The Chaos of the Day

In January, in a moment of weakness and complete naiveté, I let myself be talked into being the manager of my son’s tennis team for this summer season. Except for the fact that the first inquiry for a rescheduling of a match came two months before the season even started, and the dire situation that I had to work with a team of only four players to play six matches – in which we always need four players – everything has been surprisingly easy going so far.

Until today. It is the hottest day of the year, over 35 degrees centigrade. We were scheduled to leave for a match in a town approx. one hour’s drive away at 2:30 p.m. I had stocked up on cold water to be prepared, and was going to take two buckets and towels to cool off  the children during their matches.

At 2:05 p.m. I received a call from the other mother who was also going to drive, she had been contacted by “the other team” because my phone supposedly had not been working, the match was cancelled because one of their players was sick and they could not put a complete team together. But I should call the other team leader back for re-scheduling. First thing I did after sending notice to the other team members by message service was to send my son to the pool, he was off within three minutes. Then I called the other team leader. He did not know that the match had been cancelled, nor that anybody was sick in their team, but he had only just got back from work, could he call me back. Ten minutes later he called back, nobody on their team is sick, nobody called anybody, and they are ready for the match, waiting for us.

I was almost tempted to suspect a conspiracy – but our team is next to last, the other team is ranked second, we did not really constitute a severe danger to them with three other teams between us in the ranking. So I called the other mother who had passed on the cancellation, could she retrieve the number of the caller who had issued the cancellation in the first place? Yes, and I called that number which had a significantly different area code than the area we had been supposed to go to. Yes, they had cancelled the match with our club, because of sickness, yes, they had not been able to get the team leader. It turns out this was a club which was supposed to play against the girls’ team, no, she did not know why she called the other lady (who has a boy) or where she got that number...

By then it was decidedly later than we should have left to get there on time. One of the four boys – who has the furthest way to come to the meeting point – had left home and his mother, who was at work, did not know where he went and could not get in touch with him or the father. Three different possible substitute players did not answer the phone, were on the train to go away for the weekend or had a soccer match coming up in two hours. The third boy was getting completely fed up with this back and forth, he had only agreed to playing in the first place after a lot of coaxing as he had to miss out on a bike trip which he would have preferred and had now seen a last chance for. The tennis coach was a bit annoyed that we were thinking about cancelling altogether because then the club has to pay a fine. I was getting fed up at telephoning around for over an hour trying to figure out how to make this work.

In the end an attempt at rescheduling was abandoned because the other team could only offer us days during the week, which would make it very stressful for our team to get there after school, with extracurricular activities always being an issue in trying to get several children together.

The unexpected plus was that the rest of my afternoon was at my very own disposal and I mounted the first ‘real’ quilt on my longarm.

Mounting the backside fabric

Starting off large right away!

Ready to go!