Valley of Fire State Park

Regionals 2019

Let's start at the end with this photo snapped the split second before she saluted to take the Floor for her final rotation of the 2019 Region One Level 9 Regional Championships in Las Vegas, Nevada. Let's get the scores out of the way: Vault 9.775 2nd, Bars 9.225 7th, Beam 9.2 5th, Floor 9.575 2nd, All Around 37.775 1st, qualifying for Westerns.

They started as B flight on Vault. 

And as flight B tends to do, they finished on Floor with most of the meet already completed.

Beach didn't compete a "safety" vault. Normally, she competes a layout and a tuck-half. Before vaulting at Regionals they have to declare what vault they are competing to the judges via a number board. The coaches circled up the girls to make sure they knew their vault numbers. Beach's safety vault in warm-up had not looked good so she was asked, why not just compete 2 tuck-halves?

Her response was, "Okay. Do you want me to stick them too?" 

So she did. 

She also did the best bar routine she has done so far in Level 9.

She stayed on the beam when she was supposed to and got off, when and as planned.

Then she went to Floor and did what she loves to do.

This is the photo shot after she competed. After she was given ice for her back and she asked for a second bag which she gave to one of the other girls from another gym rotating with her and her teammates.

Then awards.

And Westerns Qualifiers for 4 age groups; Sr 3, Sr 4, Sr 7 

(2 of Beach's teammates also made Westerns in their age divisions)

Region One SR 4 Team for the 2019 Westerns Championships

The room, the photos, the phone calls "home".

And then back to the start. 

Out to the floor with her teammate who was competing alone in the final session.

Because that is who she is <3 

Beach Ries: Teammate

and Region One Level 9 Sr 4 All Around Champion

leftover stones

Sometimes in the night, I can feel it. Whatever noise from this side of the door that startled me awake vanishes, and a door from somewhere else opens.

It crawls like black water along the basement floorboards. Silty specks of black sand suspended in cold foam.

I sit up and listen.

Silence.

I roll over and drift between to-do lists and sleep. Then again, a noise, a memory, I sit up and try to feel the night. Is it out there? I return to tossing and turning.

It crawls up the stairs like tar. It seeps in around the bed, rising as high tide in a shallow marina. The bed, a rowboat in the sea.

I can put a name on it. Label the fear. Give it hands and feet. Give it claws and intentions. But when I do, it only causes me to draw the blankets and move into the center of the bed.

I know it seems silly to be afraid of nothing, but it also seems silly to take the chance.

These waking nightmares have become more common again. My sleeping dreams teaming of people like an amusement park in July. So crowded and hot, so mashed up, it pushes me to the edges of dreaming. So far, the bubble pops, and I find myself awake and listening to the nothingness of the night. Listening to the tide in the trees.

Then the lists: 2 thank you cards, a phone bill, an ER bill, a credit card bill, did the cats go out enough during the day? It was raining, a bag of popcorn, how to defrost bananas, what setting should the crockpot be on when I leave for work? Is it okay to mop the kitchen floor with bleach, or is it too close to leaving for Regionals because there is a strong link between children getting respiratory illnesses and houses that use bleach to clean with, a line from The Book Theif, wait, I am forgetting something important, how many times has the heater kicked on in the last hour, I wonder if the dog opened the back door? Can I really pass turkey chili off as dinner, or are they just going to know that I am totally fucking up and need to go to the grocery store again? Didn't I just go?!?! was that an earthquake or part of a dream?

The night is a lake. It stretches long from one sliver of lit shore to the other. No one really knows what lies beneath it or how deep it goes.

The moon casts white shadows. It pulls at the silky cover, undoing the waves one thin string at a time. It spins a watery dark web in the sky, catching and feasting on stars.

I skip stones of sleep across the night, standing beneath the giant white spider's lair.

The black rings ripple across the darkness. Eventually, they roll out onto the far beach and fade into purring kittens under the light of a rainy morning.

But I start my day slowly because the night is never long enough to throw all the stones it would take to clear the ground at my feet.

now reading: The Poisonwood Bible

a thousand more

I don't know what to write. It's like standing in the outfield not knowing which way to be ready to run. Perhaps that is why I say, play ball, following the National Anthem at Meets. But the question as to whether or not Beach will compete at Regionals is pretty much answered. Although, I doubt anyone but me ever questioned it in the first place. As of right now, she is going.

I personally realized it after a week (or longer) of not being able to do her flick-lay (or even a flick for that matter) she got up on the beam and did a whole routine flick-lay included.

She isn't landing her vault, her bar routine is under 2 weeks old, 

and she has yet to do a floor routine on the actual floor. But she is also Beach. 

Hence, the outfield wondering. This could really be bad. It could be okay. It could even be great. Chances are it will be a mixture of all of those. Most meets are. 

Regionals should be more like a victory lap than anything else. But when injuries get mixed it, it feels like someone moved the finish line back a few extra miles in an already long race.

The biggest "known" possibility is that Regionals will be the last time she competes her current floor routine. She will be getting a new routine for next season. Dance Steps Through The Dim (10/21/17), is the blog post I wrote about her getting this routine: "When she competes this routine for the first time in early December the judges will never know she learned it "blind".  That she learned it mostly from feeling it- listening to the directions under Donna's lead but not always able to see her demonstrations.  Limited too by the small slow healing avulsion fracture in her hip." 

There was no way to know when I wrote that what was ahead.

No way to see how much she was about to accomplish. In her 2nd season competing this routine, 

she has taken 1st on Floor 6 out of 7 meets! All while battling the pain of a compression fracture in her back. 

I try to picture what it will be like this weekend watching her out there competing but I am not great with the unknown. I don't know what she is physically capable of doing right now. I don't know what her body and her heart have in them. 

I don't know her as her coaches and teammates do. I am her mom. I stand back in the outfield trying to catch whatever comes my way. Standing, waiting and squinting into the sun. Loving and hating every moment of it.

My job is to get her there.  

The rest is up to her.

ashes and sparks

The racks of clothing run long in lines that are blurred by the rising and falling crests of collars and hemlines. It's our tenth store, on the third week of the hunt. Only now are we getting serious.

Dress hunting with a gymnast. Her problems are practical; her arms too build for the narrow sleeves, her waist too small, her legs too long, her chest not a soft cupped curve but a ridge of muscle. This is not the body of 15-year-old hiding in an oversized t-shirt at the pool.

She walks like she is driving a machine. In many ways she is; finely tuned and out for display. But the skin is that of a girl, imperfect, constantly fused with. And the hair, only this year has she allowed it to go free. It explodes like champagne bubbling and fizzing down her back.

She could wear anything. I fish the racks pulling out dresses to display, "I don't hate it," she says tilting her head. "Okay, I can't tell if you are joking," she says to the next.

I sit and I stand in the corners of dressing rooms staring at myself in the mirrors waiting for her to appear. No, not this one, no, it's cute but not for the banquet, no, the cut is wrong, no, oh god no!
 
Then there is the one. I pull it from the end of a rack where it is peeking out. It's a head tilt one way, then the other. "Oh I couldn't....could I?" She squints her fingers running along the soft waves of the fabric. It is a white 2-piece dress with a fitted top and full skirt.

"How much is it?" she asks reaching for the tag.

I brush her hand away.  "Try it on, then we can worry about the tag."

"A 2-piece?" She questions it three more times before finding some bravery in that it is her mother offering her the dress.

She takes 2 dresses in with her.  Only one comes out.

She nods. "This is the one." It will have to be taken in at the waist but that can be done.

The sales attendants smile. They like the girl but not the dress. They would have preferred she picked the blue one. They say nothing but I can tell their judgment is on me as a mother.

In defense of the 2-piece dress; the skirt is longer than what she normally would wear and after the alterations, it will sit securely above hips leaving no gap between the top and the bottom... unless she salutes.

And as for the open back, my god, she certainly has earned that.      

"How much is it?" she asks and offers to buy it.  I tell her that with the sale discount of 50% off the cost is $21.50.  And no, I will pay for it and the alterations.  The clerk asks if she going to a dance.  No, a banquet.  A sports banquet. They place the dress in a bag, staple it shut, and staple on the receipt. All sales are final in bold black.

In the car with the bag on her lap, she looks up the label on her phone.

"Mom," she gasps, "these dresses are like $300! How scary. This is a really nice dress!"

I nod. I smile. I drive.  

She is already dreaming of shoes.

what is within

It's that moment. The pause. The place that might mark the before and the after. Are we truly here? I wondered watching her trying to get comfortable on the gurney. She's too big and too small all at the same time. The ER hummed quietly outside the closed door as the clock dragged against the night and we waited.

In the 8 plus years, Coach Lindsay has coached Beach that was the first text I have ever received during practice from her. It was about Beach's back. More shocking than that was when I showed up and pulled her from practice to go in for x-rays Beach didn't even question it.

She was done throwing punches in the dark.

It's hard to retell the contents of the hours in a holding pattern and maintain their integrity. To explain the family connection I have with the ER Doc; Dr. Plum. That I grew up with her little brother Andy.  Andy who died of an overdose fueling Dr. Plumb and her family to set up UtahNaloxone. When I identified myself to her I said, I am Wendi Brown's little sister... I too am a sibling to one of the Lost. 

Only hours earlier standing beneath a giant billboard with Andy's photo on it I had told Beach about Dr. Plumb and about Andy not knowing Beach would be meeting her within a few short hours.

While we waited to be seen, Beach's phone died. I gave her mine. Beach got 2 full series of X-rays. I got Instagram installed on my phone.

The first nurse knew one of Beach's teammates. The second X-ray tech was a retired gymnast with horror stories of an abusive coach. The kid standing at the nurses' station that we passed on the way out- was a gymnast. The Dr and the room nurse had bets on what was meant on Beach's chart where it said, It hurt in the fall. Fall the season or a fall? Yes, with a gymnast it would be the season.

The films show compression fractures in her T12 and L1. Mild, stable, painful. The Orthopedic surgeon couldn't believe there wasn't a reportable injury.  He was so strongly confused he keep having to be corrected; there was no single point of injury, no big fall, nothing. I honestly think everyone was surprised.

What else everyone was, was respectful. The staff respected her and her sport. There was no gymnastics bashing, no she should quit, no shaming, none of that which usually occurs between medicine, gymnasts and their parents.

And yes, back to the possibility it was a fall, they fall all the time... but Beach has never truly had a serious wipeout that would cause medical concern. One super bad vault I still hear coaches talk about but didn't see, a half dozen double pikes to the face, a handful of less than planned bar "releases", a couple of beam bites, loads of missed feet.

Dr. Plumb gave me discharge papers, a disc of the images, 2 RX's scrips, and a hug good-bye. We left the ER after midnight. Drove 4th South home in the rain. She was what she was going in and coming out. She is a gymnast.

This morning BC and I sat together on the sofa sifting through the information and we came to a very decisive conclusion: neither of us can read x-rays.

However, knowing what specifically is wrong and what is NOT wrong gives us something. We will meet with a specialist and a PT and the coaches but really all the decisions are with Beach. Had the films shown something unstable or major... but they didn't. Ortho left it open telling us to go get her cleared and she could compete IF the pain doesn't stop her.

So this is the nightmare of a gym mom; in the ER getting spinal x-rays. My child walked in and she walked out. She even stood in her leotard instead of a hospital gown for the first set of films. Yes, I know what this sport can do. I am well aware of the danger it keeps in and out.

This sport helped create her. It surrounds her in love and support. It pushes her to be capable and brave. She is amazing and strong and this sport gives her a place to prove that to herself.

In a moment; it reminds me of how close we are to the end of this chapter in her life. How close any of us are, to anything, at any moment. It reminds me to enjoy the journey, the good and the bad, and all the long drives between before and after.