sporty spice

One of the sports I was forced to participate in was swimming. I hated it. I loved to swim, don't get me wrong, and I adore being in water, but I hated doing it competitively. At some point when I was pretty young, it was discovered that the one stroke I was good at was breast stroke. I pretty much sucked at everything else in comparison. Joanna latched on to this. After this discovery, I was swimming year round, sometimes twice a day, before and after school. I did both summer and winter swim. After school I'd go to practice for baseball, or soccer and then on to swimming. I never had any time for homework, or to eat. Not that my mom ever helped with homework or bought groceries. The worst part of it was that my mom was a lazy piece of shit. By this I mean I would finish with swim practice in the evening and literally wait anywhere from one to three hours for her to show up to pick me up. She didn't have anything more important to do, she was just lazy about picking me up. And it was winter. In Maryland! I'd wait for her for so long inside the pool, that eventually it would close and they'd have to ask me to step outside. I knew they felt bad asking, and it was embarrassing being the only kid on the team with a neglectful parent. So I would wait outside in the freezing cold, a little kid, with long wet hair and clothes from swim practice. And then came high school.

I went to a private Catholic high school in DC with a diligent ROTC program. My mother made me join the ROTC program because it apparently would look good on a resume (not if you constantly failed the class and they said to leave the program or be kicked out) and because if there was ever a war and a draft was enacted I'd be a high ranking official. Seriously. Another one of her requirements that was that I joined the swim team, which I expected. St. John's didn't have a pool on campus, so we'd swim at the Montgomery College campus in Takoma Park. Takoma Park is an old, beautiful hippie type neighborhood with lots of big Victorian houses. Like so many neighborhoods in the greater DC area, you'd walk a block and be in the shitty part of Takoma Park, which included lots of crime and drug deals. So while the pool wasn't in a bad area, the walk to the metro was. Again, while all my friends got picked up from practice in the middle of winter, my mom, who had nothing else to do, told me to walk. I had no idea how to get to the metro, it was always dark and I'd often get lost. So I'd wander around Takoma Park (the bad part) in my flimsy Catholic school girl uniform (by this point I'd dropped ROTC and wore the regular super short plaid skirt and white polo), wet from practice searching for the metro. I was old enough to start taking my driving classes, but Joanna refused. One particularly cold night I remember, it took me about 3 hours to get home. I walked in the door, freezing cold, drained, tired and overall just emotionally exhausted. I had so much hate for my mother, I knew she was a piece of shit, and I had no way out. I always felt trapped. She was sitting on the couch reading or watching tv or something.
"I need to take that driving class. Seriously. It took me three hours to get home and I'm fucking freezing." I said this calmly. I only ever started to yell after she did, which was basically all of the time.
"I don't think you're mentally stable enough to have a car." When I was a child, hell, even until I was a teenager, I was never allowed to have a bike, literally because my mom would tell me it was a mode of transportation. And I had this dug addled crazy person telling me I was too unstable to drive a car? This makes me mad even writing it.
"What the fuck are you talking about? I have to wander around the bad part of Takoma and in the middle of winter soaking wet. I'll pay for the classes."

I don't remember the dialogue from there so I won't try to reenact it. I do remember that it turned into a screaming match, she could give me no valid explanation for not letting me go to driving school, she hit me, and I ended up outside on our deck hysterically crying. I called my friend Raph to pick me up. She took me to her house, fed me vegan desserts and ran me a bath. She dropped me off back at my house later that night, where I passed out in bed, thinking of how much I hated this aspect of my life, and fantasizing about its nonexistence.