Last summer I attempted to get my twin daughters involved in a youth soccer class. They were two-and-a-half at the time, and so this may have been a little premature. However, other parents I knew with two year olds were doing it, and their kids were having a ball. And why wouldn't they? Being driven to an enormous green field where you and other two-foot-tall humans chase a soccer ball for an hour? What toddler wouldn’t love that?
My daughters, apparently. I was stymied. They were as athletic and smart as any toddlers I knew. In fact, I generally look at other children my daughters' age with a mixed sense of pity and disdain. It must be terrible to wade in your gene pool, I think to myself as we pass other children in the park. You're so brave to run in a public space with that gait of yours.
The problem is that my kids shut down around children they don't know. And adults. And trees. This comes from a combination of two things: they're twin sisters who have a built in best friend, and they stay at home all day with their mother, so they're not forced to make nice with new children in a day care setting. And so, when we reached the bag of soccer balls and the other children last summer at a nearby sports facility, my daughters climbed up my legs like rats on the Titanic. There we stood for an hour, watching other peoples' children have the time of their lives, running like maniacs towards a ball that had been kicked completely by luck, all the while my own children watched from the sidelines like the twins in The Shining.
Will this year be different? I don't think so. My wife runs a day school out of our home, and the children who come each day are our daughters' closest friends. Outside of that circle, however, they shy away from kids their own age. Josephine will reach for me to pick her up. Cecilia will stare at the toddlers the way an advanced alien race might look at us. It's slightly embarrassing and I don't embarrass easily. My wife finds it humiliating, which I find ridiculous, but I get it. She takes her job as a mom seriously, and so she looks at anything short of our children winning a gold medal in three-year-oldness as a personal failure.
Ultimately, though, I’m not even going to attempt the soccer field this year. They’re not ready, and I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t matter. Their behavior is unwittingly sending me a message that I suppose I needed to hear: We have the rest of our lives to talk to people we’re forced to be around all day, and soccer is more fun when it’s just me and my sister.
