Cheer Drama

Part of being a team is learning to deal with people and get along even when you have differences, realizing that sometimes self has to be sacrificed for the greater good of the team. This is a very important lesson and one of the reasons we spend a lot of time and money carting kids to various team activities.

Younger daughter has chosen to spend the majority of her time in competitive cheer leading.

This is not a sport that existed as such way back in the dark ages when I grew up. Back then cheerleaders wore skirts and sweaters and cheered for their school team at assorted ball games. And the skill and the popularity of the girls was clearly delineated by the sport they cheered for. The football cheerleaders ruled the school and basketball cheerleaders were not as cool although they were better than the hockey girls. The poor suckers who cheered for the golf team were generally seen as losers only slightly better than the kids sneaking into science club. Of course now the science geeks own Microsoft and Facebook and are bazillionaires and the golf girls knew something the rest of us didn't grasp. Golf is lame but golfers generally aren't losers. Am I wrong? Would you rather own a house over looking a golf course or a football stadium? But that is another post.

The point is that cheerleaders cheered for other people. It wasn't a stand alone activity. Also they did a few tame stunts but mostly shook pom-poms, jumped around, and yelled.

Things have changed a bit.

No pom-poms for one. Now it is more like synchronized tumbling. It requires nerves of steel, quick reaction time, extreme flexibility, and advanced tumbling. Only very small kids do cartwheels and round-offs. Now by the age of 10 they are all doing back handsprings, most do tucks and quite a few do layouts and fulls. Kids as young as 5 lift each other above their heads and perform gravity defying stunts.

No sweaters either. It is all glitter, skimpy outfits, big hair, and goofy faces.

It is also the most dangerous sport. Worse than hockey, football, and rugby. When you toss someone 20 feet in the air and something goes wrong, bones break, and sometimes kids die or they don't walk again.

Which is why I still don't know why on earth I agreed to this activity. I can't even joke about it because it isn't something you can justify. Either you have a kid in it or you are crazy. It's an all or nothing thing.

Think soccer moms are bad? They don't hold a candle to cheer-moms. Think moms with manicures and nothing to lose. These women will take a stiletto to you if you cross the line, and they won't even break a sweat. They swear to drive the miles and pay the fees in order to watch their kids do crazy dangerous things. They agree to plan all other family events around the competition schedule. This includes weddings and funerals. After all the person is dead, why miss a comp for that? It isn't like they are going anywhere.

So imagine that one mom skips town in the middle of the night and takes off for home with her daughter who happens to be in all the stunts and tumbles in the front row. A crowd of liquored up rednecks in the 30's would have been polite to a minority person compared to the vitriol spewed by angry cheer moms. The only thing standing between them and first degree murder charges was the approaching performance time. NOTHING stops the show. You can barf in a bucket back stage, teeth have been pulled and bones have been set. There is nothing those women can't fix with hairspray, duct tape, and glitter. They just grabbed a sibling, ganged up in a huddle and emerged with a girl ready to fake it with the best of them.

It isn't over, and if the mom who left has a drop of sense she has already left the country and headed for a part of the world that speaks a different language and outlawed glitter. I'm not even exaggerating.

Cheer moms don't forget, they don't forgive, and if she ever shows her face at the gym again she will be choked to death with a sequined bow. Of course it will look like an accident and the mortician won't need to fix her hair, but trust me, nobody accidentally dies by ribbon.