Here if you need

Posted on 28 October, 2019

Thirty-eight years after first gracing the Deakin netball courts as an enthusiastic eight-year-old bullant in the 80s, I staged a comeback last night at 46, in twilight netball with my sister and daughter.

When an activity is deemed 18+ it usually seems so grown up. Not so, when that’s the age requirement in a game of sport populated by teenagers in the physical prime of their lives.

These are the frighteningly young, fit, fertile humans Mother Nature favours to propel forward the human race. I used to be one of them, but don’t even have a uterus any more (thank goodness, because I’m pretty sure it would have attempted to evict itself during the first quarter).

As the sun went down, time melted away. By the time we’d cut the cake (that’s a pre-game ball drill, rather than the type of cake I’ve been cutting far too frequently in the elapsed decades, if the fit of the bib is any indication), I was ready.

I’ve always been in goal defence or keeper, and quickly remembered how to do this. Step One: disarm your opponent with self-deprecating chat about motherhood and it having been another century when you last graced a court.

How hard could it be to get back on the horse, really? I mean, I might be a million years older and a thousand kilos heavier (and realised during the game that I can’t actually see beyond the first third of the court without my glasses these days, which I didn’t have), but I’ve been walking around Googong on and off for a good month now in preparation for this moment.

I’ve even been performing the odd strength-building workout while watching Say Yes To The Dress Atlanta and crying when mothers-of-the-bride (with whom I identify, age-wise) bawl about ‘losing their daughters’ or when instructed to do a Sumo V-sit with any form of resistance, or even without any.

The hooter blared, Centre stepped into the circle and it was on for young and old. Literally.

The ball was heading my way—faster than it used to or was I slower? In any case, it’s extraordinary how the mind hijacks a situation from yesteryear and convinces itself you’re seventeen and should definitely leap skyward and intercept that pass.

The groin strain occurred in the opening seconds, but I’d be darned if GS was going to get her hands on that ball. Not on my watch. We won the ’91 Div One grand final on the next court for heaven’s sake—it’s a matter of honour!

Granted, these very same leaping legs had been a shadow of their current selves then, their gravity-defying antics aided by a lack of excess cargo…but still. That ball was mine. Repeatedly.

Something primal took over. That inner, ‘here if you need’. A deep, evolutionary instinct lying dormant until now, from a timeless fraught, when my worst post-netball worry had been whether I’d get enough of my maths assignment done to go to the party that night, and whether the boy I had a crush on was paying enough attention from the sidelines.

No stress. No grief. No sandwich-generation rushing to the game after work via a piano lesson and a quick visit to the parentals in the nursing home. Parents who, back in the day, never missed a game.

Now it’s our children on the sidelines, instead. It’s my daughter scoring our goals up the other end (I think—must investigate contact lenses).

It was a social game but quite honestly we wiped the floor with the opposition, in the nicest possible way. And I have a great deal of pain to show for our victory this morning. The finger I dislocated in a vigorous intercept in the early ’90s is having injury flashbacks while I type. Arthritis may set in before I can complete this article. A toe is squawking in chorus with the aforementioned groin.

The Epsom salts had their work cut out for them in the bath. I’d still be floating around in there (it was almost impossible to find the strength to clamber out) except bed—not parties—beckoned.

Turns out I’m not the teenager I was in my head during the game. I’m the middle-aged mum with a messy, middle-aged life to match. When I ran this article by my friend, Catherine Russell, she said, ‘The game never changes, but the players do. We need to be on the court to get that perspective. There’s something to be found in marking time through a simple game…how things change, and how they stay the same’.

Those kids on the sidelines have had much more to worry about in their youth than maths tests and parties, and maybe they won’t one day return to a childhood game with as much carefree nostalgia as I am.

Maybe they’ll think of sport as a mental health strategy, when they needed it most.

And that’s how I’m viewing it now. On the way home, windows down, music blaring, I found myself crying over the unadulterated joy of reconnecting with the confident, happy, sport-loving girl I used to be. And crying about sharing this with my sister, who was similarly exhilarated and dearly needs this outlet too.

And because every time I put the clutch in, my upper thigh felt like it was completely unhinged from my pelvis.