A Love Letter to Gymnastics

My deepest apologies, dear readers, for the tardiness of this post. I imagine you all sitting around, waiting patiently for my latest dispatch to hit your feeds and inboxes, when–in all actuality–it’s quite likely none of you had noticed my failure to smash that “publish” button. Maybe someday you will. A writer can hope.

So, yes, I was procrastinating (it’s one of the things about writing that sucks, remember?) in one of my favorite ways to procrastinate: watching women’s artistic gymnastics. The U.S. Gymnastics Championships were this weekend, which means my own feeds were full of meet updates, warm-up video, and amazing feats of flight involving women under five feet tall. I’m certainly not going to recap the meet here; if that’s a thing you are interested in, head over to The Balance Beam Situation, where Spencer Barnes does just that with a high level of snark and GIFs. So many GIFs.

Most of you probably don’t know that gymnastics is not a thing that just happens in an Olympic year (even if that Olympic year is a weird one because of a global pandemic). Gymnastics happens all the time. Sure, the competition season for most athletes is short, lasting only a few months, but there is no off season. It’s only on the radar of most Americans every four years, when short, muscular girls in sparkly leotards appear on prime time television.

I might have mentioned that my daughter was a competitive gymnast, and if I haven’t, well, I just did. But I was a gymnastics fan long before my daughter was a gymnast. It may have been a wee bit of foreshadowing that the very weekend she was born in 2004, I watched the Olympic Trials from my hospital bed (a nurse scoffed, “They’re all anorexic,” when she came in to check on me and my baby girl. I let her do her thing, then politely dismissed her), where a teenager from Louisiana fell off the beam and still made the team. That gymnast, Carly Patterson, became the first American woman in twenty years to win the Olympic all-around gold, starting a streak that has yet to end (2008: Nastia Liukin; 2012: Gabby Douglas), and is likely to continue with Simone Biles winning her second all-around gold (after her first in 2016) this year.

My daughter retired from her gymnastics career in January, after suffering two fairly serious injuries in the space of a year. I could devote a whole blog to the highs and lows of a child’s gymnastics career (and they are children; most of the women in women’s gymnastics are barely adults). I could write about having an eight-year-old who voluntarily misses birthday parties and sleepovers because she has gymnastics practice. I could tell you about the unmitigated elation of an athlete who achieves a skill before her teammates do, and the crushing disappointment felt by that same athlete when every teammate can perform a skill she is still struggling to achieve. I could tell you about the coaches who fiercely love and are dedicated to their athletes, but who also look the other way when there are problems, not because they don’t care, but because they are young adults themselves who don’t know the best way to handle those problems. I could write about tweens who spend sixteen to twenty hours each week in a gym, beating up their bodies and sacrificing their childhoods for a sport that is their first love. I could tell you about how a gymnastics family comes together, even after most of the athletes have retired, when death claims one of their own.

I won’t write all that, because it would only be interesting to me and the handful of my readers who are the life-long friends I made because our daughters competed together. To those moms–the ones who are still here and the one who is not: I hope you watched, too, smiling around the lump in your throat, like I did. I thought of all of you. I miss all of you. I’m so proud of your girls–those who are still here and the one who is not–who found the next thing to make them happy. Mine is still searching. She will find it. Of that, I have no doubt.