Rolemommy

Anyway, she's doing beautifully when all of a sudden, a loud alarm starts blaring, over and over and over again.  We watched as our daughter continued to skate as best she could and she did finish the routine without any mistakes.  But we were fighting mad.  Instead of giving her the chance to skate again without the incessant sound of a fire bell piercing her eardrums, they decided to stick with the routine she had just performed and move on to the next skater.

And here's where I became a stage mom.  I raced off the bleachers, ran over to my daughter, who at the time seemed perfectly fine as she sat on a bench with her dad.  But then I overdid it and asked if they were going to let her get a do-over.

"Why Mommy?  My teacher said I did a great job."

To which I stupidly replied, "But that damn fire alarm was blasting the whole time during your song.  You should have gotten a do-over."

And there you have it.  At that point, my daughter burst into tears, realizing that the fire alarm could have affected her performance.  I tried to calm her down, but the damage had already been done.  I should have just told her she did beautifully and left it at that.  But the competitive athlete in me reared its ugly head.

When we moved into the lobby to check out her scores and learned she had placed second (she was only competing against one girl), my husband went to complain and pretty much ripped one of the volunteers a new one.  Oy, we truly are those kind of parents.  We grabbed her medal and left the rink pretty annoyed and I announced to my friends, "We were Nancy Kerrigan-ed."

The next day, my daughter's coach called and laid the guilt on real thick. She explained that the woman we laced into was simply a volunteer who had put in more than 40 hours to the competition and if we had a problem we should have directed it at her.  The only problem was, she had left the rink immediately after our daughter's performance to go to a Christening and was nowhere in sight when we blew our stack.  And so, even though we totally thought our actions were justified, I'm now feeling like a crazed parent who was ready to tear somebody's head off because my child didn't get a fair shake during her 90 seconds on the ice.  To put everything in perspective, I couldn't have been prouder of my daughter.  She performed incredibly well under pressure and the only person who acted like a child was little old me.