peevish mama

You stopped me dead in my tracks with this:

“The look scared her, the body slant. He walked through the apartment, bent slightly to one side, a twisted guilt in his smile, ready to break up a table and burn it so he could take out his dick and piss on the flames.”*

I would love to believe that there aren’t any meaningful difference between male and female writers. This proves that there is a difference – that there should be. Hats off, dude.

*Lianne thinking about her ex on page 104 of Falling Man.

Adventureland’s soundtrack got me thinking about music and how for me, it used to be a really tactile, physical thing – both literally and figuratively, in a way it just isn’t anymore. In 1987 we were listening to music on cassette tapes. Plastic, durable, stackable, bulky tapes with scratched cases. I can still smell the ribbon and feel the anger in my throat when it got pulled out and chewed up by a rogue tape player or a little brother. I remember spooling it back in with a pencil, holding my breath, hoping it would still play. Taping songs off the radio, making mixed tapes, it was a manual thing – you had to get the timing right, you had to listen and press RECORD and STOP at the perfect moment.

When you went to the record store and plunked down nine dollars and change for a casette, you were taking it on faith that you were going to like all the songs as much as you liked the one you bought the tape for. You listened to the whole tape as soon as you got in the car. It was cumbersome to fast forward to a particular song, although it’s a skill we all honed. Doctor Dash was exceedingly good at this, though he had had many years of practice by the time we started roadtripping together.

Music was experienced by album back then – not by song – so there was a depth of familiarity and listening that I’m not quite getting anymore. We used to listen to our tapes over and over until we wore them out. Now I flit around, clicking and dragging, making playlists, dismissing songs I don’t like in the first ten seconds. Truth be told, there’s so much music on our computer, I haven’t even listened to a lot of it. Music is an ocean now – vast, unknowable – I feel I can’t do much more than sail along on top of it.

When I was young, I would very specifically and deliberately associate certain songs with certain times or people. A song was like plastic wrap and you would wrap it around a memory and there it would stay forever. Packaged, accessible, easy to hold in your hand daydream fodder. Lionel Richie’s Hello offered direct access to the one and only time I danced with Danny Voss – hunky, blond, turquoise-sleeveless-t-shirt-wearing, cousin-of-a-girl-I-hated, Danny Voss. Talk about yearning. Talk about visceral. This song made my stomach do flip flops for months on end.

At the beginning of law school, I sat on my fire escape and cried because someone was having a party at a house nearby and loud snatches of Uncle John’s Band kept floating over to me. The late afternoon sun, the Dead, the smell of beer and pot – that was college and I missed that life so much it hurt.

Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes? High school dances – unfettered Molly Ringwald dancing. I Melt with You by Modern English? Also school dances – spinning, dizzy, swallowed up in the music, wishing I had a boyfriend.

The Reflex by Duran Duran was the lip synch contest at camp. A girl from another cabin peed on stage. Pee and nervous laughter as she pretended to play the keyboards. Darkening concrete beneath her feet.

U Can’t Touch this by MC Hammer was the lounge at school. Girls in uniforms dancing on the coffee table.  

Brass Monkey by the Beasties was Fourth of July fireworks. I was really really tan and my hair was really really big. I was wearing Levis, rolled and tapered at the bottom, a pink tank top and opalescent lipstick. Hot shit.

And if there’s any woman my age who can’t hum the song from the Sixteen Candles scene pictured above, I’ll get a spiral perm tomorrow.

Do kids still do this? Lock in music to moments? Or is that something you only do when you can fit all your music into a shoe box? When the rate of discovering new music is directly tied to weekly rides to the mall? Is there too much music now? Is our capacity to make music our own finite and ultimately being diluted by instantaneous and unmitigated access? Is the very fact that I’m posing these questions, proof positive of my old lady status and that I just don’t get it?

And then there’s irony, which creates even more distance between the gut and the song. A friend was complaining about how her high schooler was listening to Phil Collins, whom she had never liked and liked even less now that her daughter and her friends had discovered him. I can’t say I disagree, although perhaps I find myself softening on Mr. Honey Tones and Thinning Hair as the years pass. On second thought, Sussudio really was unforgivable.  Maybe I was uniquely unjaded when it came to music, but I always took it as it came. I certainly didn’t listen to music with any sense of irony. I do now. And kids now seem to as well. Is it their loss?

I hope not. I hope that when Saint James is 35, he can pick out a handful of songs that send him shooting to his teen years, to specific moments in time when he couldn’t breathe for laughing so hard or being so smitten, to driving with friends with the windows open and the wind on their teeth, to playing foosball in smoky basements, to wrestling in the snow because he and his best friend were both being dicks and it was the only way to work it out, to pressing a finger onto a girl’s sunburnt shoulder, watching his print recede and doing it again.

Which songs did you wrap around your memories? Do tell.

I’m not sure what the appeal of Golden Girls could have been for a young teen, but I loved it. Maybe it was the fact that my parents had banned me from watching Laverne and Shirley as a child, their reason being, and I quote: They are cheap ladies! Cheap ladies! No further explanation necessary, apparently. Perhaps the Golden Girls seemed like cheap ladies disguised as old ladies. They were certainly as sassy and brassy and funny as Laverne and Shirley. Perhaps, despite their age (which seemed ancient to me back then), it was clear to me that their female friendships were as compelling and enduring as my own. Perhaps I enjoyed them because both of my grandmothers lived in Argentina, and it was a bit of an old lady fix. Or maybe I just watched a lot of TV. 

I don’t remember any particular plot lines. Just a lot of robes, house dresses, pastel pantsuits, wicker furniture, lanais, whipped white hair and cheesecake. Their Miami condo, decorated in 80’s tropicalia, probably smelled of powder and perfume and I fantasized about all the sweet creamy confections they might have in their refrigerator, about falling asleep on the mauve couch printed in sage palm fronds. I fancied I might be welcomed there – fawned over, even. Bea Arthur was a classy lady with a great voice and wit. She could move laugh tracks with a mere look of exasperation or a raised eyebrow. I’m sad to see her go.

You know that feeling the first time you kiss someone you really like? You feel like you’re falling, right? Adventureland is, hands down, the sweetest movie I’ve seen in a long time and taps right into that dizzying free fall – that vertiginous, dangerous, utterly perfect last three inches before your lips meet.

Jesse Eisenberg plays James, a likeable if slightly uptight protagonist who wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s smart, he’s sincere and he’s stuck working at a cheesy amusement park in his hometown of Pittsburgh instead of traveling around Europe after college as planned. He ends up falling in love with the beautiful and troubled Em played by Kristen Stewart. Eisenberg is perfection – he is authentic and restrained and brings us all the angst, yearning, butterflies, sharp pangs and small humilations of young love with total immediacy and subtlety.

The movie is set in 1987. This is my era – I was 17. The soundtrack is full of ridiculous gems that make you chuckle (Your Love – The Outfield) and that hit you in the gut (Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely – Husker Du, Pale Blue Eyes - Lou Reed). Nostalgia tends to make me slightly queasy, but since this movie so deftly sidesteps sappiness, it was easy to just relax and indulge. It’s a coming-of-age flick with brains and heart.

Doctor Dash and I picked this movie because we just wanted to escape and laugh a little – we didn’t really want to have to think. The last thing we expected was to feel. And remember.

Yesterday, before my adventure with Red Vogue, I was feeling shitty. Sad and shitty. After dropping the kids off at school, I drove around the lakes boohooing and feeling sorry for myself. I called my college friend, Tartare, in Seattle and left her a pitiful, weepy voicemail, apologizing and blubbering and apologizing some more for being so pathetic. I know I sounded absolutely over the top melodramatic, but I couldn’t help myself. The tears just kept coming, pooling in the bottom of my Kanye sunglasses.

Tartare called me back and bless her heart, without a lot of verbiage and fuss, she managed to gather up all my cards that were strewn over the floor, shuffle them, cut them and set them in a neat pile in front of me. She may be far away, but her powers are mighty. Like this.

                                                       Photo by Helmut Newton

My friend, Red Vogue, saved me today. She spirited me away to June, a beautiful vintage clothing store she recently discovered. I didn’t take much convincing. You’ll love it, you can just sit in the big chairs and I’ll bring you things to try on. It’s totally you. Beautiful store, beautifully edited, something something something . . . bustier with feathers . . .  

Feathers? Feathers. Now you’ve got my attention, lady. 

I’ve said it before, but normally, the change of seasons gets me all a dither about clothes. Not this spring. Right now it’s thermal tees and yoga pants every day. Totally boring. Completely utilitarian. No beauty. No creativity. No edge. No frilly. No feminine. No flirty. No nothing.

It felt so good to be out, to try on beautiful clothes, to finger dainty evening bags and chunky cocktail rings. I got to sink into a cushy chair and page through fashion photography books while Red Vogue emerged through red velvet curtains from time to time in different pieces. Why haven’t I shopped with her before? She used to be a model for Christ’s sake! Her legs are impossibly long and she carries herself with the insouciance and languid grace of a crane. Clothes look amazing on her. Not to mention scarves – she rocks scarves like a second skin – like the French.

We both scored. She got a gorgeous pencil skirt and black kitten heels. I got a sweet teal dress and a sexy 70’s inspired cover up for the pool this summer. I think my Visa might have squealed when it saw the light of day after all this time.

Then we went to Liberty for custard. And then home. A perfect afternoon. Jesusmaryjoseph, I needed that. I feel like I got to exhale for the first time in weeks.

And then, as if that wasn’t enough, Red Vogue emails me the Helmut Newton photo above. Slay me now. I will look at this every day until I’m off these wretched crutches. 

Merci mille fois, Red Vogue.

I think my friends are afraid of me. I think they think I’m really really feeble right now. Scary feeble. Feeble. Forlorn. Frightening. There’s nothing specific that leads me to believe this. You could say I’m simply being given wide berth. Time to recover. Get my shit together. I think they’re afraid.

I can’t say I blame them. It’s spring. It’s life. Everyone is skipping, stretching, going about business as usual and then some. I’m just the beat up orange pylon tipped over on the side of the busy road.

And let’s face it. Injury. Illness. It makes us uncomfortable. It renders the other less easy to predict, less easy to understand. Is she up for a visit? Is she tired? Does she want to be left alone? Is she hurting? Is she angry? Is she tainted? Is she different than before? All fair.

I would avoid me too, if I could.

Yesterday Dash and I snuck out for a movie. As I navigated the sloped, carpeted aisle with my crutches, my sunglasses slipped down my nose and I had to leave them. The fact that I had them on at all in a darkened theater is ludicrous enough, but such is the dilemma of a person on crutches. You can walk (sort of) but you can’t use your hands. And if you are using your hands, you can’t walk. Hands or feet, but not both.

I spotted a handicapped seat. Actually it was a big spot for a wheelchair and a handicapped companion seat. It is entirely possible that there was more leg room in that seat, but I didn’t want it. It was an irrational, visceral and entirely immature reaction. I am not handicapped. Those seats are not for me. Those seats. Who am I kidding? 

It’s temporary, but I am indeed handicapped. I can’t move with anything approximating grace or speed. I can’t hold anything in my hands and change locations at the same time. I even spend most of my day in a contraption. A CONTRAPTION! How about that? It’s a machine, a Continuous Passive Motion machine, that bends and extends my leg over and over. I’m supposed to use it for six hours a day. Sexy times. The harness that supports my leg is covered in a pearly gray synthetic wool substance, like the fleece of some superfly celestial sheep. I’m obsessed with this faux pelt because when I mentioned to Doctor Dash that I was glad they changed it between patients, he gave me look that I can only describe as a heartbreaking coalescence of dubiousness and pity. The machine itself is total Miami Vice – turquoise, fuscia, white and yellow – made from the same plastic as Crockett and Tubb’s speed boat.

And the best thing, the best thing about my knee bender, joint juicer, flexor-in-crime is its name: LEGASUS. As if I will soar to the heavens once I’m done with this penurious convalescence. Whoever thought that up deserves a certificate. Maybe even a ribbon.

We all feel the sap rise in our veins when it’s spring. I know I do. I feel lusty, antsy, frothy, a little bit wicked, almost adolescent. This is a bad time of the year to be hobbled. My trusty minivan is my only ally. I cruise around, windows open, my hair dancing in wild wips, listening to Hip HopNation waaaaay too loud. Thank God for satellite radio. Slim Thug, Lil’ Wayne, T.I., Young Jeezy, Jay Z, Fiddy, Diddy, Kanye, Dre, Snoop and my girl M.I.A. I drive around, my van fulla my homeys, warm breezes and bass. Spleefs and 40’s passed around, the windshield a movie, the soundtrack our own.

Except. Except. Not.

It’s just me and the music and the wind. I pull into the driveway, my ears ringing and the yearning in my chest only slightly abated.

Damn you spring.

There are 142 crutch steps from the physical therapy office to my car. Not that many. Like a girl with a heavy bag of pennies, I am underwhelmed once I count them out. It is a disappointingly paltry number which belies my pounding heart. But 142 crutch steps take enough time for plenty. Enough time to break a sweat. Enough time to be passed by an old woman with a cane. Enough time to receive a kind smile from John Denver. I know JD is dead. But this was him. Denim, little glasses, bowl-cut of straw. I am not sure why, but he smiled at me today. And I almost lost count.

I promised myself I wouldn’t post again until I could post about something other than my knee, but sadly, I’ve got nothing. My knee still rules. I am its simpering bitch. I pamper it, strengthen it, bend it, medicate it, hydrate it, coddle it. Curse it behind its back.

Here in Minnesota we are breathing in the first of spring – with great inhalations of relief, we are greedy for the smell of green – sweet, sweet chlorophyll. This week has been but a string of days that feel like sun-kissed gifts from Mother Nature. I have taken to sitting in my adirondack chair in front of my house in the afternoons. I feel like a proper invalid from the olden days taking my fresh air, my sun, my constitutionals – minus the white blanket, the buxom nurse and the Swiss Alps in the foreground. I am a feeble convalescent – outside of everything – nothing more than a passive bystander as an orgy of bipedal existence flaunts itself in front of my eyes.

I sit in my chair, my crutches glinting in the grass beside me, and I watch Devil Baby ride her tricycle on the sidewalk. We amuse ourselves by creating elaborate dinners, with her riding her tricycle to the little tree to get each ingredient. Yesterday she went to the “lake” and caught some fish, which I cleaned and breaded and fried in a cast iron skillet. Then she raced off to the little tree to buy blueberries. Then back to get spinach, carrots, cream for the berries, sea salt, a baguette. She is a tireless food shopper. It’s a game – part charades, part pretend, part fetch.

As she pedals away, her little blue rain boots pushing like mechanical pistons, I slip into one of my infamous calamitizations – my reveries of doom. I imagine a rusty van stopping and someone jumping out to pluck my Devil Baby off her red tricycle. What would I do? Normally, I envision leaping out of my chair and running like the bionic woman until I catch the van – my reflexes so cat-like that they wouldn’t have gotten far. I lunge and grab hold of the side of the van, working my arms into an open window while the culprit tries to shake me off, thwacking my legs against the side of the van like a rag doll. I rip off the rear view mirror and bludgeon the driver in the face until he swerves, swearing and crying, and hits a tree. I am thrown from the van, but I jump up and grab Devil Baby from the floor of the back seat, collapsing into the grass. I cradle her, a trickle of blood snaking down my temple, as the camera zooms out and the music swells. Cue the distant sirens.

But now, NOW, I’m on crutches and I won’t be able to leap out of my chair and put the smack down. Now, I must rely on my wits, my keen eyesight. I, who couldn’t tell you the make of most of my friends’ cars if you offered me a million dollars, will have to get my shit together and start to identify all those amorphous sedans and suvs with the precision of a trained detective. 1997 Buick Lesabre. Sage-mist metalic. The brake rotors are shot, passenger side wiper stuck at 30 degrees, I will rattle off through gritted teeth. Crucial, above all, I must memorize the license plate number. Gotta get those plates. Suddenly, it feels irresponsible to be sitting outside alone with Devil Baby and no cell phone. So exposed, helpless. I know every second is critical.

Tick. Tick.

I decide to practice.

Devil Baby is buying a peach pie at the little tree. A maroon minivan snakes by, a bit too slowly for my taste. Downright predatory. Soccer ball decal in the window. Check. I squint into the sun and – Mother Mary – I can’t make out the license plate! I can’t even read it, let alone memorize it, let alone make a lightening quick phone call to alert the authorities so they put out an APB and smack a tail on that van faster than you can say crazy.

So I put my head back and close my eyes, the sun thumbing dancing sparks against my eyelids. I take a deep breath and wait for my peach pie.

     Photo by Kathy Quirk-Syvertsen

On Monday I had my knee surgery. On Tuesday Saint James got his cast off his arm. There will be one day when we have two injured people in our family, he said. He thinks that the simple removal of his cast, ipso facto, changes his status from injured to non-injured. To him, an injury is something easily identified by external markers: bandaids, casts, splints, crutches. He is, at the age of eight, blissfully unaware of hidden injuries, bodies broken in places unseen – in some cases unknown.  To Saint James, I wasn’t injured when I was seventeen – I was injured on Monday, when I came home with a bandaged knee and crutches.

Ironically, Red Vogue took this picture while she was watching the kids during my surgery. Later she wrote in an email that she was fascinated by Saint James’ empty cast – that the soft and cozy interior reminded her of a nest. I just love that. A nest.

From what I could tell, the cast allowed Saint James to forget about his broken arm. Where he had gingerly cradled his arm for the 24 hours before we got him x-rayed, he seemed to have no pain and no memory of the broken bone magically healing therein once he got his cast. In true kid style, it was business as usual – he was able to write, swim, play soccer, and navigate the monkey bars as always.  Piano is the only thing that went by the wayside for six weeks, and he was none too sorry about that. Instead of slowing him down, the cast freed him up – let him get back to the business of being a boy.

I on the other hand have been spending far too much time contemplating my knee. It has almost taken on a life of its own. Sometimes, it’s just a knee. Sometimes, if I’ve fallen behind on the pain killers, it expands in my imagination – the hurt emanating out in a perfect pulsating orb – swirling and electric like a crystal ball. And sometimes, when I’m fighting back tears of frustration because I can’t carry my own cup of coffee to the table, it grows even bigger, expanding to fill the room, threatening to burst the walls, to suffocate me. 

I have been thinking a lot about a book called The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, so I asked Doctor Dash to find it for me in the attic. It took me about a minute to locate the passage I remembered and when I did I just clutched the book to my chest and sighed. These are the ruminations of an old man named Leo Gursky who is at once hilarious, ornery, fatalistic and a hopeless romantic – a beautifully written character and one of my personal favorites of all time.

“My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells shit?- small daily humiliations – these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. Other damages I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it’s over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes. I don’t mean to make it sound like I’ve made a science of it. It’s not that well thought out. I take it where it comes. It’s just that I notice certain patterns. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I’m ready, this, for reasons I can’t explain I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible. (We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood: to me that is the sound of childhood, heavy breathing and shoes scraping the hard earth.) Stiffness of fingers is the dream of childhood as it’s been returned to me at the end of my life . . . Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”

And me? Helplessness, vulnerability, loss of innocence – that all goes straight to my knee.

Indulgent? Ambitious? Definitely. Maybe. But it’s six weeks. Just looking at this pile is sure to heal.

Do you remember in the Sopranos when Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri’s wife died suddenly and he couldn’t bring himself to eat her baked ziti from the freezer for months and months? It was all he had left of her – something that had been made by her hands. Tony’s sister, Janice, was tying to move in on Bobby and she forced him to eat the baked ziti – defrosting and deshrining Bobby’s dead wife in one fell swoop. Over the past several weeks I’ve been doing quite a bit of cooking and freezing so we have real food to eat when I’m on crutches. Don’t think I’m not thinking about this scene every time I slap a label on a piece of tupperware. 

Every time I try to write about my upcoming knee surgery, I feel myself morphing into a paunchy ex-jock, swigging my beer as I regale you with war stories of  my high school football glory days. Not very sexy, but nevertheless, here it goes. Errp. Scuse.

It was May of 1988 and the Academy of the Sacred Heart Gazelles (I know, so cute and yet so ridiculous) had travelled to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio for the last lacrosse tournament of the season. A few of us seniors had come straight from prom – my light pink strapless dress swung virginally from the garment hook of Marian’s mom’s car. She drove us through the night because there was no way we were going to miss this tournament – even if it meant bidding our flummoxed dates adieu at two a.m.

By this point in the season – the end of the season, we were in the best shape of our lives – we had hearts like bulls. Lacrosse is a graceful running sport and it is played with no out-of-bounds. If you wanted to burn up time on the clock, you could just take off with the ball and sprint across the next field over, pretending you were a young Native American brave thumping across the prairie in a loin cloth, your heart pounding in your ears. Our coach, Ms. Dritsas, never let us forget it was a game invented by the Plains Indians and played on vast fields that were miles and miles long and wide. The games could go on for days, with hundreds of players on each team. We Gazelles proudly played with the traditional wooden lacrosse sticks made by a guy in Northern Michigan, while all the other teams used plastic sticks, easier sticks we used to say. A stocky woman with spiky gray hair, Ms. Dritsas ate orange peels and was suspected to be a lesbian due to her habitual ass slapping. Somehow, this seems a lot less newsworthy and titillating now than it did then, but we were sheltered Catholic school girls and we liked to make fun.

The beginning of the season was a cold rainy blur of Ms. Dritsas sending us on long runs. Don’t come back for an hour. Go. We would dutifully trudge off, our pony tails flicking behind us, our colored spandex tights gleaming from beneath our oversized shorts. As soon as we were out of sight, we would drop into a saunter and go to our friend Sherry’s house to eat Pop Tarts for fifty minutes before wetting the hair at our temples in the sink and jogging back to school. Sherry isn’t alive anymore. How could we have known as girls, giggling in her house, feeling like we were getting away with something, that she would die in a tragic accident in her early thirties? It is still beyond comprehension.

I’m not sure if I felt it as much as I heard it, but mid-stride in a dead run, there was a pop. A pop that ended my world as I knew it, a world where girls played fierce and hard and felt completely invincible. As I lay on the ground, a thick fence of gold knee high socks surrounded me, but I couldn’t see past anyone’s knees. I remember screaming, over and over, I don’t want permanent knee damage. Please don’t let it be permanent knee damage. Even then, at that moment, there were too many words coming out of my mouth. Meaningless, impotent words. 

Arthroscopic surgery determined that in the last game of the last year of my high school career, I had a completely torn my ACL, screwing up my knee forever. And for the next twenty years I would put off getting it repaired, learn to favor my other leg without even thinking about it, let all the sports I used to love fall by the wayside, and generally get on with my life. 

In five days I’m having surgery to repair my ligament and the cartilage that has been worn down due to instability. If I don’t perish during surgery or from a flagrant, angry infection, I will be on crutches for six weeks. War and Peace, the Nile River, Rapunzel’s hair. Six. Long. Weeks. This is bleak, people. Bleak. Doctor Dash has a couple weeks off during that time and my mother and mother-in-law are each coming for a week, but still – how is this going to work? Who’s going to do everything that I do? How am I going to tolerate sitting around all day, lying around all day. What am I going to do if Devil Baby throws a tantrum in a parking lot? How am I going to get used to asking for help? 

I was fitted for my crutches today and given a lesson on how to get up and down the stairs. This is going to be incredibly humbling. Every fiber of my being feels like I cannot possibly be taking myself out of commission for six weeks. That this is utter insanity. That I will end up crying on the floor as my house crumbles around me, my family falling away with the debris, their faces covered in white dust. I have to dig deep – dig back. I have to rely on the fierce, fearless, selfish girl in me to see me through this, to push me through this. Why? For the sake of the old lady I hope to become. So I can walk and dance and coyly cross my legs when I’m sixty, seventy, eighty.

What is six weeks against decades? Right? RIGHT? Please tell me I’m right.

postscript: if there is a girl athlete in your life, check out this article.