Skater Boy - Coming of Age Part VI

Title: Skater Boy – Coming of Age

Part VI

A support team is vital to any endeavor like Matthew’s.  Unlike his early days skating, Grandma quickly became the main figure in the story.  She was his driver, agent, scheduler, cook, financial backer, and of course, fan:)  Whether it was making food for summer skating camp (a very intense amount of time training) or getting a hotel around for a competition, Mom Card worked tirelessly to make sure Matt had everything he needed.  It is not that Mom Card is independently wealthy.  She worked for years for IBM and then Lockheed Martin, in their food staff, bringing carts of food to different executive meetings and making sure the regular cafeteria was ready for the engineers and staff of the building.  Being a blue-collar worker, Mom Card knew how to pinch pennies, but she also knew when to spend what was needed to succeed.  One example was Matt’s skates!  When you buy a growing boy $1000 skates, you want to keep them as long as possible!  Matthew would start out with thick socks, go to regular socks, thin socks, and then finally nylons.  Expensive skates are vital to professional skating allowing them to do amazing things on the ice!  But there is more to skating than equipment!  Early on Mom Card realized Matt was going to be going through tons of calories since he was doing difficult gymnastic moves, on very hard ice, and in a cold room!  Mom did not want fast food to be the answer for everything so she would pack carrot sticks and tons of other healthy snacks, as well as some junk food.  I think her tireless work in this area was very helpful to Matt!!

Matt would spend half his week with grandma and half at home but when home a bulk of the homeschooling had to be done.  I was really scared of this aspect.  Matt had struggled academically at JT and now we were going to be HOMESCHOOLING him?  Gail was the hero here, getting a curriculum (that I loved) for Matt!  I’m sure there are many fine programs out there but Sonlight is very strong on reading and that is what I enjoy!!  Matt had historical fiction novels for the history period he was studying and a decent history book to match!  Some of the books were award winners and some of the books were... okay, but I enjoyed reading to Matt for hours if I didn’t have to substitute at JT.  Gail was nice enough to pick up all the subjects I didn’t like (Math and Science) as well as pick up the slack in reading if I got too busy!  One book I really loved was Master Cornhill, which was a book a Sonlight author wrote to fit the course, but it was fantastic!!  I gave different characters voices and oh, the wonder of that book!  Matt liked it too!  We read classics like “Great Expectations” which I compare to a wonderfully built racecar that is merely used to drive to work everyday.  What do I mean?  Dickens is a wonderful writer and his words flow off the page but I still hated the book as much as I did as a teenager in school.  I hoped it would be different but it wasn’t.  What was different, was I got to admire Dickens’ craftsmanship, marveling at his great skill, even as his story still bored me:)  I know some people really enjoy the book and probably find it “realistic.”  I guess I like stories about characters like Matthew who strive to snatch the moon from the sky and not characters like Pip.  Anyway, poor Matt didn’t like the story OR the craftsmanship, which he would endure me occasionally gushing over!  I also loved “The Dark Frigate” for it’s writing style and language... Matt was NOT a fan:)  Whether the book was awesome, okay, or downright boring, Matt and I an enormous amount of time together reading.  (Sonlight has parents reading half the books out loud and of course there are many books the child has to read.)  Mom Card eventually did more in this area too but in the beginning that was Gail and my realm:)

Did Matt end up with a good education?  I’d like to think so:)  Matt spent the first six years of his life in public school and they did a good job!  Then he went with Sonlight from 6^th – 10^th grade before doing his last courses through an at home college program.  I was very nervous about Matt taking college courses and there was a period of adjustment, especially in writing, and thinking.  But Matt made the transition and excelled.  When Matt went to college made the Presidents list (I never even made the Dean’s list!) and got VERY good grades!  He graduated Magna Cum Laude... I graduated Praise the Lordie!!!! 

Matt ALMOST spent most of his ice skating career with a partner too.  Early on at Ithaca he did ice dancing with a young lady named “Mandie”, who was a great skater:)  They looked great together and Matt and Mandie is very catchy!  Matt was always a guy who skated better on his own when girls were out there with him.  Olivia at Elmira would join him in the middle and they would both do moves in those early days, watching each other.  I always felt Matt came alive when skating with someone else.  The video of Matt and Mandie in competition will always be a favorite of mine!  Unfortunately it didn’t work out and Matt would skate as a solo skater for almost all of his middle through high school years.  That was probably a good thing, in that it made him work hard on his own skating and made scheduling his life just crazy, not insane (working it around two families instead of just one).  Anyway, Matt likes to jump too much to be an ice dancer:)  That is another thing Matt enjoys is launching himself into the air above that cold, hard surface.  I have to give him credit... I don’t think I could do that hour after hour, knowing the pain of falling!!  When Matt went to nationals in 2017 it was in pairs, a blending of a partner AND jumping!!

Gail.  Gail picked up any slack in the system.  If Mom Card couldn’t do something, Gail jumped in.  She plugged the gaps and carried her own load in homeschooling, drove Matt here and there when needed, and even when on trips with him!!  Gail was our accountant, somehow (by the mercy and provision of the Lord) squeezing out the money to buy the next years Sonlight curriculum, gas money, and our household needs as well! 

Even though most of this post is about Matt’s support team (I’ll talk about his coaches in a blog next week), the story is still about Matt.  He had to put his heart into the rink and schooling at home to go where he wanted to.  He spent hours and hours and HOURS at the rink, when most kids are in school, and then he had to cram the school week into a few days.  We’d try and get ahead at points but there was always so much to do!!  It felt like whether in ice skating or homeschooling, there was always a mountain to climb and very little time off from it once the summit was reached!  Sometimes the mundane is where the hero will get tripped up.  Bobby Fisher fought his school teachers, Norman Rockwell dropped out of school, but Matthew had to do what he was told or his dream would have vanished.  Bobby Fisher could play chess in his mind, Norman could draw and paint on his own, but ice skating???  A child cannot follow THAT dream without severe help from adults and the adults in Matt’s life insisted that he also have an education!!  We weren’t rich and even with Mom Card’s money, Matt’s dream was difficult.  We’d always hear about Olympic boys and girls that started skating years ahead of Matt and who skated seven days a week, so Matt’s dream always seemed impossible.  But I wanted Matt to have a life too.  I didn’t want him to get to the end of his journey whether that meant a gold medal or nothing, and have only ice skating.  After all, the "Coming of Age" Story is about what kind of person the young man or woman becomes at the end of the journey and Matt hits it out of the park here!  So many parents have told us over the years how much they like Matt as an ice skating teacher!!  I don’t blame them!  He’s a great guy!  Not many people have the guts and gumption to reach for the stars, no matter who is helping them:)  The Lord has been very good to Matt, working out so many details... especially in coaching!  But that is another subject for a different blog!!

*** Author Adrian Essigmann has eighteen books in print on Amazon.com, soon to be nineteen!  All of them are $.99 cents on Kindle, with the exception of “An Assumed Risk” which will be (Lord willing) an e-book before summer.  All of his books are available in soft cover too!  Type Amazon Adrian Essigmann and his author’s page should come up ***

Book of the Week – American Fairytale - $.99 cents on Amazon Kindle books (paper version is available too) – “This book blends the magic of a Fairytale with historical fiction. Although it is set in the years leading up to the American Revolution, it has an evil wizard, a princess, and other worldly weapons. It is a book that can be enjoyed by the whole family, yet has hidden meanings that an adult will find stimulating.”