Since we returned from Sweden, fall 2021, my kid wants to figure skate. We spent three months there after I completed a long-distance hike in the Swedish mountains. Since we lived in a semi-remote cabin in Skåne, and I had a lot of things to do around the house, I sometimes let my daughter watch DVDs. One of them was “Bara roligt i Bullerbyn” (The Children Of Noisy Village).
So, while I was cooking dinner or chopping wood, she would watch these movies. And in one of them a little boy, Lasse, would skate on the frozen lake with his frends. At some point, since he was being silly and trying to brag that he was “the king of Bullerby”, he fell backwards into a whole cut into the ice (for retreiving ice blocks for the cool house).
For some reason, this very scene encouraged my 3-year-old daughter to tell me she now also wanted to skate. At first, I shrugged off the idea as just another 3-year-old idea. They come and go. Most of them last a few minutes or days at best. But when she still insisted on wanting skates half a year later, begging me almost every week to buy her some, I finally caved.
I went on a second hand online market place and got her some 50 bucks skates and then off to one of the only two open rinks (of five) in 2021 we went. From that day on we would go almost every weekend, and she would just not lose interest in skating. To the point that we joined a skating club eventually.
It’s important to me to add that this was 100% my kid’s idea and always will be. Nothing was further from my interests for me than joining a competitive sport, especially figure skating. Even though I liked it as a kid. But it was just so far beyond my scope, I could not see that for us… I also have to think of all these obsessed sports moms you inevitably get confronted with, and even if it’s just a bad stereotype of something you maybe don’t want to become (hopefully). The type that has their kids live out their dreams. I never wanted to be that. But I associated it with competitive sports. That, amongst many things, just made me very suspicious of the sport and reluctant to allow my kid to even join a figure skating club. If it hadn’t been for her telling me “I want to skate everyday!” it would’ve probably stayed a weekend thing…
I guess we’ll never know.
Leave a Reply