People always look at me funny when I mention ice skating and kickball. Then I get to bootcamp and their eyes start to take on that “she’s crazy!” look. Sometimes they take it in a positive way, other times they clearly think the divorce has affected my brain, but I always get some variation of “gee, that’s great… I wish I had the guts to do something like that”. By which they usually really mean “you wouldn’t catch me dead doing any of that”. So I thought it might be interesting to write about why I do the things I do. I’m not exactly sure myself, so maybe I can figure it out along the way…

Part one is about Ice Skating…

For reasons I never fully understood, my father was about as overprotective as they come, and he spent my childhood keeping me away from anything that had any sort of injury potential. So of course, ice skating was right out. There was a rink near where we lived and I always wanted to go, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Of course it didn’t help that he didn’t know how to skate himself, and he wasn’t about to put me in a class. So as I was growing up it was one of those sort of mythical activities that I always wanted to do and yet knew in my heart of hearts I would be really bad at (yea, pudgy kid, afraid of falling, very poor sense of balance… maybe he was right…).

I took up skating in the mid-90s because I had a friend from a rubber stamping group who was an accomplished adult skater. I had spent a couple of years in therapy and had been told repeatedly that it was a good idea to go back and do some of those things that I never got to do, that it was good for my “inner child”, so when I realized that adult skating was a real option I jumped on it. I didn’t make a huge amount of progress, but I did feel like I had made up for some of that loss, and probably became a better skater than I ever would have been able to as a fearful child. Though I was still plenty fearful as an adult; my fear of falling held me back quite a bit.

One of the things I did during this period was participate in an ice show. I was the only grownup in the show, so I towered over everyone else. I was dressed up as a clown, with face paint and everything. I know I looked silly, and I even fell at one point, but I *loved* it. I guess it was good for my inner ham. :)

After a few years we moved away; at first I was too busy to skate, and then we moved to New Hampshire, which has very few skating rinks (indoor, anyway). And then finally to Oregon, where I have once again been too busy to take it up. Plus I’m a bit more worried about injuries than I was 10 years ago… In NH I fell on the ice on our driveway and cracked a vertebrae, and I remember the pain of that quite vividly; I wasn’t sure if I would be able to go out on the ice at all anymore.

Now here I am, single and the master of my own schedule, and suddenly trying skating again seemed like the right thing to do. So I did, and it has been a lot of fun so far. I’m much stronger and thinner than I was before, which helps a great deal. I’m also much *less* fearful, oddly, even though I’ve had a few falls now.

I like skating because it makes me feel light and like I can move effortlessly. I also feel more graceful on skates than I do on the ground, though I suspect I don’t *look* that way. :) I like to imagine that one day I’ll be able to do some of the harder stuff, maybe even some single jumps. That may be unrealistic but if I manage to do it I’ll have really conquered a lot of things – my old clumsiness and lack of coordination, my fear of falling (because it takes a *lot* of falling to learn how to jump), and even my self-image as awkward and dorky, which has never fully gone away even though it’s mostly not true anymore.

There are quite a few adult skaters at this rink, so maybe one day I can be in an ice show again and not be the only tall one. :)

I also learned something about myself through skating, indirectly that is. Back when I skated at the Snoopy Rink there was often a crying child being soothed by a parent nearby while I was putting my skates on or taking them off. This always made me tear up, every single time. It took me a while to figure out why… because of that overprotectiveness, I always got in trouble for getting hurt. If my dad was there then I got scolded for not being careful enough. If my mother was there, she was just annoyed that I actually needed something from her. No-one ever just tried to comfort me like that. It made me realize how much I still carried them around with me, even though I didn’t want to. It hasn’t happened so far this time around, so maybe I have finally been able to let that one go…