My Mom is a skater…
…and other things that made all the difference
I’ve been going ice skating as long as I can really remember. There are slides of me as young as 2 or 3, bundled up like the stay-puft marshmallow man, squinting in the glitter of the frozen lake on double runner skates. Slides, not photos, because for some reason I still don’t understand, my dad decided he liked getting film back that way. The photography was my dad’s domain. The ice was my mom’s.
As soon as it got cold enough, the parks department would flood the tennis courts at our neighborhood park and she used to walk us the few blocks away to skate before we were old enough to go there alone. A lot of kids didn’t have skates and would boot slide around, but my Mom could skate and made sure we learned. She was a pretty skater — not a lot of tricks in her repertoire, but she was fast and had a graceful bearing that made me feel proud of her when we went there. I remember her smile and how she relaxed when she skimmed around. It made me like skating, watching her like it. She told me about the flooded backyard of her childhood and always lit up in the re-telling of how she would stay out skating even after dark, long after her brothers and sisters had gone inside. I could see her as a little girl skating in the yard, and I think it might be the first time I considered her as someone other than my grown-up Mother. I was like her. She had been like me.
The winter after I turned 9, my mom showed me that the parks and rec department was offering ice skating classes at the rink not far from us and asked if I might be interested. I honestly didn’t know why I needed classes when she had taught me to skate already, but I liked skating, so I let her sign me up. The rink was cold and dingy and kind of sterile, and the teacher wasn’t particularly inspiring — but after a couple sessions I got more comfortable on the ice and more importantly, far faster. When you pick up speed on skates everything changes — suddenly there’s adrenaline, and freedom and flying and then I understood what I had been watching on my mom’s face when we were little.
I advanced from front to back crossovers and soon was speeding around backwards and looking for the next challenge. I was also paying attention to other skaters and starting to admire and want to be like the older girls who came after my class was finished — the ones spinning and jumping and wearing short dresses. I never thought about whether the cost of getting to the next level in my skating was even affordable for my parents. If I wanted to jump and spin and skate to music it was going to take joining a figure skating club, hiring a private coach, paying for practice ice time and getting far better skates. I remember my mom helping me choose my first real skating dress from the pro-shop. It was a red, white and blue with a sporty zipper at the collar and an embroidered patch on the chest that advertised the 1980 Winter Olympics. I had made it — I was a future star in my own mind but not of my own making. That was my Mom’s doing too.
I skated and she sewed rhinestones on dresses. I skated and she listened to music she thought I should choose for my next program. My dad drove me to my endless stretch of lessons and practices while my mom stayed behind with my younger siblings, juggling the busy house on her own so I could skate. I skated and she rearranged the budget at home to make it work. For a little while, my brother and sister both joined the skate club/lessons routine — there are ice show costume pics of them to prove it — but they were ultimately meant for other passions, and I continued on at the rink alone. I won a few local competitions and she cheered. I got some coveted solos in my club ice shows, and she cheered. That’s how it was, I skated and she cheered. It never occurred to me that in adopting her early passion as my own, I had taken over the role of “the skater” when, in her big family, that had been her special thing. She handed over that magic willingly and watched me fly away with it well beyond her girlhood backyard, yet I never once saw longing or regret. She shared in it easily and excitedly, without want of credit or attention. I took that for granted, too. There was no stage mom in my mother, and unlike a lot of the other skating club Moms, she yielded to me the space to find myself out there on the ice. Maybe its because she once found herself out there too.
This isn’t a story about a young girl with a dream who fought and scraped her way to becoming a champion. I skated happily through high school at a relatively novice level and then packed my skates up with me to move away to college. At Michigan State I served as a teaching assistant for some of the university’s phys ed credit classes, and I taught parks and rec group lessons at a rink in Lansing for a tiny stipend for a couple of winter seasons. Beyond that, I was and remain a recreational skater. I brought my own kids to public skate sessions when they were younger. They watched me speed around, cheered when I could still do my sit spin, and brought their friends around to have me give them some pointers on an outing or two. My kids told me how proud they were of that, having their friends see their cool ice skater mom. I remembered how I had looked at my own mom speeding around at the tennis courts and being proud to claim her. I realize now I never told her that.
When I was busy finishing school, getting married, working, parenting, etc. and my skating took a back seat position, my mom was finding it for herself again. She became a later-in-life rink rat, out at the local rink’s public skate sessions several mornings a week. Beyond rekindling the enjoyment and exercise, she found a social outlet there too. Other skaters like her, some retired or empty nesters who never lost their love of the sport either. She expanded her network of friends and found a camaraderie in their shared enthusiasm for all things skating. I went to the rink with her a few times back then, and she was still herself but different. Her skating was stronger than I remembered it, and she was too. Vibrant. Full of energy and speed and even daring. Growing up, I would never have described my mother as daring, but here she was, zooming around, confident, pushing the envelope both in her skating and in her relationships. She also knew so much more about what was happening in the figure skating world, talking about this skater’s program, that coach’s latest acquisition, and what the Russians were up to (still a pertinent topic), while my knowledge and intensity for both had waned.
I didn’t live close, and we didn’t skate together often, but every skating competition season, she’d call (and later text when that became a thing) to tell me when skating was on TV. I’d flip it on and we’d watch the greats of the sport in our separate houses together, rooting for our favorites and critiquing the various performances. Sometimes my husband or kids would sit and watch, drifting in and out trying to support or understand my favorite sport, more as a courtesy to me, but it was never their thing. It was always our thing — me and mom. Regardless of all the other obstacles and distractions we had at work these last 25 years, skating was always in our favor.
My mom didn’t return to the rink after she fought and survived her aggressive bout with cancer. Chemo had leached the strength from her bones, and she was advised not to risk the inevitable falls that come from a sport like ice skating. I actually didn’t know how long it had been since she had skated until very recently. She’d not laced up her skates in 15 years, and the realization frustrated me and confronted my brain in a way I didn’t expect. Yes, she was nearly 80 years old — smaller and softer in the way that older ladies get, and a little slower. But not skating? Once again, here I was, having failed to see the person right in front of me. She’d left her time on the ice behind quietly, without fanfare or complaint while I cruised along in my contentment that everything would always be the same. People say that you aren’t really paying attention to the last time you do something, like carry your sleeping child from the car into the house. It slipped from my notice that my mom and I won’t go skating together anymore, and while the knowledge made me feel cheated, I didn’t ask her how it made her feel. I didn’t think I should.
In one of our regular sessions of texting back and forth while watching skating this winter, I noticed an advertisement for the World Figure Skating Championships taking place in Canada this Spring and hatched the idea of traveling with my Mom to go see it. We’d always watched but never attended an international competition before, and I asked her if she would go. She hesitated, as travel is a little tougher on her than it used to be and asked for time to think about it. A few weeks later we were back in front of our respective TVs, chatting about how much we both adore Jason Brown as he skated his program at the US Nationals and I said, “C’mon Mom, let’s go see him in Montreal.” Love of Jason, of skating and of me won out over her concern about the travel, and she said, “Okay, I’m in!” Tickets were secured a few rows up from the ice, the hotel was booked and 2 months later we arrived in Montreal.
We bought day passes that allowed us to see a good amount of the whole competition, and unlike what the usual television coverage provided, we were able to see all the competitors in each skating discipline, instead of just the ones most likely to win. Here we were, far from both of our couches, among people who’d traveled from all over the world to witness both the glories and defeats of skaters just like us, though, obviously a tad better. We were like them, though, united in a kinship that started in the same way for these elite competitors. The love of the sound of ice crunching beneath blades, the cold wind rushing through your hair as you pick up speed, the hell yes pump of a fist in the air after a landed jump — now we were just 2 old ladies in the stands, but so much more. The old thrill took hold of me in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time, and I was sitting next to the one person in my life who understood exactly what I was feeling.
Not everyone gets to share a first love of theirs with a parent. I am one of the lucky ones who does. I’m connected to my mom in all the usual ways that most people are with theirs. Maybe in some ways we were less so than some of you, but in skating, we always had something extra, and the older we both get, the more I appreciate the rarity of that. Among all the things she has been and done throughout her life, my mom is a skater, and because of her, so am I. Like everyone living, we’ll keep changing, but skating never will. She is still a backyard ice princess and I am the girl who surprised everyone by landing the first axel she ever attempted. And so together, we are still us.
And that is good. Really, really good.
