We are at the public outdoor skating rink in our city, and it is cold, but I am hot. Sweat forms on my neck and torso. My body, prone to hot flashes now that I am in medical menopause, floods with prickly heat whenever I am stressed, embarrassed, or overly warm.
I have brought my daughter, her friend, and my younger son to the rink. I am moving out of breast cancer treatment, and this is a big outing for me. I have carried my own skates, and my son’s: both are heavy and sharp and bang against my sides as we walk from the car to the rink. I curse myself for being the sort of person who owns skates but not blade covers.
Once we are on the ice, though, it feels good to move. My extremely cautious son is learning, slowly. He holds my hand and we circle the rink at a snail’s pace, or he slow dances with his arms around the rubbery skate penguin, a dapper tuxedoed date for a small child.
This is good, I think. The past six months have been scarred by chemo, surgery, radiation, not just for me but for the whole family. Now maybe I can be a mom again. I can take my kids to skating on early dismissal days. I can even skate with them.
The rink is nearly empty; but not quite. A lone young woman skates expertly around and around, and two college students — maybe on a date? — struggle along next to the wall. Eventually another mother arrives with two younger children.
My daughter and her friend, fifth graders, play ice hockey on a co-ed team. This in and of itself is baffling to me. I have never played a team sport, never pushed my body to its limits outside of a yoga class, never started a skill from scratch — surrounded by my peers — for the sheer fun of it. They are highly adept on the ice, and they show off. They skate fast, bent low, and occasionally cut across the center. They veer perilously close to others, including me.
I am annoyed, and ask them to slow down, to be more aware of their surroundings.
“This isn’t hockey practice,” I point out, pedantically. “There are little kids here who are learning.” My daughter’s friend heeds my warning, but my daughter does not. She shoots past me, cutting me off, and I nearly fall.
I pull her to the side and let her have it. Mean mom — beyond firm — has come out to play. I sweat in my many layers, and I rage at her. I will make you get off the ice, I threaten her. You have to be aware of other people.
Is this what I want? If my life is cut short by illness, as I worry nearly every day that it will be, is this an important maternal lesson? The words — be aware of other people — bounce around my head like a pinball, as I grudgingly send her back onto the ice after the scolding: am I telling my prepubescent daughter to shrink? In some ways, the answer is yes, because I don’t want to raise an asshole outlaw. Part of the relentless apologizing and obsessive attention to others that is caricatured as feminine weakness is empathic, caring, and important.
Yet even beneath my white-hot fury and second-hand shame, a small part of me is delighted by her prowess, her fearlessness. It is alien to me: I am always getting out of the way, apologizing when someone bumps into me.
When I was 10, Tonya Harding’s then-husband hired a man to bash in Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, and I watched both women skate their hearts out a few weeks later in Lillehammer at the 1994 Winter Olympics. Each glittered in their leotards and tights, but Nancy looked classic in gold. Tonya looked cheap and tarty in red, or at least that’s what I thought then. It seems cruel to me now.
My friend Mandy and I ached to be like Nancy, pretty and strong and persecuted — and resilient! — as we sailed along the frozen pond in our neighborhood, lifting our legs and hinging forward at the hips, arms out at our sides. We couldn’t jump, or at least I couldn’t. Maybe Mandy could; I think I was envious of her skating skills but I no longer recall why. Off the ice, we dressed more like Jordan Catalano, all flannel shirts and Converse, but Nancy was always there on the pond, a few yards ahead of us, twirling and sparkling and winning.
That winter of my own fifth grade year, I thought that if I could skate hard enough, I would transform myself into Nancy. Now I know that after that winter, I no longer lived near the pond and seldom skated. I outgrew those ice skates and never got new ones. That once I tried to skate again in college, on Boston Common, and could barely stay upright, but that almost 20 years later I tentatively inched onto the city rink in our new town, and found it wasn’t hard at all. Now I know, too, how I turned out: competent, put-together, middle-aged, loved, thoughtful, kind. I am not sparkly like Nancy, but most days — although not every day — those other things feel like enough.
No one is watching me skate, which is good; I don’t look great, nor do I do it particularly well. My right foot dominates; I struggle to stop gracefully. But the ache in my lower back after I’ve been skating a long time is vaguely pleasurable. I’m alive and fluid on the ice, moving for the sake of moving. I’m astounded by the joy that radiates outward when I am on the pond, or even on the city rink. I feel it even at the indoor rink in the suburbs, which smells like a dirty refrigerator. The dream of becoming Nancy isn’t pushing me forward anymore. Now I am propelled across the frozen water by another force: the pleasure of the movement of my own body.
By the following year, my daughter has mellowed into her expertise. She saves her big tricks for the pond in our small city, an uncrowded frozen oval of joy tucked into a park, huddled against the curves of the river. Still: sometimes she skates too close to me. Once, zipping along backwards, she slams into her friend’s dad. “I need to be better about being aware of what’s behind me,” she tells him, genuinely apologetic. And I am relieved. But I also wonder: how the hell do you see what’s behind you? And how do you learn to skate backwards — a skill I have never truly mastered — if you don’t just have blind faith that the world will get out of your way?
One afternoon at the pond, a dad lends my daughter his lead-filled puck with which to practice: it is heavy, and moves differently than a regular puck. While she chases its strange weight around the ice, gliding above the frozen submerged leaves, we rhapsodize together. I tell him that I love skating here.
“I’ve been coming every day since it froze,” he tells me. “I mean, what else can you do for free?” His question is rhetorical, and I don’t answer “sex.” If you don’t like running, or basketball on city courts, he is right: bodily exhilaration is often expensive to come by. But the comparison to the erotic isn’t lost on me: joy for joy’s sake.
Every time I skate on a pond I worry that it will be the last, that the ice will melt forever just as I worry that my time with my children will be stolen by illness. This covers the pleasure in a veneer of anxiety, but it also makes it acutely precious. Gliding on frozen water while the world burns, after my body has betrayed me, it feels like a rare gift — to move, smooth and fast, while a hawk flies parallel to the line of the trees.
What am I preparing my daughter for? Into what shape do I want to push the clay of her body and behavior? I am teaching my son the same things: to pay heed to the rest of the world, to think of those around you, and their comfort and care. And also I tell them both to yell stop when someone doesn’t respond to your polite request, to raise your voice above the din when you have a good idea. What I want for both of them is to master a balancing act, to be tenuous but not unsteady on two thin blades: take up space, while also allowing space for others.
At work, a colleague — like me, a middle-aged mother and wife — tells me that she has taken up the violin after years away from it. She tells me that she has joined a local fiddle group. That she is playing: for herself, for fun, with others. We sit, waiting for our meeting to start, and mortifyingly, my eyes fill with tears. “Michelle, I’m weeping,” I tell her, wiping my eyes, and we both laugh as our younger coworkers look on, baffled.
This is something on its own, I want to yell out to my daughter as she pursues the lead puck with her hockey stick. To skate on the pond for yourself, just to see how it feels to move, to see whether you can stop quickly or turn sharply. To right yourself when you think you might fall, to struggle to your feet after you’ve lost your balance and wiped out spectacularly: this counts as joy.
Look at her, armed with her stick. Actually, don’t look at her. Keep your eyes on the ice ahead of you, on the trees. Feel the way you tilt forward, into a cruel winter wind that could send you back inside. It won’t. You will skate, until the ice becomes water again.
Miranda Featherstone is a writer and social worker. Her essays on parenting, family, illness, and loss have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in newsletters such as ParentData and So Many Thoughts. She lives in Rhode Island.
P.S. 21 completely subjective rules for raising teenage girls and teenage boys.
(Photo by Lea Jones/Stocksy.)
