When lockdowns ended in Melbourne last year, I eagerly looked up activities for my three-year-old. Sure, she was ready for new skills, but really, I needed her off the screens, out of the house and entertained by someone else who was not me. I turned to my fellow parents and, according to them, popular activities for this age were swimming, dance and soccer.
We started with “kinder soccer”, a modified, non-competitive version for kids. Her dad holds fond memories of playing and watching the “world’s game” and wanted to pass this on to our daughter. We eventually found a club where she would wear a cute uniform with her name and number at the back.
Her first class started with warm-ups where the kids “do” banana (lean to one side), star fish (a star jump without the jump) and rocket (crouch down and shoot up). The veterans of the class were demonstrating and the enthusiastic newbies followed with a five-second delay. My usually energetic, bright “threenager”, however, refused to do any of it. She complained of being cold, tired, hungry, wanting to go outside, and no amount of Squeezies, Tiny Teddys or blueberries would get her moving.
It was a long class but the coach was optimistic. We spent most of the next class on the sidelines, just watching, and I wondered if this was money well spent.
When she figured out that we wanted her to kick a ball, into the net, and then did it (slight toe contact to the ball, ball rolling into net in slow motion), I carried on like she had scored the goal that got Australia into the World Cup. I spent the entire week after that talking about her goal and the sticker she got at the end of the class.
While she got into the drills and games eventually, she didn’t love it overall, so we decided to try something else.
Next on the list was ballet. The dance studio was conveniently 100 metres from our house. Unlike soccer, she seemed to know exactly what ballet was about, possibly from hours of watching Emma Wiggle.
The class started with the children asked to tell a story (what they did today, what they ate for breakfast, their favourite colour). Then followed a warm-up strangely similar to soccer. They hopped like a bunny, walked tall like a giraffe, waddled like a penguin … all to beautiful music.
Then came the pirouettes, arabesques and attitudes (she corrected my pronunciation and I had to google these terms to understand what she was talking about). We continued ballet until the end of the year and I experienced firsthand the complex rehearsal schedule for dance families and the chaos of being backstage with 100 excited girls and boys.
Alongside ballet, we enrolled her into swimming, a necessary life skill when our home is girt by sea.
The waitlist for swimming classes gave childcare a run for its money and we were lucky to score the holy grail of classes: 9.30am on a Saturday. It was the first level without parent participation.
By now, our little one was four years old and she was a terrible swimmer. She couldn’t blow bubbles. She couldn’t kick. She couldn’t put her head underwater. She couldn’t wear goggles. But she loved it and I was on the sidelines, cheerleading with so much gusto, there was no way she could tell she was wonderfully woeful.
As a mum of two young children, I collapse from exhaustion every night, but before that I sometimes scroll through the countless photos I have taken of her in her soccer jersey, ballet tutu and swimming costume. It’s moments like these that make parenting wonderful. It’s in their imperfections, their trying, failing and improving. It’s in the end-of-term badge ceremony, their three minutes on stage at the end-of-year concert, and the celebratory ice-cream afterwards.
Last week, I caught my daughter doing a “final pose” while she was waiting for me to do something with her. I didn’t know what she was doing at first. Then she explained, “It’s when you choose your favourite pose, and then you freeze.” Then she said: “Thank you for taking me to ballet, Mama.”
I don’t remember much from when I was four years old. I doubt my daughter will remember much of these classes either. But I hope I won’t forget these small moments, long after the early parenting years have passed.
• Lucille Wong is a Melbourne writer and a mother of two
