As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it difficult to lose touch with the things that once brought me joy. For me, that thing was tennis, and I recently found myself, at the ripe age of thirty-eight, standing on a court for the first time since I was eighteen, wondering if my body remembered how to do any of it.
It’s important to note that a lot has changed in twenty years. Not just my knees or my lower back, though certainly my cardio-level. I played competitively in high school, back when getting a court meant physically driving to the public courts and writing your name on a paper sign-up sheet taped to a corkboard. Nowadays, everything runs through an app. I had to download the local tennis booking software just to reserve a single hour, and I’ll admit there was a small, humbling moment where I stood in the parking lot squinting at my phone, feeling every single one of my thirty-eight years.
Let’s delve into why I stopped in the first place, because I think it matters. University happened, then grad school, then a series of jobs and moves that each seemed reasonable at the time but collectively added up to two decades without picking up a racket. Then parenthood happened, which, as I’ve written here before, restructured my entire understanding of what my body and time belonged to. Somewhere in the fog of early motherhood, tennis simply wasn’t a category that existed anymore. Hell, sports as a whole wasn’t in my mind until I started sleeping again. It’s a testament to how thoroughly caregiving can erase a person’s previous life that I genuinely forgot, who I was at all.
So coming back wasn’t just physical, though god, was it physical. My first session back I could not, in good conscience, call myself a tennis player. I was a woman flailing at a ball with the muscle memory of someone half-remembering a language she used to speak fluently. It’s a humbling experience to be bad at something you used to be good at. I think there’s a broader lesson in that, about ego, about beginner’s mind, about how growth often requires us to sit in discomfort before we see progress.
What’s kept me coming back, in this ever-evolving journey of rediscovery postpartum, is something similar to what I’ve found in strength training. My body doing something hard, on purpose, for no one but myself. No baby monitor in my pocket. No one needing anything from me the time on the court. Just a ball, a net, and an increasingly less embarrassing forehand.
At the end of the day, it’s not about being who I was at twenty, teaching English as a second language in Bosnia, but it’s about who I am becoming. UGH. Please understand that I just vomited a bit. I know how cliché that sounds and I hate it. But it’s one thing that I keep coming back to, is that when I had my little one, I was also reborn as a parent. And there’s been a difficulty balancing the needs of young children with the needs of being human. I haven’t found the balance yet, but hopefully it’ll be based upon a racket, perfectly weighted in my hand.
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