like I’d thrown my whole life away. All that time I could have been enjoying it, and now my body was a wreck and I was stuck petty, small, trapped in my own shortcomings. I was 40, and my knee wasn’t getting better, and I had met a part of myself that wasn’t going to heal. My tennis career was over, and I would always be this small. And then there was the skirt. For 24 weeks, I treated that skirt like a transplanted organ in the pivotal moments in the operating room as men and women in scrubs watch to see if their hard work has paid off, to see if the organ has taken. I waited and watched, beep-beep-beep, for that skirt to become a thing I was instead of a thing I was wearing, but it never did, and so the beep elongated until this whole experiment was finally declared dead. I washed the skirt one last time, and I folded it into a tiny ball, and I put it as far back into a drawer as I could, unsure of why I couldn’t just throw it away. A week later, the babysitter called in sick and I got in the car to pick up my kids at tennis camp. I was early. My sons are 8 and 5, and they’re good at tennis, the way they’re good at soccer and baseball. In the waiting area, the other mothers wore big sunglasses, and two of them got into a whisper discussion about a Pinterest board that has the best nail art. I couldn’t take my eyes off my sons, though, their arms cutting through the air with a power I don’t expect from children. There they were, with a man watching them and shouting out tips, back and forth, back and forth. I looked down at my phone; they were denying me my refund, said an email from the other tennis club, but it didn’t bother me right then, because I couldn’t look away from my children. They had the wordlessness, those two, and with every back- and-forth I heard what they had to teach me, what I only knew in moments of grace like this one, a moment that would be vanished as soon as I was confronted by an acquaintance’s new Escalade in the parking lot: that money is just money, and a game is just a game.
ldn’t know y again.
was here, all and all the long with it, for me.
Taffy Brodesser- Akner is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and GQ .
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