The Dodgeball Dilema

In our family, the game of dodgeball has become a kind of moral and ethical template by which we judge people’s character.

It all started with my nephew Collin at a family dinner. We were grilling him about a kid his age, someone we vaguely knew. “He’ s an OK guy,” answered my nephew, thoughtfully chewing his burger. “But he cheats at dodgeball.”

We got it. We all got it. Dodgeball, a game we all played in the summer, had become the arbiter of whether or not someone was a decent human being at their core, honest and ethical.

For those of you who don’t know, the game of dodgeball has made a comeback. There are even college teams. It’s kindler and gentler now and much more PC than when I was in middle school. You don’t try to nail the chubby girl in the back row who eats paste or the kid with duct tape on his glasses who picks his nose.

Dodgeball is a process of elimination; a survival of the fittest. It begins with organized chaos as two teams square off with dozens of balls being hurled in the air. Unlike baseball or basketball, where all eyes are on the person who has the ball, dodgeball has dozens of balls all flying around at the same time with the goal of nicking any body part below the neck. If you get hit, you are out. Pure and simple. In the craziness of the first few minutes, it is often one person’s word over another’s. This means it is largely up to the individuals to police themselves.

There are those that get hit and try to get away with it. There are some who fight the call when challenged. Others give in and slyly slink off when called on the carpet. And then there are those who immediately come clean when they’ve been hit. Even when no one is watching, they pull themselves out of the game and onto the sidelines.

As a parent, I aspire to raise one of those kids. Oh, I’m well aware that cheating at dodgeball doesn’t mean a kid is destined to a life of robbing banks, kiting checks or pulling the legs off flies. But I found it interesting that my own nephew had arrived at the dodgeball test on his own. I like the fact that one teen could identify a kind of touchstone to determine the stuff of which his peers were made.

I recently watched an R-rated movie with my daughter and two of her friends. It was mostly inappropriate humor but I made sure to ask both kids if this was OK with their parents. I was impressed when each girl wanted to call their mothers to double check.

When I commented to my daughter about how wonderful it was that her friends did this, she immediately jumped on me. “Mom, I have never seen an R rated movie ever. And I would always ask you first,” she huffed defensively. OK, she passed the dodgeball test on that one.

The dodgeball test may be one little marker, one silly way we can look at an element of a person’s character. But cheating at dodgeball is just one of many small but critical transgressions I see today that we need to remain vigilant about when it comes to our kids. So many of life’s little lessons are being lost in our haste to be “friends” with our kids, or unnaturally force our lives to be completely “kid-centric” (a term that makes the hairs on my forearm stand up).

By being afraid of drawing too many boundaries, we are letting slide a lot of opportunities to teach good old-fashioned citizenship and manners. Like the dodgeball test, we can all be judged by an aggregate of the little things; respect for the elderly, giving up your seat on the train, looking people in the eye, delivering a firm handshake. As parents, we get sick of nagging about these things, but in the end, their presence or absence tells us something about an individual. I have a warm spot in my heart for a young man who calls me Ma’am, even though it makes me sound like an ancient crone.

I want my children to understand that there are consequences for actions. That means we need to follow through with our threats, not make the hollow remarks I hear screamed at kids in the grocery store aisles.

There is a famous parenting story about a family traveling to Disney World. Maybe you know this one, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it is an urban myth. Exasperated by the dreaded “when will we be there” question, the parents told the kids if they asked one more time, they wouldn’t be able to go to Disney World. Legend has it when little Johnny broke the rule, they stuck to their guns. They had to. The miserable parents went to the park by themselves all day, hiring a sitter for the kids in the hotel room.

I know I sound just like the grandmas of a generation before, cluck-clucking at that hip-swivelin’ rock’n’roll music. Or, heaven forbid, I sound like Tipper Gore sounded to me in the 80s about record lyrics, until I had my own kids and listened to some of the misogynist bondage rap stuff on the radio one day. I began to channel Tipper Gore that day, taking back everything I had ever muttered about her and freedom of speech.

When we lived in Phoenix in 1995, in the span of two weeks I left my wallet on top of my station wagon twice and drove away. Those were really exhausting days with two kids under four and a full-time home business. The second time it happened, I set the wallet on top of the car as I wrestled both kids into their car seats and then drove away. When I got home, I realized immediately what I had done and burst into tears.

Lo and behold, the phone rang a few hours later. A man had found the wallet and he lived 20 minutes away in what I knew to be a somewhat shady neighborhood. I was making bets that the money was gone and I was furious with myself because I had just been to the cash machine and withdrawn my bi-weekly budget. Planning on giving him some of the money in my wallet as a reward, I also stopped and bought a 12-pack of beer. I figured in his hood they could all have a little party.

When I rang his bell, clutching my two kids to me in the dark, the man who answered the door was in flowing robes, with a top knot of hair. I quickly reached into my limited knowledge of Eastern religions and dimly recognized that he was a Sikh. As I thrust the beer at him in gratitude, he practically jumped back in disgust. “We don’t drink in our religion,” he said. And my humiliation at my sanctimonious neighborhood profiling was complete. The wallet was intact, with every dollar accounted for.

One thing I knew for sure. If that man, the one who found my wallet on the asphalt of the grocery store parking lot, had been tagged out in dodgeball and nobody saw him? He would have quietly taken himself out to the sidelines. Can you say the same?

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The Women's Sports Pages

Last Sunday I was reading the Woman’s Sports Pages in the New York Times. For the uninitiated, that’s the wedding section; the part where a happy duo smiles blithely and innocently from their cropped photo on the page.

Much had changed since my own face beamed out from my engagement photo, a rite of passage with the formal wedding announcement. For starters, in the olden days, proper etiquette dictated that the photo contain only the bride. Hence the pejorative term, in reference to the accomplishment of having “bagged” a husband. The sport was in catching a man.

Today, those same pages spill over with lesbian and gay couples, hetero duos with bright faces beaming, unaware that they are about to climb on the rollercoaster of life together, certain their love will bring them only good things and eternal happiness. There are older couples too—couples stunned with the brilliance of their good fortune at meeting so late in life or getting a second chance at marital bliss. These couples look less jaunty, perhaps more prepared. They understand that a percentage of this is simply up to the fates.

Perusing those pages I thought back to my own whirlwind wedding weekend, my open, apple-cheeked face as a new bride marrying “Robert Woodruff, of Birmingham, Michigan attorney at Sherman and Sterling” as if all of those NYT pedigreed descriptions could contain him.

Our wedding had been hasty. Although we’d dated for two years, Bob had the chance to go overseas and teach in China. He had asked me to go with him, to marry him first, a feat which we pulled off in three months, with not just a little angst on my mothers part and a lot of friction between us.

The morning after our wedding we woke up as husband and wife in a canopy bed in the Adirondacks and made our way down the Hudson River by train, holding hands as the light flashed through the window between the trees like an old newsreel. We were married. We were determined that our love was big enough and powerful enough and generous enough… was simply enough, to forge a wonderful life together. Tragedy and misfortune were for people who didn’t follow the rules, who were mean and colored outside of the lines, who disrespected others and harbored black places in their heart.

I thought about all of this last weekend as I let my eye trail down the page at the images of all those happy, expectant people. These were folks who had just gotten engaged or married, who wanted to announce it to the world with their photos, to gleefully make us a party to all that happiness and hopefulness.

Thank goodness that the world kept turning out couples like that. I reveled for a moment in the prospect of all that boundless optimism to believe that life would deal you a good hand, that love kept regenerating, even while others battled loss and depression, disappointment and sorrow.

A silly thought flashed through my mind. I pictured us now, today, on those pages, envisioning how we would appear; the set of a jaw, the look in our eyes. Our love was richer, deeper, it hid more in the folds inside of us. It was no longer moonfaced and expectant. We were long past the point where we couldn’t touch each other enough or held hands on every sidewalk. Our love had mellowed into something with real texture; the fibers of the tapestry tough and tenacious from a marriage woven of good and bad, joy and sorrow, loss and abundance.

Thinking about the miscarriages, the loss, the injury, the fear, the things we had endured together I could touch the parts in me where dreams had been compromised. I could articulate what a parallel life would look like, one in which my husband was not injured in Iraq, one in which life had kept moving forward as he flew to all the worlds breaking events, covered the 2008 election, interviewed world leaders.

How do you live in the shadow of what might have been after something big and bad happens? How do you grocery shop and car pool and cut up the salad and not let your mind wander to that parallel life, the one where only good things happen, where good people are rewarded?

And in any marriage you play the hand you are dealt. Wherever that may take you. And yet, as my friend Jim told me once, you never stop trying to get your hands on the deck.

That, I think, is the lesson we all learn, in one form or another as we struggle to make sense of what it means to choose a mate, to hitch a star to pull a collective wagon, to overcome or to simply endure.

And as we move, day in and day out into a familiar orbit, one with duller colors and smoother edges smoothed by the passage of time, we are no longer that expectant couple looking hopefully out of the engagement photo. But the rewards of the journey, are often full of unexpected goodness, beauty and moments of grace.

My two sisters and I were recently in Hawaii to celebrate my 50^th year. We shared the resort with conference attendees and honeymooners and we watched with amusement and nostalgia as they draped themselves around one another in the elevators or gazed dreamily at each other during breakfast.

“Enjoy it now!” we joked under our breath.

“This is the fantasy island part,” my sister Nan said in a feigned warning. “The rest is all downhill.” We cracked ourselves up.

But lurking under our pretend cynicism was a moment where each one of us took stock. The children, the years logged, the good health, the close family, the new families we had built. We’d all three weathered the good and the bad. We were here. We were celebrating, each raising a glass, ultimately eager to get home to our house, home to our kids, and home to our men.

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Throwing Out My Bra

It was time. Past time. I stood with one hand poised over the trash can holding my bra. The elastic on the straps was shot, the material puckered around the back where it meets the hooks and eyes. There is no longer any support offered, but yet the cups now seem woefully big for me - or is it that with the advancement of time, my boobs have shrunk yet again.

Standing over the trash with the bra, I hesitate. My conviction wavers. What if I just keep the bra as a back up, some emergency moment when all the other bras fail me or are in the wash? The truth is this — this bra has been good to me.

This bra has supported me through the last three years. It has taken me through parent teacher conferences, been there for medical pronouncements, supported me when the doctor called to tell me the lump was benign. It has exercised with me, walked and hiked. It had held me together while my husband recovered from injury and I tried to buck up my children’s fears. It has grocery shopped and gone on girls’ weekends. It’s been to concerts and gotten sweaty in raspberry fields and while doing yard work. This bra has seen me at my very best and most joyous and put up with me through the headaches, the petty and snippy moments, the nagging.

I’d bought the bra in a group of three—one black and two nude, skin color they called it, although I have yet to meet someone with that truly pinkish color of flesh. But one of the fleshy ones was defective, one strap kept coming unhooked, and so it found its way to the back of my drawer. This one, the one I held now, had become, by default, my go-to bra. How many hundred times had I washed it by hand with Woolite?

But the support was gone. And now, with the passage of time, there seemed to be a chasm between the lip of the bra cup and the flesh of my breast. Its like the space between two glaciers. There is no longer any contact. You could lay an entire banana between the gap between my breasts and my bra now. Sigh.

I hate bra shopping. Hate it. Perhaps if I had perfect, perky boobs or a boob job where they sat like mounds of dewy perfection I’d enjoy this exercise. But bra shopping to me is an exercise in facing my flaws in a fluorescent mirror. It’s a little bit like whipping a cat-o-nine-tails over your back.

So as I held the bra over the trash, a sort of simple bra-prayer played over my mind; the kind of thing one mentally mumbles when a hamster or gold fish dies. You have a flash of remorse for the thing that was, even though it didn’t live on the grand emotional scale afforded a cat, dog or human being.

Here was the thing. I had already replaced that bra. I’d gone to Victoria’s Secret with my teenaged daughter, determined to walk out of there with something appropriate and well fitting. We’d chosen three again, one black and two that pinkishy nude of a band-aid, nothing racy, lacey or with demi-cups. Once again I’d ended up with something sensibly supportive.

With one last look and a sigh, I dropped the bra unceremoniously into the garbage trash. Covered with coffee grounds and rotten broccoli and the leavings of the previous meal, it seemed an inglorious end to something that had been so intimate.

I imagine it now, in some kind of land-fill heaven. I envision sea gulls dive bombing the area for food scraps as the bra stands, cups outstretched to the sky, silently holding together its little patch of hill.

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