A Hall of Fame Journey…

6 Comments May 16, 2017 drworobec

My dad is being inducted into the Alberta Golf Hall of Fame tomorrow night. Parents often tell their children how proud they are of them, but statements of pride and admiration don’t flow from child to parent as commonly.

This is one of those times.

I’m so proud of him. And not even for the Hall of Fame induction per se, but for the passion that he’s followed his entire life.

I grew up with golf playing a major role in my life. Until I was ten years old, we lived in the tiny village of Hughenden, Alberta, with a population of a couple hundred people. The golf course of my early childhood had sand greens, and at weekend tournaments I would earn spending money raking the sand as each group played through. We owned a two-seater golf cart, and I vividly remember learning to drive it when I could barely reach the pedals. I remember Sunday pancake breakfasts at the clubhouse, disturbing red ant hills in the treed area behind the number one tee box, building elaborate wooden forts alongside the forested roadway entrance, and walking the course in the Spring as crocuses peeked up and signaled the end of the harsh prairie Winter. At seven years old, we memorialized our poodle, Sugar, with a pile of rocks that lies deep within the forest off the number three fairway. I can still imagine that clearing in the trees and see my mother’s tears. Am I painting you a picture? Can you feel the golfbag on your back, the crunchy grass beneath your spikes, the crisp Alberta sunshine on your face?

After our move to Sundre, at age ten, my love of the game waned. Moreso, I suspect, due to adolescent moodiness rather than any feelings for the golf itself. Nevertheless, golf remained a constant. We played as a family nearly every Sunday afternoon, even as my teenaged petulance grew. Now, with the benefit of hindsight and maturity, I can see that these afternoons were never about the golf for my parents, but rather a chance to spend some time together. My brother grabbed this opportunity and ran with it, eventually earning a golf scholarship to a D1 school in the States, and lots of international travel and competition. I went the other way, rebelling against a sport steeped in rules and tradition; my perfectionism, impatience, and stubbornness do not serve me well on a golf course, and these days, I limit my golf to the driving range and tee boxes only.

But I’m flying in for the event tomorrow; just me, no kids, and 24 hours in Alberta at my dad’s side. I’m going to squeeze in a run on my beloved Snake Hill, snuggle with my baby niece, and enjoy an evening celebrating my dad’s passion. Because really, “there is no passion to be found in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” ~Nelson Mandela

We’re creating their “normal.”

Leave a comment May 1, 2017 drworobec

My son had a flag football game on Saturday morning. I snuggled in a blanket on the sidelines with my daughter and we played with colouring books and hand clapping games while we watched him run around. He’s only eight, and his teammates are in the six to eight-year-old range, so it’s a bit of organized chaos unfolding amidst a sea of mouthguards and football cleats. Flags flying, kids running, and footballs dropping everywhere. It’s childhood fun at its best.

The game was scheduled from 11:30am-12:30pm, so we packed snacks to eat at the field to tide us over for a later lunch at home. Both of my kids are snackers, as am I- in fact, our sporting event snack bag looks more like a full grocery bag than a few snacks thrown into the bottom of a purse. I’ve always been that way; I’m the mom with a full cooler at BlueJays games and a packed lunch for an afternoon at the park. Nutrition is important to me, and I find that I have far less control when purchasing food than I do when I pack my own. Food brought from home allows me to better manage the preservatives, the additives, the sodium, and the fat content of typical take-out on-the-run options.

When the game finished, we began to pack up our gear. My children are still young enough that we usually pack like we’re going away overnight when in fact we’re only gone for the afternoon. I gathered our blanket, our games, our snacks, our extra layers, and we began to leave. My husband, who is the assistant coach for my son’s team, mentioned that team snacks were being handed out further down the field. The post-game snack is a big part of the fun in young children’s sports, so my son hurried down to claim his share. He came back with two things:

I cringed on the outside and raged on the inside.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be unreasonably strict with my nutritional standards. Yes, I believe in high-quality food, and yes, I try to minimize my family’s intake of processed junk, but I’m not on the all-organic, all-homemade, no-sugar, no-yellow #5 train either. I like to live in the world of moderation, with a heavy emphasis on fruits and vegetables. All that being said, “normal” is based on one’s perception, and my household normal does not include multi-coloured goldfish crackers and KoolAid jammers.

As is always the case in parenting, I weighed my options. I let my son have some of the above, and my daughter had a taste too. We threw the rest out and we had a good, long conversation on the way home about properly fueling our bodies so that they can be at their healthiest and help us to perform and feel at our best. As a lifelong athlete, I have learned first-hand the effects that nutrition can have on athletic performance, and that’s why I find it particularly troubling that these snacks are being given in a situation in which we are promoting fitness and sport. The irony is not lost on me. The same could be said for school cafeteria and vending machine choices- if we expect our children to perform at their best, physically and mentally, why are we choosing these types of snacks?

A pre-cut veggie tray and a block of cheese would be no less convenient. A bag of apples and a box of fig bars would be no less costly. A watermelon and some granola packets would be no less tasty. We can change the food industry with the choices we make with our dollars, and we can change our children’s well-being with the choices we make with their food.

Please, let’s choose wisely. After all, we’re creating their “normal.”

Beauty. Babies. Bathrooms.

2 Comments March 20, 2017 drworobec

Not coincidentally, most of the blog posts that I write that really resonate with readers are the very same posts that really resonate with me. The posts that make me laugh or cry, make me introspective and reflective, make me transparent and emotional. This is one of those posts.

My five-year-old daughter wasn’t feeling well yesterday, so I kept her home from school. She wasn’t really sick, just not quite herself, and a full day of rest for her seemed like a better choice than sticking her into the first-day-after-March-break Kindergarten chaos. Her tired little body needed to stay in pyjamas, to watch movies, and to re-energize. Mondays are an 11:00-7:00 day for me at the clinic, and my husband was unable to take the day off, so my in-laws stepped in and agreed to play nursemaid. But before I took her to their place, we stopped into one of my happy places to sneak in a workout. I saw my 9am crew, completed week four of the five-week Crossfit Open competition, and set her up with an iPad, crackers, and water.

It was after the workout that she threw me for a loop. She was sitting on the vanity in the women’s changeroom as I applied my makeup, getting ready for work. “Why do you need that mommy?” she asked, pointing to my eyeshadow. “What does it do?”

Radio silence.

“Well, it makes my eyes look brighter,” I said. And as she asked about each subsequent piece of makeup, I explained away concealer and powder and eyeliner and mascara as “it makes my skin smoother” or “it makes my eyelashes darker,” stumbling to find words to minimize the aesthetic component of cosmetics. As I spoke, I cringed inside, realizing that this is where it starts. This is where she starts to learn about society’s rules of beauty. This is where she starts to learn about her beauty. Her worth. Her value. Am I being too dramatic? If you think so, then I will boldly tell you that you’re wrong.

Now, I don’t wear much makeup as it is, and you can often find my face completely bare, but nonetheless I swayed her views, however unintentional, to believe that having smooth skin, bright eyes, and dark eyelashes are desirable. I fuelled the machine that believes that young skin, blonde hair, and a thin body defines beauty. I contributed to the belief that natural looks are not good enough and I influenced my own daughter towards an ideal that I don’t even believe in myself, yet have somehow bought into. My history of disordered eating is no secret, and I’ve written about it a few times; I still feel emotionally stripped down and exposed when I read those posts. But with adulthood and hindsight and years of self-reflection under my belt, I’m sure that disordered eating also falls into the realm of beauty and self-worth too. And it starts young.

So what should I have done? What should I have said? The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know that I find parenting my daughter much trickier than parenting my son, because of social issues like this. Beauty. Value. Self-esteem. Uuugh, it’s just all so damn hard.

I’m trying to raise my little girl to value her brain. And her abilities. And her kindness. Even if the world at large values hair extensions and self-tanner more. It starts young and it starts with us. And maybe, just maybe, it starts on a bathroom vanity at the gym.