Another Friday. Another night of watching high school basketball--not one game, but two. In the last few weeks, I've effectively quadrupled the number of high school basketball games that I've attended in my entire life. Which brings my total game-attendance number to 4.
Tonight's games were really exciting, because they were raising money for breast cancer and it seemed like the entire town came out to support the two competing teams. Lots of little kids running around, which made me nervous b/c I thought they were going to get trampled. One little boy took particular interest in Tyler's tri-colored score-keeping and kept turning around an peeking over Tyler's knee to get a look at his notes. (As for me, I kept thinking the "HP" scrawled on the notepad stood for "Harry Potter" instead of "Highland Park"...yes, I am a nerd.)
Truth be told, the amount of energy crammed into the tiny gym made me really nervous. I don't think I've ever witnessed that much school spirit outside of movies--turns out that people really DO get excited about basketball games in real life! Who knew? People paint their faces! They do mass arm wavey things! They chant the names of the players!! They actually WANT to be there!!
At W&M, they had to close a cafeteria and set up a buffet line at the court to get people to even remotely consider going to a basketball game. And I have no idea how basketball games worked at CHS b/c I was too busy staying out of the players' way.
It's weird seeing high school from 6 years out, b/c it really is like nothing changed. The girls behind me giggled about how cute the boys are from the other team (the exotic other team!), which took me back to a particular choir trip to Atlanta where girls from our choir fawned over boys from another choir. Ah, teenagedom. It will never change.
Which brings me to tonight's blog point: I am terrified of having children. No, not just the pregnancy bit; I've kind of accepted that that's going to have to happen and my belly button will never look the same again. But it's the fact that teenage years never change. And my God, my teenage years were a wreck of failed romances and awkward decisions and blown-up drama. And on and on and on and on and on! How can I possibly deal with a having that again in my own home? The Ivory Tower/Rapunzel housing situation suddenly makes a lot of sense--because I really hate to think about these half-children running around, making their own decisions and making stupid decisions. I don't have kids yet, but man, the thought of letting them go makes me kind of sick to my stomach. How did our parents ever do it? And why weren't we more scared about the world and what awaited us? I guess that's one detriment to hindsight: if we had known just how hard and unforgiving the real world was, would we ever have even bothered getting out of bed? For these kids, these games are their lives and they're so wrapped up in the newness of drama and love and achievement. And there's something so sweet about that. As a good friend of mine recently said, it kind of makes you wonder if any of them know that senior year just might be their peak, and it's all downhill from there. Because unless you're really that good, you're going to have to do more with your life than play ball or wave pompoms.
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