Mens sana in corpore sano
posted in OmegaDotter |Most folks know that saying: "A sound mind in a healthy body".
I’ve been thinking about this lately while ferrying OmegaDotter around to her various activities.
We placed the dotter, who wanted to "dance like a princess", into ballet last year in Small Mountain University Town. She had a blast–the teacher was a wonder with children and kept them interested and involved and having fun. So this year, we signed her up again, here in Suburban Alaska. This time, it’s not turning out so well; the class is a lot slower, more focused on official balletic curriculum tenets, and less fun in general. Around late November, she was whining complaining about it being boring and how she didn’t want to do it any more, but when she realized that ditching the class also meant ditching the recital (girly costumes! makeup! twirling around onstage!), after some bargaining attempts to get to do the recital without the class, she bowed to reality and said she’d finish off the year. I suspect that ballet is going to bite the dust after the recital.
Towards the beginning of last summer, when we knew we were moving, a buddy of the dotter’s had a "take your friend to your gymnastics class" day. Striving to ensure that she got as much contact with all her old buddies before she had to move, and influenced by her OT’s ongoing "you should put her in gymnastics, it would help her a great deal", we leaped on the chance. She had a blast with that, too. When it turned out that her before-and-after-school care facility was actually a gymnastics facility that offered gymnastics classes, I signed her up. She loved the gymnastics so much that in November I signed her up for a second class per week.
She’s doing wonderfully. She can do an awesome cartwheel. (I never could do a cartwheel. I was always a wuss about it, and I don’t know why. Apparently, neither OmegaGranny nor Great Grandma could do cartwheels, either.) She’s working on handstands. The bouncing, the jumping, the balancing–all things necessary for her to get that "I want to thump into things!" modality out of her system–she glows when she’s done with class.
Now, I must admit to having had a horrible prejudice against gymnastics in general before this. All I could think of was the horror stories about girls being browbeaten by ambitious coaches into anorexia. It seemed a celebration of all that was "tiny" and "delicate", conjoined with a somewhat condescending "omigosh, lookit that girrrrl bounce around!"
But when I haul the dotter off to gymnastics and sit on the bleachers watching the ongoing three-ring circus of varying ages and abilities of boys and girls whirling and twirling and flipping and bouncing and climbing…
It’s a different world than I expected.
I see all these strong girls. Flexible girls. Girls with muscle. (And boys, too, but as a parent of a girl, I’m much more aware of the girls defying age-old stereotypes.) All ages, all sizes. None of them look to be anorexic; there are, in fact, some Amazonian teens in the older gymnastic team practices, tall and lithe and muscular, well-proportioned and tall and still flipping over backwards and doing handstands and soaring from one uneven bar to the next.
The administration are always handing out flyers about good nutrition, things that emphasize the need for breakfast, for healthy snacks and proteins before a practice and afterwards. Not a word about worrying about weight. It’s refreshing. And, of course, it’s totally counter to my prejudgment.
Yesterday I was focused on two girls, maybe seven or eight years old. They were climbing up the ropes in the foam pit. The gymnasium is two stories tall, and the ropes go the entire two stories. There is a bell at the top of the rope; anyone who makes it to the top rings the bell, then heads on down.
These two girls–little things–worked their way up the ropes. All the way. They rang the bells. Then they climbed down.
I couldn’t have been prouder of them than if they were my own dotters: No-one was forcing them up those ropes. No one was shouting at them to force them on, no one would have dissed them if they hadn’t made it all the way. They were doing it because they wanted to, and they were determined about it.
In the end, I find these budding gymnasts inspiring and exciting to watch. And when I get glimpses of the dotter, way off on the other side of the gymnasium, between the junior gymnastics team girls on the beams, or the boys on the rings, succeeding after weeks of work at a particular move on the bars–well, it makes me feel just all warm-n-fuzzy inside.
