Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

When my husband was about 6 years old, his parents purchased a small vacation home on a lake in Vermont. Because my mother-in-law won a motor boat by getting the secret square on Hollywood Squares (that’s a fun story!), my husband started water skiing when he was young. More importantly, because the house was just a mile or so from a ski mountain, he also started snow skiing before he started most of the sports that dominated his athletic life. To this day, I am awed when I watch him ski.

My husband and I bonded over the fact we were both athletes. He was an all-state soccer player. I was a female who played on the boys’ team because my high school didn’t have girls’ soccer. He was a varsity tennis player. I was all-conference first-team in basketball. We both understood what it took to be an athlete.

But there is something about skiing that is not innate to someone who first hitches skis to their feet when they are an adult. It’s harder to learn when your center of gravity is not close to the ground, I think.

My husband and I started dating our freshman year in college, and at spring break that year he asked me to go to his family’s Vermont house to ski. I was young and in love and somewhat athletic, so of course, I said, “I’d love to!” My experience with skiing to that point had been a few trips around our family farm on cross-country skis, which included a short, 4.75% grade down our “back hill” (totally making up the slope in order to get my dad to comment on this post) and a single trip to a small hill in the Poconos on downhill skis when I was either in middle or high school. I literally don’t remember much about it other than what I needed to do in order to survive. The answer was “pizza.” I could do that. In my experience, all I knew about skiing was that going down a hill wasn’t all that difficult for this varsity athlete.

However, I had never actually been on a real ski mountain. It was a new challenge, to say the least.

After that first trip, I knew I had fallen in love with a boy who (1) taught me to ski by taking me up the first lift and then, literally, pushing me down the mountain, and then (2) patiently skied with me the rest of the day. I’m pretty sure he knew at the end of the day that he had fallen in love with the girl who survived it.

Over the last three decades (plus!), he has taught me to ski – both on water and on land – but it wasn’t easy for me, and to this day, I am the worst in my family. But I’m okay with last place because it means we gave the gift of skiing to our children. Even though it was hard to get to Vermont with our work schedules and our kids’ activities, I knew it was important that they have the same opportunity their dad did. Learning to ski as a child — just like any other talent – is much easier than learning as an adult. The pain just doesn’t hit you in the same way, so the fear just doesn’t grow. Starting as a child was a gift I could give to them, and I made sure it happened.

While my kids were learning to ski, I was getting better. From that pizza-gate moment when my husband pushed me down the hill to my adult life, I have skied an average of 1-2 times per year, and I have developed competence (if not love for) black diamonds in Vermont. I did not, however, love the “not groomed” trails at the ski mountain last week when we took our family vacation to the resort where my kids had been skiing since they were in pre-school. My husband has skillz. My kids have no fear. I, on the other hand, should never listen to their assurances that I could absolutely handle the “very short” cut-off trail that was marked “ungroomed.”

After getting my ski stuck in a tree branch that had fallen across the path and then sliding backward, out of control, down the icy trail until I stopped screaming (swearing) at my son to get out of my way, I looked to the beautiful, Vermont sky and said a small thanks that my children had learned to ski when they were young, not an adult. I also praised the time I got to spend with them on the mountain.

Later that day, I was sitting in the outdoor hot tub next to an 86-year-old man who had competed in a downhill race as part of the “70+ Ski Club” and who was traveling to France next month to ski more challenging terrain. The hotel was filled with 70+ skiers (plus the 65-year-old we met at the bar and told us she had a fake ID to get into the group), who traveled the world to ski together. I thought to myself, “Why would anyone want to do this to their bodies when they are older than I am right now? Why am I even doing this now?” But as I listened to that man talk about his life of skiing, his military service, and most of all, his kids and grandkids, I understood why I was there. I was celebrating the gift my husband and I had given our kids.

I spent my time this last week reflecting on my past, congratulating my parenting, and wondering about my future. I know I won’t be joining the 70+ ski club, but the community they have created around a common love makes me wonder how I can better fill my time.