The other night, baby-on-the-way and I went to a playoff basketball game. No, this was not a Lakers game, or even a high-school game—though it was in a high-school gym. It was a playoff game for my husband’s lawyer basketball league. Lawyer basketball, you ask? Yes. Lawyer basketball. It’s basically a league made up of different law firms from around the city where overly aggressive males release the tension from a day’s work on the basketball courts and strive to recapture their glory days.
The smell of stale, sticky sweat permeated the air. The sound of rubber-soled-sneakers squealed and screeched as the players came to a halt on the shiny wooden floor. I saw the championship banners hanging high on the wall above the bleachers, with the hand-painted “Go Wildcats” posters not far below, and I was instantly transported to another world.
Something within the sounds and smells of the high-school gym took me to a mental place I had never been before during my pregnancy. As I watched these grown men run up and down the court, yelling “I’m open!” and “Come on, man!” with their hands in the air, I started thinking that someday, before I know it, I might be back in a gym just like this. But instead of watching my husband and his over-worked compadres hustle and wheeze their way up and down the court, I’d be watching my own child run, and jump, and test himself against other kids.
Since the early days of my pregnancy, I have spent countless hours imagining what my baby is going to be like—what she will look like, how it will feel to hold him, what it will be like to try to teach her things—but rarely have I thought about what happens when my baby starts to grow up and becomes an actual kid. What happens then?
As I sat in that gym, holding my pregnant belly tightly, I felt a new spirit of adventure. For the first time, I thought that being a mother will go far beyond changing diapers and pushing a stroller. Someday soon, several years away at least, I might be sitting in a gym watching Junior play YMCA basketball, or along the sidelines of a soccer field watching her run, or even in an auditorium watching her dance. Having a baby means more than just having a baby, it means having an actual KID who is going to sweat and compete and test himself or herself against the world, and I’m going to get to watch. That is pretty cool. And if it took a bunch of chubby, sweaty lawyers with inflated perceptions of their own athletic abilities to actually make me realize the depth of experiences I might someday share with this little person inside of me, so be it.
My husband’s team lost the game that night, but I won much more than he’ll ever know. Let’s just hope our baby has more class and sportsmanship than the “adults” on the floor that night who got into a fight because one of them was using too much “D” under the basket. (And no, my husband wasn’t one of them. Thank Goodness.)
The smell of stale, sticky sweat permeated the air. The sound of rubber-soled-sneakers squealed and screeched as the players came to a halt on the shiny wooden floor. I saw the championship banners hanging high on the wall above the bleachers, with the hand-painted “Go Wildcats” posters not far below, and I was instantly transported to another world.
Something within the sounds and smells of the high-school gym took me to a mental place I had never been before during my pregnancy. As I watched these grown men run up and down the court, yelling “I’m open!” and “Come on, man!” with their hands in the air, I started thinking that someday, before I know it, I might be back in a gym just like this. But instead of watching my husband and his over-worked compadres hustle and wheeze their way up and down the court, I’d be watching my own child run, and jump, and test himself against other kids.
Since the early days of my pregnancy, I have spent countless hours imagining what my baby is going to be like—what she will look like, how it will feel to hold him, what it will be like to try to teach her things—but rarely have I thought about what happens when my baby starts to grow up and becomes an actual kid. What happens then?
As I sat in that gym, holding my pregnant belly tightly, I felt a new spirit of adventure. For the first time, I thought that being a mother will go far beyond changing diapers and pushing a stroller. Someday soon, several years away at least, I might be sitting in a gym watching Junior play YMCA basketball, or along the sidelines of a soccer field watching her run, or even in an auditorium watching her dance. Having a baby means more than just having a baby, it means having an actual KID who is going to sweat and compete and test himself or herself against the world, and I’m going to get to watch. That is pretty cool. And if it took a bunch of chubby, sweaty lawyers with inflated perceptions of their own athletic abilities to actually make me realize the depth of experiences I might someday share with this little person inside of me, so be it.
My husband’s team lost the game that night, but I won much more than he’ll ever know. Let’s just hope our baby has more class and sportsmanship than the “adults” on the floor that night who got into a fight because one of them was using too much “D” under the basket. (And no, my husband wasn’t one of them. Thank Goodness.)
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