One more step on the journey ~

     Around 20 years ago, my journey landed me on the pool-deck of a YMCA in Massachusetts as a swim instructor.  It was there my relationship would take yet another turn.  A stay-at-home mom with four children and four part-time gigs built around their schedules, time was limited. Very limited.  As a swim instructor to many, I had caught the attention of a woman who worked with a Special Olympics swim team.  One Saturday as we hurried off from a morning of swim classes she approached me and asked if I would consider coaching.  My ‘I wish I could, but no’ seemed sensible, prudent, true and difficult.  I had first come to know Special Olympics in High School when a coach asked who would head over to the track and help out with a practice.  That experience reshaped much of what I knew about competitive sports, training and coaching.  It changed my understanding of what it was to ‘win,’ to ‘compete’ and to work with someone to discover what gifts they brought to an experience.  Although I had been coached by talented and caring coaches, it was these special athletes who taught me everything I came to know and value about coaching.   And so, in that hot second on the threshold of the pool deck, after offering my ‘no,’ I turned and said I would find the time as long as I was able to build in participation of my children even though they didn’t yet meet the age requirement for volunteering in the program.  What I brought to that ‘yes’ was the certainty that despite a fine school system, participation in swim team, music lessons, fabulous grandparents, engagement with the arts, participation in church and many other assets, that participation in the Special Olympics program would impact who each of my four children would come to be in the world.  I knew that real relationships with people so differently abled would change them in ways I could not articulate but knew deep in my own soul.  It was a selfish, ‘yes’ from a mother raising children in a world so eager to mold our young in manners tied to commercialism, ‘achievement’ based on scores, college acceptances and salaries, survival of the fittest on any field and celebration of Disney-drawn beauty.  I recall her appreciation as I offered my ‘yes.’ Over twenty years later, hours and hours of practices, years of competitions, buckets of pride and tears of joy, laughter, getting to know the struggles of families, losing two swimmers to early deaths, .... I look at my four, now adult, children and I realize it is I who owe her a long-overdue note of appreciation.