When my husband and I tied the knot, I promised to love and honor him and learn how to ski.
He had grown up skiing and had dreams of having his own family of skiers. I had dreams of owning a castle and my own private chocolate factory, but at least I was smart enough to realize that some dreams are just not meant to be.
Fortunately, I managed to avoid honoring my ski vows by getting pregnant fast and often. But eventually the day came when I my husband decided the kids were old enough to ski and then my plan was foiled.
Knowing I was a reluctant participant, my husband bribed me into skiing by buying me some cute ski outfits and lots of heated accessories. I had heated boots, heated mittens, head warmers, and butt warmers. I gave off so much heat when I skied that I left a trail of slush behind me on the slope.
So now I was warm. And I looked cute. But unfortunately, I wasn’t very good.
For 10 years I took group lessons, private lessons and a lesson with a top-notch Austrian instructor named Otto who promised to make a skier out of me but then threw up his arms in defeat when I skied into a tree. I was ready to resign myself to the fact that I would always be queen of the bunny slopes.
And then fate intervened.
One day when I was having yet another ski lesson, the instructor said to me, “Are you a snowboarder?”
Five minutes later after I got done cracking up, I said, “No. Why?”
“Because you ski like a snowboarder,” he replied. “You have a really wide stance and you ski sideways.”
I thought about this as I skied in the direction of another tree and decided that maybe I had, indeed, picked the wrong cold-weather sport. So the next weekend I announced to my family that I was going to try snowboarding.
Five minutes later after they got done cracking up, they said, “Really? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I responded. “I think I might be good at it.”
Of course I had never actually been good at anything sports-related before in my life, so I don’t know why I thought I was going to be a master knuckle-dragger. I was so bad at sports even as a kid that I had been kicked out of ballet class when I was 7, forced into early retirement in Little League when I was 8 and forcibly removed from the soccer field when I was 9.
I failed at tennis, golf, and even badminton. The one time I tried skateboarding, I decided to give it a go down a street aptly named “Suicide Hill.” This is when I first decided that I must have some kind of magnetic attraction to trees because I ended up hugging one with my face a harbinger of tree collisions to come.
Still, I was sure that I would be good at snowboarding. So after my husband took out extra accidental death and dismemberment life insurance on me, I signed up for a weekend of snowboarding lessons.
“I’m so stoked!” I said to my family as I headed off to my first snowboard lesson. My kids shook their heads.
“I give her a day,” my husband whispered loudly to my son.
“I give her an hour,” said my son.
Half an hour later I was lying on a bag of ice in the mountain clinic.
“The bad news is I fell on my butt so hard I think I broke my tailbone,” I said to my husband when he showed up to claim me.
“So what’s the good news?” he asked.
I grinned victoriously.
“I didn’t hit a tree!”
For more Lost in Suburbia, read Tracy’s blog at www.lostinsuburbia.net.
