When you're a hopeless klutz but your kids are not

My children are athletic, especially my son. This is primarily because I am not.

Actually, I'm a klutz.

If you've ever raised kids, you know that fierce determination to give them all the things that your childhood self never received.

In fact, the entire point of having children is wish fulfillment. “I always wanted an air rifle, but I never got one,” you say to yourself. “So I'm going to buy one for my kid, and hope he doesn't shoot his eye out.”

For some of you, this means an annual pass to Disneyland. But for me, it meant the chance to play sports.

Maybe they had team sports in the small town where I lived as a girl, but I never knew about them. Or maybe only boys were invited.

But I wouldn't have wanted to join anyway, because I was — and continue to be — a klutz of spectacular aplomb.

To this day, I can trip over my feet while I'm strolling on tile.

My clumsiness started back when I was a child. My only interest in life was walking to the public library and checking out books. This might improve your vocabulary, but being a bookworm does not endear you to the other kids in your neighborhood.

So I tried to be a normal kid and fit in.

I climbed a tree. I fell out of it.

I bought roller skates. I fell down 10,001 times in a row until I had no skin left on my lower extremities.

I tried to run, but apparently I run funny, according to the other kids lying on the ground in hysterics.

My sort-offriends could climb a chain-link fence in nanoseconds. I just fell flat on my back and, after I caught my breath, staggered home to finish reading “Jane Eyre.”

Eventually, after I'd bruised every part of my body, I just had to accept that I was different. So I happily hid myself away inside the long branches of our weeping willow tree, which I considered to be my private clubhouse. There, I spent every free minute in my own secret world as I worked my way through all the books in our local library.

All this reading might have taught me to spell — I did win our school spelling bee — but it did not bring me closer to the other kids, who universally thought I was an awkward weirdo freaky oddball alien geek person.

The only time anyone talked to me was when they needed help with their homework. Later, I was saved by the fact that I matured much earlier than the other girls, and developed, well, you know, bosoms that suddenly made me popular and attractive.

However, I never got over being a klutz, and I was determined that my kids would not share my fate.

This meant that I stuck them in every sport available, whether they wanted to join or not. I drove past a youth soccer sign-up one day and backed up the car to sign up both kids.

My son, Cheetah Boy, who was probably around 7 at the time, complained bitterly that he didn't want to do it.

I just looked at him.

“Your favorite things in life are running and kicking things,” I told him. “You're playing soccer.”

And of course, he loved it and became a star player. It was the same story with baseball, softball and more.

His sister, Curly Girl, liked making new friends, but she had one problem: She hated running. At a certain point, she realized that the goalie doesn't have to run down the field, so that became her position.

Whether it was karate, soccer, basketball, football, track, softball or baseball, I made sure that my kids were out there on the field playing, even when it meant I had to get up at the crack of dawn to watch them.

Still, they had fun and made friends and the seasons and games and practices gave their lives a rhythm. It always annoyed me when I would talk to the mothers of my daughter's friends and suggest that they sign up for her softball team.

“Oh, Ashley wouldn't like that,” the moms would universally say. And, yes, all the girls were named Ashley. I always wondered how exactly they knew their daughters wouldn't like it, since they'd never tried it.

At one point, Curly Girl wanted to do “cheer” with some of her friends. No, I told her. I want you out on the field of battle, not out there bouncing up and down on the sidelines.

Looking back, it was all worth it. Both of my kids have lean, hard, muscular bodies like I never did, and they enjoy being outdoors playing sports.

Next up: T-ball for my new grandson. I guess he needs to be out of diapers first.