No, this isn’t a racist diatribe about white women. Nor is it a short-ist hate rant. This is a recounting of my weekend. #:0) This last weekend my mom, sisters, and our daughters got together to celebrate the birthday of one of my sisters. We’ll use any excuse to have a girl’s weekend and, this week, it was the birthday. I won’t tell you how old she is but I’ll just say that it’s one of those birthdays you don’t usually celebrate. So our goal for the time we spent together was to laugh, eat a lot, and just have fun. I’m happy to announce that we succeeded on all counts. But the culmination of the weekend was probably the most fun of all. It was a game of tackle basketball on my half court. Yes, you heard me right. Tackle basketball.
We’re a slightly competitive family.
When we moved into the house I didn’t really pay much attention to the half basketball court, or the net that was set at kiddy height (perfect for a bunch of short women!). I’m not really into basketball…at least not to watch it on tv. But I have to say I really enjoyed playing it. Even if we bent…er…okay slashed the rules into a million tiny pieces. The game of short white woman basketball didn’t start out completely unhinged. But like everything this group does it quickly went the way of a rugby scrum or a football pileup on a short fourth down run. We tried it the civilized way first by playing Horse. We changed the name and goal to Sixty (I’m not going to say why…) instead of Horse but we quickly realized my youngest would be 60 before we got that many letters so we changed it to Old instead. Yeah, that’s how badly we sucked. That part of the event was tame, safe, and boring. So in that way we do, we decided to up the stakes a bit. We picked teams to play a real game of basketball – 4 v 3. I was on the three side and we were seriously kicking ass for a while, but then the bad guys decided to play even dirtier than we were and the game degenerated quickly.
Thank god there wasn’t video.
Elbows were thrown, choke holds ensued, and even the Great Dane got involved with a few buttocks pinches. I saw stars when the ball was passed into my face. My sister jammed her finger and took an elbow to the nose in one play, and my youngest had her pinky nail ripped off down past the quick. (She grabbed a bandaid and was right back in there leaping up to block passes within minutes. (I was so proud). We carefully protected my eighty-three year old mother, but she threw a few shoulders of her own in the battle. I don’t think we’ve ever laughed quite that hard before. We did indeed verify that white women cannot jump. But we can certainly smash, strangle, and hang monkey-like from the competition’s back if necessary. And when push comes to shove (literally) we can take a beating and keep on ticking.
But most of all, we learned that when we’re together nothing is out of the question. And everything is up for grabs. Because, after all, we’re building memories we’ll cherish for the rest of our lives.
However, being with us on a girl’s weekend is definitely not for the faint of heart!
Declan Sands 