Mutual Tutelage

Being a parent is such an interesting experience.  It allows one to experience all of the emotions of youth all over again; both good and bad ones. Watching my kids have to learn how to deal with their emotions while doing new activities has made me understand the universal way of frustration with ones self. This frustration was demonstrated (predictably) this last weekend on the slopes.

The first time I ever went skiing, I was seventeen.  I know- born and raised in snowy Montana and never went skiing?  Well, my folks weren’t skiers and most of the people I hung out with weren’t either. Skiing never even really crossed my mind as something that I should try. The only reason I went that first time at all was because it was a school function. 

We went to Snow Bowl, a place to this day I don’t particularly enjoy because its runs are STILL too hard for me.  I remember being out there with skis strapped awkwardly to my feet, wondering what in the world to do now.  I had heard there was something called the bunny hill, but I couldn’t have told you where (or what) it was, except for that bunnies are pretty non-threatening, so maybe I should look into their hill until I could figure out how to move with these boards attached to my feet.

When Rosanna Ne'er-Do-Well (Name changed to protect her identity- I hear she turned out to be a perfectly FINE adult, living somewhere in New Mexico, saving orphans and puppies) came up and asked me to go on the lift to higher runs, I was HESITANT… but, stupid enough to believe her when she said I would be FINE going down a run that was a little bit more challenging than the bunny hills. 

What she should have said is that she needed a buddy to keep her entertained while riding the lift, but she wasn’t really looking for the commitment involved in teaching a newby how to navigate that painful, terror-filled first trek down the side of a snow/ice coated mountain.  As soon as I fell off the lift, I found myself all alone. I watched Rosanna through snow caked eyes, as she was gliding away shouting, “See you at the bottom, K?  We’ll ride up together again!”  I laid there for a bit, and then slowly untangled my legs/skis and tried to suck air back into my lungs.

In retrospect, I believe a couple kind souls asked if they could help me.  At that point, I became my own liability.  My frustration with my inability to do something (like STAND on skis, let alone glide on them) so IRKED me, that I found myself smiling politely and laughing, waving would-be-helpers on as if I had been skiing a hundred times before and how silly of me to be so clumsy this day. What IS it about suffering alone in silence that is SO satisfying? 

Once I was upright and semi-mobile, I awkwardly scooted my way along, following the herd to some unknown destination.  Once there, I looked down the steep incline and I had a riveting thought.  It turns out (if you didn’t know this), that skis are lacking BRAKES. 

SO, I first decided that side-stepping down the mountain might be my best bet for survival.  That lasted about five minutes, too much for even a seventeen year olds legs.  So I sat in the snow for about twenty minutes and froze, watching all of the other skiers with squinty eyes and an inner hiss of hate.  When I realized I was silently hoping for the small children whizzing by me to wreck, I knew I needed to get up and try to go down, or perish trying.  So, I did the hard work of standing up, pointing my skis downhill, flying for roughly 10 seconds, crashing, losing my skis, taking 15 minutes to find said skis and refasten them to my feet, pointing downhill again and then repeating the whole wretched process.  It took me two and a half hours to get off of that mountain.  There were several times during that I was indeed laying sideways on the side of a run, crying.  When I finally got to the bottom, I limped into the lodge, ordered a hot chocolate, and vowed to never ski again.

We are constantly pushed into new waters (or down ski slopes), whether we want it or not.  Getting all frustrated with oneself and feeling like you are the only person in the universe to ever struggle is pointless.  Teaching my kids (with Derrick) to do something that was so incredibly hard for me to learn is so…  poignant.  Made me remember exactly what it feels like to just want to lay there until Spring for someone to scrape you up and take you the rest of the way down.  Come to think of it, I still feel that way quite a bit, only in a more general “this is too hard” mentality… that whole wanting to be a bear and hibernate frame of mind….

At the end of the day, my kids’ attitudes were awesome.  Kloe said “That was FUN! When can we do it again?”  Even after getting lodged in a deep pile of snow, after having her skis explode off of her feet, after having been so jammed that it took both Derrick and I to get her unstuck.  Same with Derrin- even after getting to the bottom of a hill and realizing that he’d have to either hop up a hill with a board attached or totally unhook from his board and have to struggle back into it at the top (both equally daunting and devastating prospects at that moment), he still jumped right back into having fun.    I’m not saying it didn’t take a bit to snap their attention back to the task at hand- they really would have just lain there without a bit of “help”.  But they were will to listen and accept help (not like their ol’ ma on her first trip down).  

Good lesson day for me.