Cheerleading competitions. They will make you smile, make you cry and make you change from a fairly normalish Mama in the suburbs into some kind of crazy freak screaming your head off for about two minutes and thirty seconds. Cheering is good for the soul!
Once the screaming subsides, if you just take a moment to listen to all that is going on around you, you may just hear something kind of wonderful;
“I just sneezed sparkles right out of my nose!”
“I can not get the glitter out of my eyebrows.”
“Meh, she’s ok, she only got kicked in the face.”
“I. Am. Fine. Mom, the Coach will just tape me up. I can tumble, and I will be FINE”
That last one was my daughter, and it turns out she wasn’t fine. Tape did not keep her from jamming her knees so badly that she couldn’t walk. An old ghost injury from gymnastics, Returned. Unwanted. Unwelcome. When a member of the cheer team gets hurt, a good cheer coach stays calm, leads, and grabs the ice. Mama’s; well we pretend to be brave and pass out the hugs, but the real hero’s on the Cheer team are the girls themselves. My daughter who just kept putting on the brave face, just kept doing her very best to get through. And her teammates. Her sweet sweet teammates. Carrying her bags, holding her hand and when they realized she was far too injured to walk without pain, this was the next thing overheard at a Cheer Comp brought me to my knees.
“Girlfriend, get on, you’re not walking anymore today.”
Sometimes you can only get by with a little bit of help of your friends….
So sweet and nice to see the power of girlfriends and teammates.