Tennis profoundly affected my life 50 yrs ago!

So I'd play adequately with boys on dates??

I remember when mom told me how important tennis would be in my life.

“If a boy asks you to play a game, you want to be prepared.”

Ok. I got it. Tennis was an important sport for me to learn. My dad played it for a few more years until his tennis elbow got him off the court. My older brother played in high school. I had my lessons during junior high. Chris Everett I was not. Uncomfortably running to and fro, pendulous breasts flapping erratically, back and forth, before my reduction in year 17, 2nd month. Sports bras didn’t exist back then. The Presidential Physical Fitness program challenged us to a 6-Minute Mile, every Friday, around the track at Hoover JH. That was a more steady, but no less unappreciated, lift and plummet motion.

I thought tennis was an okay sport. Firstly, I learned how to volley the ball back and forth over the net. Secondly, I learned the difference between a forehand and backhand. Thirdly, I learned how to return a serve. Then, the serve. All the things to keep in mind. The height, the power, the positioning. So much to concentrate on. When I first experienced serving an ACE? Absolute Fascination.

That very distinct feeling; in the racquet, in my forearm, in my wrist - when the ball hit the racquet just right. Unlike any other feeling I’d ever had.

NOTHING HAD EVER FILLED ME UP SO COMPLETELY WHEN THAT BOING WAS AN ACE.

I COULD SUDDENLY SEE BETWEEN THE A FOR SCHOLARSHIP AND THE E FOR SOCIAL SKILLS.

I understand intellectually (if Wiki is intellectual) that an ace in tennis language is: a point scored especially on a service (as in tennis or handball) that an opponent fails to touch. So mom wanted me to learn how to serve so any of these so called “dates” in my future, would fail to touch me?

Confusion sprinkled in and through me. I knew for a fact, my mom wanted me to KNOW I was adequate and worthy of a boy’s attention. She wanted me to feel social ease and heart opening instead of discomfort and disappointment. She wanted me to feel a confidence she hadn’t felt due to her upbringing. My mom gave me everything she didn’t receive. How lucky was I?

When finding the above definition for an ace, I discover, the ace is also a title for someone that is asexual. Hmm. I know my mom wasn’t asexual. She was a Scorpio. I’m not either.

I’m sure it was hard for her, watching me go through all those years I got to explore dating and relationships in the 70s and beyond. She was stuck in the late 40s and early 50s before marrying my father. Never having the opportunity to truly discover what sex was all about, like I did. My dad told me “Love Making is an Art Form.” Mom used the old adage repeatedly, “Why would a man buy a cow when the milk is free?”

I decided to write a blog about the ACE, (this page has been open for four weeks). While doing digital update (to be explained later), I discover a brief conversation with a mentor who marvels tennis guided my journey. For over FIFTY years. The above recording took place on June 5th, 2013.

When I was first back east, after graduating college, looking for direction, I came across Barbara Marx Hubbard. She had a group of New Age people showing me ideas about a future I’d never conceived of in my political science or political psychology classes. BMH was an author, speaker, co-founder, and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. She was a futurist who believed “humanity was on the threshold of a quantum leap if newly emergent scientific, social, and spiritual capacities were integrated to address global crises..” (check out her Wiki description).

She had a WDC mansion off of the Rock Creek Parkway main road. Ace in this group’s language meant, Agent for Conscious Evolution.

The license above, ACE WAY, was on my hand-me-down Mazda 626 2-door. I paid $25, or was it $50 extra a year for that license plate? For many years. That’s what I learned from tennis. That there were ACE moments in life, and those were the moments I most wanted to live.

I’ve wanted to be true to myself and my unique needs and views, while at the same time wanting the world to accept me and my idiosyncrasies as well.

That may not be possible. Some of my views might be too different, or too forward-looking. Or too intimidating for too many reasons.

And yet, in the book, Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, I found and am continually renewed, each time I read the following sentences.

• “Here is an alternative model to the feminist imitation of the dominant order. Charlotte Bronte imagines a rare woman who can rise on her own terms, developing slowly from within so as to release a different kind of agency and passion, and a moral being distinct from convention. What are women to be? Even the novelist is not prepared to say. Pause. Pause. The novel ends leaving the question open for a time to come.”

How blessed I was to be born in 1959. I’ve been able to rise on my own terms. I’ve developed slowly from within. Throughout my reproductive life I had the possibility of birth control, as well as power over my own body’s reproductive abilities. I could choose whether I would, or I wouldn’t. When if I decided yes. How to insure if I decided no. I worried many a month because I was never regular. Learning how to control and corral my fire has been an ardent task. I never had to end a life, heck, no one ever said, “Please carry me, please birth me, please put me through school, please teach me how to live, please give me life.”

I’ve laughed thinking I convinced my body not to be a woman’s body. My mom said she was a fertile Myrtle. Also, there was an expectation because my mother’s maternal grandmother birthed three sets of twins, that I would have twins.

Orgasms, yes. Children? No, thank you.

I bet you thought I was going to go on and on about tennis. Surprise. Gotcha!

Will women’s rights go back in time? Will women allow the world to go backwards? Why do women who know who they really are find so many men terrified of them? Do you? Are you a man terrified by women? Are you a woman willing to be and embody all of your voice, distinction, character, and concerns?