I heard from his dad about how good he was. I had not seen him in a few years, but it turned out he was dominant because he was bigger than the other kids, and he quit growing and the other kids caught up to him. It was a tough pill for him to swallow going from the proverbial penthouse to the outhouse.
I saw this onetime and I don't remember the numbers, but for baseball the number of players involved dropped by about a factor of ten at each level. So from youth to high school to college/minor league to MLB. There are 832 players in the majors 26 players/team X 32 teams). My boys went to a big time football high school, coached by a former NFL QB. Only a handful went on the play in college. Of the 6 varsity teams between them only 7 boys got offers to play Div 1, only 4 got to play (1 of those was a kicker), only 2 got a shot at the NFL and played. For some of the boys it got them in to more competitive academic schools than they otherwise would have. Some Ivy League.
Another thing to think about. Not to get political but we don't know yet how this will play out. Considering your daughters chosen sports do you want her to have compete against boys after puberty?
So one thing that Bubs and I have always been on the same page about is how realistic an athlete's chances are of going to college or the pros. For our area and are age, we both competed at pretty high levels and I certainly could have gone on to be on a small D2 or D3 gymnastics team had I not been so burnt out. Bubs was definitely going to get a college scholarship and maybe even have a chance to get into the pro draft right out of high school but his knee injury pretty much ended that. But if we were being very honest, we both knew college (or low level pro baseball) was as far as we'd both go. The thing that Abby does have going for her is that her chosen activity is still pretty niche so if she keeps working at it, I think she may have a good shot at wrestling in college. We'll see, my parents never pushed me in gymnastics and I loved it so much but I still was completely burnt out my last year so the same thing may happen to her.
DeleteAs far as wrestling boys--it doesn't really bother me but I would rather see her wrestle girls. I think the problem is that in a lot of places girl's wrestling is very small so they will enter the girls into the boys division as long as the girls meet the same weight requirements. If that had to happen with her, I would rather do that than have her not compete. This is still very new to us (or me I should say) and just because I've been laid up, I really haven't been able to go to her practices to see what its like in person. I know at her Jiujitsu gym back home she had no issues wrestling with the boys but that may change as she gets older. But at least as of right now, she is so aggressive that I don't even think she notices if she's wrestling a boy or girl.
Bubs knows far to well that regardless of how good you are an injury can end the dream. As you said you burned out on gymnastics. One of my daughter-in-laws was a ballerina until as her mom said she got to "curvy". Then among the saddest story is the kid that is the superstar like my grandnephew until puberty came along and he stopped growing and everyone else caught up with him. I really feel for these kids because when they are young the parents and coaches make a big deal out of them but when everyone catches up with them and they are no longer dominant they become afterthoughts. The psychological slide is tough on these kids.
DeleteI think it is crazy to allow boys to compete in women's sports. It's not an issue before puberty, girls can hold their own and often beat boys at that point. After puberty a boys body changes in ways different from girls. Their bones get thicker and heavier, their heart and lungs get bigger. Their muscles get thicker. All the hormones and hormone blockers in the world aren't going to change those facts after puberty. Matching weight class in wrestling or boxing doesn't compensate for these differences. There are high school trans boys breaking all kinds of state records around the country. On Gavin Newsom's podcast with Charlie Kirk as his guest they referenced a trans boy in California who was long jumping 10 feet further than the girls. In Connecticut there has been a lawsuit filed by a group of high school girl track athletes who have lost out on championships and scholarships to trans boys. It was stated in the suit that 2 boys held 17 state records in women's track.
I don't know what it will take to get people to figure this out. Maybe some 6'10" former college basketball player decides he wants to play in the WNBA and scores 100 points a night. Or a guy struggling to survive on the PGA Tour decides to see if he can make some money on the LPGA Tour and is out driving the best women in the world by 50 yards. This issue is so patently unfair and I just don't know why people don't understand it...especially women.
I will now climb down off my soapbox.
A couple other comments. College baseball in the past has had very few scholarships to give. I doubt anyone got a full-ride like they all do in football. The scholarships are diced up. There was a boy on my youngest sons baseball team. His dad and older brother played baseball at Vanderbilt. The younger brother was not nearly as good as his older brother, but the coach liked him and wanted him in the program. He got a scholarship for his books. It also got him admitted to Vanderbilt as an athlete rather than a regular student. The boy was a good student but didn't have the grades or test scores it took to get into Vanderbilt. As an aside he did great in school at Vanderbilt, graduated, and is married a doing great. He rarely if ever saw the field in baseball.
ReplyDeleteI think there are some scholarships available at D2 schools I'm not sure. Both my boys went to D3 schools and could have played football but chose not to. There are no scholarships in D3. Agreeing to play may help you with admission.