Single Parenthood & I: School Sports Day
No, you're not getting me up to run on a sweltering hot morning. But I will turn up to support someone who turns out to be... not a natural athlete.
In the first place, I was mildly annoyed by it. I mean, who on earth schedules a school sports day for 9.15 in the morning? Because West Sussex County Council persist with this absurd concept of infant schools, middle schools and high school, in order to get my two babbies to school of a morning, we have to walk in a circle, to take in both of them.
And because of the order that we have to do them in, on this particular morning we had to do a complete circle, then I had to go home and sit around for ten minutes and then walk up to Older Child’s school. I reckoned that numbers would be depleted by this early kick-off time. Surely more people work in the mornings than in the afternoon, don’t they?
Apparently not. The Year Four School Sports Day was packed out, with seats for a couple of hundred and plenty of standing room. Older Child had been banging on about it, and how much he wanted me to go. And since this happened to be my day off, I didn’t have any way of saying “no” I was delighted to go and watch my little lumpkin running his heart out.
And yes, yes I could see the logic of holding it at this time of the morning. The temperature was already heading towards 70 degrees. Hold this any later in the day, and the school would be having to deal with a potential epidemic of fainting parents, as well. (The weather is so changeable in this neck of the woods that I’ve given up looking at the weather forecast. Might as well be reading a horoscope.)
My children are not sporty types. I’ve become aware in recent years that they seem to view football as ‘daddy’s job’ and nothing else and that trying to get them interested in it would be like trying to get most kids into spreadsheets. Older Child is now older than I was when I passed from hating football with every fibre of my being to it being the most important thing in the world, and he is just not interested.
They have heard of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, weirdly enough, but only and very specifically only those two. They also bought me a football (and a pump and adaptor) for my birthday because I happened to mention in passing that I hadn’t kicked a football in years. They’re weirdly thoughtful, like that.
The 400 metres races came and went without older child’s involvement. Instead, he sat in the sunshine, occasionally waving at me, pulling grass out of the ground and throwing it over his own head. By the end of those races, one of the classes was already so far clear that they’d more or less won, not that anybody really seemed to notice.
Then came the parents race, in which I did not partake. I had feared getting pressured into some sort of sprint against a bunch of highly competitive dads, and my knees can’t take sprinting any more regardless. I quit playing football at 33 because they felt like they were going to collapse in on themselves, and they haven’t improved in the near-twenty years since then.
And of course, it did get competitive, largely in a jocular, “Ha ha ha, we’d better not get competitive about this! (I am totally getting competitive about this)” sort of way. As as things turned out, my kids’ class won, so I would probably have only been a detriment to them anyway.
The 100 metre races were far more enervating. Everybody was running in these. There were some interesting approaches—a fair few slowed down quite a bit as they got close to the finishing line, while one child added a few metres to his hundred by veering diagonally across the track, while some ran their entire races with their eyes closed.
As for older kid, well, he ran with a big, silly grin on his face, head almost sideways on, with his tongue hanging out like a dog sticking its head out a car window. He came last by about ten metres, but he seemed happy enough. This actually called to mind a story that my mum once told me, about how she first became aware of the existence of my dad.
One school sports day in about 1949 or 1950 or so, she was sitting on the grass bank watching the athletics, and there was one boy who was so far behind everybody else in an 800 yard race that they were lining up to start the next one when he had to push through the runners to get to the end of his lap. That was my dad. “And you decided, ‘that’s the guy for me’, did you?”, I asked her. I never did get a satisfactory answer to that question.
In the end, Older Kid’s class came either second or fifth out of five. We know they didn’t come third or fourth, and we know they didn’t win. They had been second, earlier in the competition, but Older Child's performance in the 100 metres may well have pushed them down to last place. The teacher of the class that won was delighted with it all, even though he hadn't done any running himself.
Pink of nose and with my arms starting to make that familiar tingling feeling that they do when they've been exposed to the sunshine for more than ten minutes, I walked home on my own. Just a single bed to build, a house to tidy, two kids to feed and pile of things to write. Today hasn't been such a bad day off after all.