spotlights

The girls have a thing about the lights.  Around 2:45 every afternoon they stream in from all corners of the valley.  The gym is dim and sleeping.  Rec classes are out on a long lunch and won't resume until 4:00.  Light frames the front desk and the mezzanine glows but the whole of the floor, the beams, and the bars lie in shadow.

This is how they like it.  They beg for the lights to stay off.  They pool together in the pits where they soak in blue blocks of foam as if they were tubs of steamy, hot water.  The darkness sweeping their glinting giggles up like stars.

At 3:29 the girls start their run.  And if they have been lucky the lights only then pop to life.

Saturday mornings at 6:15 AM the gym looks like the activity yard of ladies prison. Ten to twelve girls jogging draped in baggy sweats.  Birdnest buns bouncing under the circles of light falling from high above.

By 6:30 they have stripped off the prison looking garb.  Sweatpants and sweatshirts sprout up in soft mounds at the edge of the floor.  The back row of lights shines like miniature summer suns over the bars. The rest of the gym in winter dark.  It's how they want it.

But why? What it is it about the lights?

If you ask them they shrug but I think I know.  Gymnastics, as a sport, is blinding.  A team sport basking in stinging solitude.  This sport is so brutal, so singular, so unforgiving you couldn't do it without being able to step back into the shelter of your team.

And high up on the mom bench among the soft candlelight of those of us burning the wax at both ends the spotlight moms are glaring.  We only have a few but even one wrong watt bulb can throw distracting shadows around the room.  They are so blinded by their own stage lights they don't seem to see the rest of us.  Walking and talking with blinders on, they miss most of what is actually happening.

I want so badly to unplug them.  To say to them, in the same twisted way gymnastics is a team sport and not a team sport, your child is unique and she's not.

Your child might not be the one requiring all the coach's attention on beam today, but one day she will be, I guarantee it.  Each one of them takes a turn playing a role- the superstar, the struggler, the good leader, the distractor, the good sport, the crier, the injured, the fallen, the redeemed.

I feel bad for the daughters of spotlight moms.  They carry an extra load with them.  I watch them squirm. Their attention split. Their faults highlighted; their victories overshadowed.  Every move overexposed.  Mixed messages and third degrees.  It splits them from their team like isolating a blub from a string of Christmas lights; together they shine, alone they stare.

What spotlight moms refuse to see is that in this sport, practice is the only thing that is fair.  The order of choreography, the number of girls who strike a similar pose, the number of turns or coaches at bars, even scores and medals- it is all floating dust.  Distractions in the lens.

Our daughters get out what they put in.  There is nothing written until they write it.

The best gymnast in the gym is not the most talented, she is the one who works the hardest.  Bad days happen but good days are earned.

The moms holding open car doors, the ones cooking dinner at 8:43 PM, and doing homework with tired kids on the gym floor, they know; the podium says nothing about our daughters. The moms working in the shadows they see the beauty beneath the haze of artificial lights.

The path our daughters have chosen to travel is lit by the light of their own stars.  Stars that shine brighter against dark skies.

And the girls, they have a thing about the lights.  

They prefer them off.