Sleepy Gymnastics

My life is good. It really is.

And yet, I found myself looming over a sobbing Olivia at 1:30 this morning, hissing, “You wouldn’t need a tissue if you were sleeping instead of sitting there crying.”

Why was she crying? Because instead of lying in bed right beside me, she was in a different bed that put her all of six feet away from me. She couldn’t touch me from there, don’t you know?

I’d spend the previous hour hovering on that brink between sleep and wakefulness, listening to her breath hitch, waiting for the cries. In the week since she hurt her arm, she’s formed the habit of waking every hour or so just to check and see if I’m next to her.

It’s exhausting.

So why don’t I make Alyssa sleep in her own bed and just sleep next to Olivia in the big bed? Because I hate the big bed. It’s so, so uncomfortable. Obviously, we need a new mattress and yet I want a new couch before we splurge on a new mattress. See, we’ve waited to get a new couch until there was no longer anyone in the house peeing on the furniture. We haven’t had a pee accident in almost a year so I’m on the lookout for a new couch.

And I tell myself each night that having someone, even skinny little Alyssa next to her, will fool Olivia into thinking she’s sleeping next to soft, squishy Mom.

It never, ever works. And so for the past week, I’ve been woken up at least five times every single night and finally end up sharing a twin bed with Olivia, who is a flipping bed hog like you wouldn’t believe. Then, around 4 every morning, I move to the THIRD bed in the room (we’ve got a freaking DORM set up going on over here) where I managed to get the best rest of the night for an hour and a half before the alarm starts going off at 5:30.

The Olympics have totally inspired Alyssa to get back into gymnastics. She’s lost her mind about it, actually. She flips and jumps and spins all day long.

While watching the team finals the other night, she noticed that all the girls have these fancy wrist guard things and she’s ‘hinted’ that she wants some.

I say ‘hinted’ because the girl isn’t all that subtle. She think she is, especially when I don’t let on that I know exactly what she’s saying because most evenings she finally gives up the ‘hinting’ and just says it right out, “Maybe we could go to Dunham’s Sports Center this weekend and look for them.”

I’ve explained to her that until she actually NEEDS that kind of support (she can cartwheel and stand on her hands, she can flip from a handstand to a backbend and yesterday she started out in a bridge and managed to flip her legs back up and over, but that’s the extent of her gymnastics repertoire.) I am not paying for something like wrist guards.

She hears me but doesn’t seem to believe that I mean it because she keeps asking, keeps hinting, keeps suggesting we look at them.

I’ll be signing her up for recreational gymnastics this week.

The tough thing is trying to explain to her that just because she’s starting back up with classes doesn’t mean that in eight years she’ll be competing in the Olympics herself. I’ve tried to be gentle as I counter her aspirations, explaining that those girls have been working at this for years and years and years. They work out so many hours a week that she wouldn’t believe it if I told her the actual number of hours. I’ve reminded her that there are only five girls competing for the USA out of countless girls who do gymnastics every single day. We are not all Olympic level athletes. I don’t want to crush her dreams but I also don’t want to set her up for crushing disappointment.

Besides, she’s probably going to be too tall to be a competitive gymnast anyway. So yeah.

Parenting is hard. Supporting your nine-year-old as she imagines standing on the podium at the Olympics accepting a gold medal while also gently reminding her of the reality that the majority faces is tough. I want her to soar, to reach for the impossible but I also want her to know when something really, truly is out of reach.

It makes me think of those people who audition for American Idol, the ones who really, truly cannot sing to save their lives. Why did their friends and family let them go to those auditions? Why didn’t someone gently take them aside and say, “Sweetie, I love you and think you’re voice is glorious but…I’m not sure the world is going to agree with me?”

I kind of want to do that for my girl. I want to tell her that I think her cartwheels are the very best in the world but that I don’t think the Olympic judges are going to agree with me. But I don’t want to be that mom who can’t help but smother my child with reality. I want her to dream, and imagine greatness and work toward it while keeping her feet firmly on the ground. That’s possible, yes?