so long

 

So Trista quit the gym this weekend.  She's not the first Corretti kid to leave the sport but this one almost feels like a death in the family.

Gym has been the heartbeat of her life since she walked in the door however many years ago.  13? 14?  At some point I've lost count.  It was Mommy & Me except Mommy & Us bc, you know, twins.  She loved it.  She jumped and ran & danced and swung.  It invaded her self.

Before she even turned 5, she was invited to team.  This invitation came with a side of TOPs, an entirely different program on top of regular team.  Strength training plus different, more difficult, routines except these were "sequences" and were meant to push further forward.  She atesleptbreathed gymnastics.  She'd practice for hours at a time & still come home ready for more.  Memorized skills/routines/sequences.  Pressed into handstand.  Again.  Climbed the rope.  Again.  Held handstands for countless seconds.  None of it wore her out.  She was always ready to throw on a leo & head back to the gym.  Meets began.  Practice continued.  Broke her arm & battled back.  

At the age of 7, she did her first set of TOPs testings & qualified as a Diamond - one of the top 50 7-year-olds in the country!  It was so very exciting!  At the age of 8, she qualified to travel to Indiana for further testing.  Missed camp that year by the smallest margin.  Vowed to get it next year.

More meets, more summer camps.  More practice...ponytails...leotards.  Always the leotards.  She competed 4-5-6 in one season and was so ready for TOPs testing again.  Except.  COVID.  And the world shut down.  There was only 1 level 6 meet.  There was no summertime TOPs.  There were Zoom practices & her Daddy built a bar for the floor, to practice handstands & pirouettes.  We already had a trampoline and Air Track.  We ordered a climbing rope for the back porch.  (It still hangs there, lonely.). Practices resumed with only a few kids at a time.  Schedules were screwy and homeschooling came in handy.  Gradually the world reopened & things resumed.  She was a Level 7.  She traveled to Boston camp with a friend.  Two Level 7 meets.  Push to 8 to finish that season.  

Two Atlanta camps in there, somewhere.  "Mean" Jacobo from TOPs testing was always glad to see her there.

TOPs was back.  Indiana again.  Qualified to B camp so Indiana again, again.  And then TOPs was over bc 10 year olds "retire" from the program.  On to Level 9.  And Hopes came next.  More skills.  Difficult skills.  A camp in Texas with National Staff.  Qualified Elite Compulsory for Hopes.  And then decided it wasn't for her.  Dropped back to "regular" level 9.  Level 9 Regionals took us to Tampa twice.

Then Level 10.  Twice.  And somewhere in there, she grew tired of the mental games.  Tired of structuring life around the sport.  Second year Level 10 brought illness and injury and missed meets and scratched events and suddenly all that was left was the whimper.  And now there is silence.

Gymnastics took her so many places.  She did so many things.  Met so many people.  It was life's blood to her.  And now tomorrow will be different.  And the rest of the week.  And the months ahead.  Something else will attract her attention at some point.  But for now, summer is coming.  Unstructured summer for the first time in 10 years - more, really, if you count the years that Auri was in the gym before she was.

There's grief in this for me.  Grief that, while she went out on her own time - not due to injury or the like, she's going out defeated with an air of unrest about the thing she gave her young life too.  She chose the path - we never had to push her to get into the car.  But seeing her feeling as if she's wasted all that time with nothing to show for it is agonizing.  We've had "big picture" conversations of late.  One day I hope she sees that picture.  I hope she sees all that she did gain from this thing before it broke her heart.  I hope that she can see what I do.  I hope that one day it will be remembered as a gift, rather than a curse.