That week with the shoe

Starting Thursday I’ll be on crutches for two weeks. Ever done this? I have and I must tell you, I am not super excited. To put myself in the crutching frame of mind, I googled pictures of people on crutches and found all sorts of crazy stuff:

- I found a picture of a teenage girl on crutches, on her skateboard. She had her bandaged leg on the skateboard, steadied herself with her crutches, and pushed with her good leg.

- I found more than one picture of a stripper, stripping while on crutches.

- I found pictures of Jessica Alba, Baby Spice, and Lady Gaga on crutches.

- And I found tons and tons of pictures of soccer players on crutches. Beckham in particular. Did the guy stay at home at all when he was hurt, or just crutch around for the paparazzi?

Dear god, what am I doing? This is madness. Last time I had ACL surgery on my other knee I was 28. Back then my mom chastised me for recklessly playing soccer and hurting myself by saying “You’re not 18 anymore, you know.” Now I desperately wish I was that young, young, 28 year old again.

Plus I keep remembering this horrible week I had during my last ACL injury that I now think of as that week with the shoe. We were living in Victoria and Steve had just started going to SFU and was gone except for weekends. I worked full time in an office at a hotel with a pretty strict dress code. When I hurt my knee, getting ready for work and even crutching down to the car and driving myself to work was okay, but shoes were a huge issue. My knee hurt too much to bend it. My foot also swelled up to the size of a small football. One week, before he left for the ferry late on a Sunday night, Steve jammed a ballet flat on my foot and I slept with it on that night…..and then I kinda kept it on until he came back on Friday and he took it off.

I know.

I couldn’t take that damn shoe off for five days because I couldn’t reach it. And even if I had managed to pry it off with a crutch, how would I have jammed it back on to my gnarly foot by myself? I was not going to go to work in my office with bare feet. When I showered, I had to sit on a chair in the shower and stick my leg out of the curtain, so it wouldn’t get wet. The toe of the shoe got caught on the blankets all the time when I tried to sleep. At the end of a long day, taking off a suit while unable to bend my leg and wearing a shoe was not the most graceful thing. (No wonder that crutching stripper in the photo looks a little awkward.)

After it had happened and I could laugh about it, I told this story to some friends and co-workers who felt bad I hadn’t asked them for help. They said “Oh my god! I would have come and taken off your shoe for you– why didn’t you call me?” but really, think about this for a minute – you’ve wedged your sweaty swollen bare foot into a leather shoe for several days - would you want your friends to smell-- I mean see you like that? I think not.

It’s not going to be like that this time, right? Everything is going to be fine, right? I may have just the teensiest amount of pre-surgery jitters.

Battle with Transvestites

Once when I was practicing penalty kicks with Roger and I scored a particularly sweet swisher in the upper left corner, he asked “Cathy, how do you get so much power behind your kick? How can I teach the girls team I’m coaching to kick that hard?” My first reaction, which I did not express to Roger, was “um, have you looked at me?”

I am not exactly a delicate flower.

Of course, I’m not one of those scary soccer women I sometimes used to play against, the ones with full, thick moustaches who hork big mouthfuls of spit on the grass between plays. I wear makeup. Once or twice, I have watched Grey’s Anatomy. I know most of the words to the songs in the Sound of Music. But I also love sports and I have very big, powerful legs.

Now big strong legs are not good for very many things. They are not good for pool parties, days at the beach, looking hot in jeans, wearing shorts of any kind, kicky little summer dresses, trying on bathing suits, or pencil skirts, or being thought of as cute, or dainty or sweet. But they are good for kicking. Big feet – same thing. I have to do battle with transvestites to get any nice shoes in my size and routinely choose footwear that makes my feet look smaller, not because it is comfortable. But big feet can help you control the ball.

My screwed up physique is engineered so that I am supposed to play soccer, the way those tiny, thin little things are meant to be gymnasts or the way that lithe, long necked girls are meant to be ballerinas. That’s not to say that all the women on the soccer field are strong girls like me – we get those skinny types too.

They just can’t kick as hard. Sorry Roger.

Knee Scars

I’ve had ACL surgery once already, years ago. It was also from a soccer injury. I asked the kids to draw a picture of that knee now so you could see the scar: the big colourful one that makes my knee look like a centipede crawling on a 2 by 4 is Sophie’s and is not an exact rendering of my leg, but pretty close. Hannah’s is smaller and more detailed, and she has insinuated that not only do I have cankles, but also numerous rainbow and flower tattoos on my leg. I don’t. (Well, the cankles, maybe.) I bet she’d probably have drawn a unicorn on there if she had time. I didn’t want to put an actual photo of my leg up there. I don’t know if you can handle seeing it.

The reason my knee looks so gross is that it got infected. After the surgery, the doctor ignored my calls asking for more painkillers. For ten days. (It had to be re-operated on. This is why the scar is worse than other ACL scars.) He admitted later he should have listened to me, but said that doctors have to account for the ‘wimp factor’ and he thought I was just being cranky. He also offered to pay for plastic surgery to make it look nicer, but said that he didn’t think I seemed like I “was the type of girl who cared about stuff like that.” It took me a long time to realize how insulting a comment like that was.

It’s less than two weeks now til I get my other knee done. I wonder what the scar will look like? They’ve changed the operation in the last 13 years so it will probably be different. Maybe I’ll do something like what my mother in law did after her hip replacement – she got a tattoo nearby the scar. She was 68 at the time, I believe, and she said “I’m tired of people asking about my scar at the pool. Now they say ‘What’s that?!’” Her tattoo is of cherry blossoms. I think it’s so cool she had it done at that age. The only thing is that she says it hurt more than childbirth, and I am getting really bloody tired of having pain anywhere around my knees.

If I get one, mine will not be flowers or rainbows or unicorns. I kind of like what Becks has done. Look closely...

Blind Soccer

As soon as I start to feel wistful and wimpy and sorry for myself for not getting to play soccer, my sister sends me this link about blind soccer players. There’s a World Blind Football Championship played every few years (this year Brazil was the winner). It’s really inspiring to watch and makes me feel exceptionally guilty for complaining about my temporary injury.

If you’re like me, and wondering ‘how on earth would blind soccer work?', I’ll give you the short version. The players use a ball that has bearings in it so they can hear it coming. There’s no throw-ins, and they play on smaller fields. The goalies can see. (In the clip I watched, the goalies seem perhaps even more psycho angry when they got scored on than some of the FIFA World Cup goalies – I guess you feel like a pretty serious knob when you can see, and you’re using a smaller net than usual, and a blind player can still score on you. I even saw one goalie score an own goal. Hee hee.)

It’s all very carefully edited on youtube, of course, so we don’t see what must be part of it-- the moments when everyone is standing around and no one has the ball. (The sighted goalie has to stay in his goalie box, otherwise, I’d imagine he’d be tempted to run up and swipe it from people all the time.) I was at first a bit disappointed that I saw only individual scoring efforts—you know, someone dribbling up with the ball, and dekeing around the defenders by himself to score, rather than give and go passes—but then I had to remind myself dude, they’re blind. It’s easy to forget because they’re very good.

If I was in charge of blind soccer, there’s only a few things I would change. First of all, why must they wear those masks that look like they’ve been cut out of sanitary pads? I understand the idea of wearing a mask, naturally, because some blind people have slightly more sight than others and this could provide an obvious advantage, but can’t they make the masks cool and black, like something Batman might wear? It would be much sexier. Also, the trophy they win in the end – does it have to look like a clear glass vase someone picked up at the dollar store? I know they’re blind, but they just won the blind World Cup. Let’s give them an actual trophy. And lastly, let’s not spray them with champagne in the end, when they do win. The poor fellows just stand there kind of sadly, getting wet, because they can’t see enough to know how to escape the spray, and they’re not frolicking in the joy of it, they’re just putting up with it.

Otherwise, it’s all good. You should watch it.

I'm Gonna Be Sedated

It has been 100 days since I last played soccer. (I counted.) During this dull, dull, period in my life, some minor things have changed for the better - my toenails, for example. They look amazing. The other day I had to cut them. They didn’t just turn black and fall off. Is this how normal people deal with their feet? I never knew.

But 100 days, come on, that’s, like, forever. Have I earned the right to rant and complain? Maybe. Do I miss playing? Absolutely. I have taken the liberty of making a list of things I miss about playing soccer:

I miss sunny, cool Wednesday mornings and being outside, laughing with my friends.

I miss listening to Rudie Can’t Fail by the Clash. (This was the song I always listened to before I played because I superstitiously thought it was keeping me from getting injured. Now every time I hear it, I have to turn it off. I even miss the naïve feeling that a song could somehow protect me….)

I even miss having handfuls of little black rubber things in my cleats after I take them off when I’ve played on the turf. (But I must admit, my vacuum cleaner works a lot better now that it isn’t clogged with that stuff all the time.)

I miss running up and down a field in unison with a whole field of players while we follow the play. Wait - Did I just say I miss running? Well, that kind of running, yes.

I miss feeling guilty about not taking a turn in goal because I suck at it.

I do not miss that numbnuts who plays left wing. I ran into him in Starbucks the other day and he talked my ear off about the World Cup, and he is still annoying.

I miss sitting in the pub after soccer and drinking Sleeman’s Honey Brown on Monday nights.

I miss that feeling of FREEEEEEE when I left the house on a Monday or Thursday night, with someone else watching the kids, where I could crank up the music in the car, and run around with a ball like a kid and escape being a tired old mom for a while.

I miss how we’d be on the field, running, and one of the guys would belch loudly after drinking too much water, and then yell loudly, ‘Cathy!” as if I’d done it.

I miss taking corner kicks. I saw so many lousy corner kicks in the World Cup. What were they doing?! Maybe if my surgery goes well, in four years, at the next one, I’ll be able to help them out....

I do not miss putting on my neoprene brace when it was still sweaty from playing soccer the day before. It was like having to wear a wet bathing suit. Ick.

I miss showing up a little early on Wednesday mornings and practicing penalty kicks on the turf. My god, I was good at that. Sometimes, now, I feel I can do some things somewhat successfully. I could cook something and it might taste not bad, or I could teach something in my class and my students might really get it, or I could write something okayish and people might like it– but that – kicking penalty kicks – I know I was good at that. I miss knowing I was really, really good at something.

My surgery is scheduled for October 14. Soon, right? Not soon enough.

Soccer Mom II

Stereotypes suck. People don't like to be placed into oversimplified categories of others who are supposedly just like themselves. I like to imagine, for instance, that there are cops who don’t care for donuts, or Mexican folks who do not wear sombreros. As a soccer player and a mom, I am particularly troubled by the stereotype of the Soccer Mom.

Now I know some political pundits feel we probably need a patronizing term describing white, middle class suburban moms whose main duty in life is to drive their kids to after school activities in a minivan, but can’t they be called something else? Minivan Moms? At least that has alliteration.

In my last blog I posted the Family Guy clip in which a soccer mom is mistaken for a man, perhaps due to her deep gravelly voice, hairs sprouting from her chin, or the way she knocks Peter’s beer out of his hand. If you look hard enough, there are definitely some other dodgy profiles of soccer moms you will find in pop culture. Some examples:

• there is a Soccer Mom movie starring Emily Osment (the lesser known sister of Haley Joel Osment of Sixth Sense fame). I can’t necessarily give this movie a definite thumbs down because I refused to rent it after reading in its review that it was “warm-hearted”, and its story was a “wacky charade”. Sounds terrifying. I think we can all agree that things that are described as ‘wacky’ should be avoided whenever possible.

• I found a book of soccer mom poetry (!) called “Suburban Antacid: Poetry for Soccer Moms”. The blurb called it ‘the perfect cure for….those with spouses who don’t replenish the toilet paper'. Barf. It had a wacky (see above) cartoon of a driving mom on the front. I believe used copies were available to buy on Amazon for 1 cent each. Shocking.

• There is a minor character in a Tom and Jerry’s cartoon whose name is Soccer Mom. She describes her ‘likes’ in life as casseroles, gardening and Thomas Kinkade paintings. She then drives into quicksand and is unable to make any decisions about how to save herself without her car’s Onstar system. Unfortunately if I were to be drawn as a cartoon, I would look exactly like her. Here she is (see the resemblance?) , and in case you are lucky enough not to know about Thomas Kinkade, here is one of his paintings:









So I move that we get rid of the negative stereotype of the soccer mom. Can we still call it soccer mom, but have some actual soccer associated with the term? I’ll go first:

I'm a soccer mom! My 'likes' in life are:
- kicking things (if it can’t be a soccer ball, I also don’t mind kicking either casseroles or Thomas Kinkade paintings)
- ranting when things don’t go my way
- sleeping.

You?

Soccer Mom

I wanted to write something about the term Soccer Mom but I got totally distracted by this clip...