Tennis, Play-Doh and other parental sacrifices

By Kent McDill

One of the key components of parenting is sacrifice.

Your personal goals, desires and concerns are all placed in limbo as you try to meet the needs of your children. Sometimes, those needs fly directly in the face of your personal rules and regulations.

For instance, last week I had to work with Play-Doh. I will explain how that was a sacrifice in a moment.

Parents sacrifice time, money, hobbies and many former pleasures to do a good job parenting. Its just part of the program. Personally, I rarely even think of it as sacrificing. It’s just a sort of moving on.

But there are sacrifices required as a parent that you just can’t prepare yourself for. So it was with me and Play-Doh.

Play-Doh is a wonderfully entertaining moldable material similar to clay. It is colorful, malleable and can provide hours of fun for a child with a vivid imagination.

As a child, I hated it. I even thought perhaps I was allergic to it somehow, but only because it gave me the heebie-jeebies. And I hated the smell.

But my son Kyle came home with a project he needed to do. He had to create a model of a blood cell, which it turns out has many parts. He said he wanted to create the model using Styrofoam and Play-Doh.

This was not, initially, a problem for me, because I wasn’t going to have to do the project. My wife, Janice, and I have an unspoken pact that she handles all art projects and I handle all science projects. This, clearly, was an art project. Do you know how I knew that? It was going to require a trip to a crafts store. Nothing screams art project more than a trip to the crafts store.

Janice, however, felt that this constituted a science project, seeing as how the topic was sort of science-y. This was definitely a gray area, and open to interpretation and negotiation. As with most gray areas in marriage, the wife won.

So I was stuck having to do this project with Kyle. I took a shot at trying to avoid my dilemma. I sat him down and told him all of the benefits of molding clay over Play-Doh. But he seemed set on Play-Doh, and I realized this was one of the those times when my personal issues were going to have to be set aside for the greater good of my son.

I survived. And guess what? Play-Doh doesn’t smell as bad as it used to. Either that or my olfactory nerves have deadened over time.

Over the years, I have done so many things that fly in the face of my personal nature. My daughters, Haley and Lindsey, had dozens of skating shows and dance recitals that really resembled major dental work in terms of personal anguish. I remember one incredibly lengthy dance recital where I thought I was either going to scream out loud or suffer a boredom-induced coma. I was rooting for the coma.

Before marriage and children, I was an avid tennis player. I often stated that my favorite thing to do in my spare time was play tennis.

Today, the only time I play tennis is with my sons, Dan and Kyle. Dan is 15, which is about the age I started to get good at the game. He is very athletic and could be good at the game, too. I want him to have a chance to experience the thrills I have had hitting a great shot to win a game or match.

But he’s not there yet. He is still learning. And when he asks me to play, I feel that single, slight moment of disappointment that I have not played competitive tennis in a long time, and probably won’t again for a long time.

But that feeling slides away as so many others do when I realize I’d rather teach my son how to play then play against someone who could perhaps beat me in a match. The personal desire to do battle in a competitive match is not as strong as the desire to be with Dan when he hits a great shot. Occasionally, he hits a shot I can’t get to. He is thrilled, and so am I.

One definition of the word “sacrifice” is the surrender of something prized for the sake of something considered as having a higher claim.”

So as a parent you often surrender a little bit of yourself for the sake of making life better for your children.

And if that means you end up with Play-Doh under your fingernails, so be it.

Ÿ Kent McDill is a freelance writer. He and his wife, Janice, have four children, Haley, Dan, Lindsey and Kyle.