V-Ball BUMPS our dinners, someone else SETS the table and I SPIKE the punch

August 30, 2010

If my parent-of-a-high-school-athlete learning curve were any steeper, I’d need to buy some pitons and an ice pick. This ascent has left me breathless, to say the least. And, while I couldn’t be more thrilled by the prospect of watching Allison play volleyball for her new high school’s team, the package that accompanies such an honor is feeling a bit like a booby prize at the moment. And I’m the booby.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you just really didn’t get the joke? When you wondered if you’d awakened in Communist Russia or discovered that someone had moved all of your dishes into the wrong cabinet while you were sleeping? Well, okay. I can relate to the “dish” thing, but I once again seem to be in foreign territory these days and I’m not really sure what to do.

Let me provide the back story. Mark and I attended Allison’s volleyball-team parent meeting last week. I figured it was a time to find out just what the heck a libero was or how it is that those girls manage to get their shorts on without a can of Pam nearby. Turns out, it was a time to sign checks and buy apparel and order team photos and sign up to bring jello salad and granola bars to the team luncheon. In short, it was a time to find out how most other parents live. Giving and giving and giving. And all with a smile and your eyes on the competition.

In this case, the competition was this super mother, who fervently spoke of the joy that it brought her to provide last year’s Freshman team with 17 pre-game-day meals,—SEVENTEEN!-- not to mention healthy snacks and refreshing bottled on the day of their game. This was her pitch for getting one of us to become the new Freshman team parent. That’s like having a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist ask for volunteers to take over the school newsletter. Given that most of the Freshman parents were men and one of the moms was in her pajamas, I figured we were safe from the prospect of making 17 meals for a bevy of teenaged girls in spandex.

Apparently, I was wrong.

And I can’t tell you how devastated I feel right now. I know, I know. You’d think I would be happy to know that, in the next month or so, someone else would be feeding dinner to Allison at least 17 times, freeing me to do little or nothing with my post-work time. But I grew up in a family-dinner household. In fact, family dinners were one of the highlights of my childhood, even if my mom lacked mad skillz in the food-preparation department. I cherish those dinner-time conversations of my youth, and have done everything within my power to continue that tradition into my adulthood.

I can count on my hands the number of times when the Holt household has not gathered, full strength, at our dinner table each night. And I’m pretty sure my kids have come to expect dinner together as the norm.

Between Allison’s 17-game schedule (for which I will happily and temporarily adjust our dinner-time routine) to the 17 team dinners that now teeter on the edge of my calendar, all four of us lose a little something. Heck, even Hobbes the Hobo dog will miss out in the coming month, a month of few home-cooked meals and much driving around between sports venues and teammates’ homes. I am baffled that no one else seems to protest the ease with which such family time is taken away.

I can only assume it means that family dinners have taken a back seat to something else entirely. And that scares me just a little.