On the Ice, All the Daughters Are Free

photo by Kirill Vytovtov

My daughter is six. I’m driving her to the rink for her first ever figure skating competition, and she says she doesn’t feel so good. I tell her, It’s just nerves. I’m not a stage mom, but we don’t have enough money to throw the registration fees down the drain.

At the rink, I can’t put her on the ice – coaches only – so I help her into her tiny dress while her teeth chatter. I watch the other moms pull out their makeup bags, realizing I don’t have one of my own. I smudge some tinted lip balm on her cheeks and call it good.

On the ice, she does fine. One or two kids before her fall and the whole crowd gasps. My daughter looks so tiny as she runs through a simple routine, getting confused at one point about which direction to go. There are a hundred people watching, and she is all alone out there. She places third out of three, her smile huge and rosy cheeks glowing in the picture with her medal. 

When we get home, her fever is over 100, and I feel terrible for pushing her out there in the first place. “I’m so sorry,” I wail, as she falls asleep in my lap on the couch, her medal clutched in her tiny fist.

*

I am six. My father is teaching me to shoot pool on a table I am barely tall enough to see over. Somehow, I did not inherit his height, although I will carry those genes to pass on to my giraffe children.

He shouts at me to keep my elbow up. To calculate angles. To plan my next shot. 

I’m a nerdy, unathletic child, a disappointment for being a girl as he watches whatever sport is in season, tossing back an endless stream of cheap beer. But the disappointment is never keener than when he tries to teach me how to play something. Whatever the task at hand, he runs me through endless iterations, throwing a softball or shooting baskets or racking the pool table while he yells at me for how terrible I am until I am limp with exhaustion.

Even though I am on the honor roll, my worst grade is always gym.

*

My daughter is nine. I watch her warmup for an ice show at the university where her father works. She is now a veteran, no longer nervous as I bust out the makeup bag I’ve acquired and swipe on her cat-eye eyeliner and a perfect red pout. 

As the college skaters zip around her, she hits a divot in the ice and goes down hard. Every parent knows that feeling of It’s a bad one, something about the sound they make when they smack the ground that rings in our ears a little different, and soon she is coming off the ice, gulping in heaving sobs.

I wrap her up in my arms for warmth as much as comfort. “Don’t cry, you’ll ruin your eyeliner,” I find myself yelling at her, and soon she is laugh-crying. We are bonded in a timeless tradition of women telling each other not to ruin their eyeliner with tears. 

When it’s showtime, I am nervous for her. And she nails it. Only I can see that her jumps are smaller and tentative; otherwise, she is everywhere, everything, she is supposed to be at once. 

*

I am twelve. My parents are getting divorced, and now all my sports interactions are playing HORSE with the older neighbor boy who comes by since his house doesn’t have a hoop. I appreciate him not only because he’s kinda cute, with the scraggly beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip, but because he’s kind to me. He never screams at me; my shooting percentage soars.

My mother hates the pool table because it reminds her of my dad. But I’m now an unparalleled pre-teen shooter, hustling family members at barbeques by pulling out wads of my babysitting cash and challenging them to a game. When they inevitably lose, my mother makes them pay up.

When we get especially broke during one winter of single motherhood, she asks me if I mind if she sells the pool table. I let it go with a shrug. 

*

I am twenty-one. My college boyfriend gets a job working for a minor-league hockey team and we’re living together in Baltimore. Hockey is his favorite sport, and now it’s my favorite sport, as much for the free tickets I get as for the fact that nobody ever screamed at me while I was trying to learn it. 

One of the perks of his job is he can skate during his lunch hour, so his mother buys him a new pair of hockey skates for his birthday. “I wish I learned how to skate when I was younger,” I say, looking on enviously. She buys me a pair of hockey skates for Christmas. I still have them.

*

My daughter is three and a half. I want another hockey player in the family, so I buy her tiny pink plastic skates and scoot her around the rink, even though I am growing progressively larger with her baby brother. By the time I get back on the ice after maternity leave, it’s too late: it’s an Olympic year, and she’s started wearing a tutu to the rink.

I suppose I should be disappointed that she’s veered off in another direction, but somehow I’m not. I see the look on her little face as she watches the bigger girls float by, practicing their edges and jumps. I see her wanting to be good at something simply because she wants to. I remember taking to the ice in the beginning, wobbly as a fawn, and how relieved I was that no one was yelling at me. How happy I was to discover that I could disconnect from gravity. I want her to have that too.

*

I am twenty-four. At hockey camp for adults, I have to change in a storage room because I’m the only woman. I’ve spent an entire year going to the lunchtime free-skate at the liberal arts college with an elite hockey team where I’m working my through my degree as a clerk in their bookstore. After we’re done playing, the guys invite me to have a beer and watch the Miracle on Ice on ESPN Classic. I never saw it the first time. I’m glad, once again, that my dad didn’t like hockey or know how to skate.

*

My daughter is ten and a half. We go to the “family skate” at the private rink we’ve shelled out more than we can really afford to join because the public rink shut down in the pandemic. The Eagles kick off at the same time, so when we arrive, it’s a clean sheet of ice all for us. 

While she’s been busy growing nearly as tall as me, I’ve lost track of how fast she’s gotten. Freed from needing to glance backward over her shoulder, she absolutely whips. My small rebellion is skating clockwise instead of counter-clockwise.

Eventually, other skaters will join us on the ice. But for that half-hour, it is only the two of us. In the middle of the ice, she works on her newest spins: a sit spin and a camel spin. I can see where she’s a bit sloppy on the setup—her tongue sticks out slightly from effort, a trait she inherited from me that my sister calls “the King tongue.” Over and over, she doggedly tries again.

I want to tell her what it means to me, that we share ice even though it’s not the same sport. But she is already a tween-ager and would just roll her eyes.

“That was a good one,” I tell her after one sit spin attempt, even though it wasn’t really, but because I know that someday, it will be. I circle around her, my heart skating outside my body, as she shows what it’s like to know joy.