Cheer Mania

I’m here in Indianapolis at a cheerleading competition with my son Tony. Tony, 10, is a cheerleader for Cheer Fusion, a cutting edge program that costs a lot and involves sacrificing your life to driving and meets. There are 52 teams here with over 200 individual squads. Every so often I take off one of my cochlear implants to stop the ringing in my head. Fortunately most of the cheerleaders are girls and I don’t hear high frequency sounds very well. But some of the parent groups, including ours, use thunder bats to assist their lungs when the team comes out and then it’s like a rock concert. 

 

My daughter Eva, 12, is also a Cheer Fusion cheerleader, one level higher than Tony, but she’s back in Chicago this time for a school cheer competition. So it’s just me and the boy at this two-day spectacular in the Indianapolis Convention Center. The convention center is downtown and everything costs a fortune: parking is $50, in-room Internet goes for $10, orange juice costs $4….and no disabled discounts. If the cheer program itself doesn’t break you, the meets will.

 

We may be the only father-and-son tandem on site. I know we are the only father-with-bilateral-implants-and-son tandem here. And I’m rotten with background noise….I mean really rotten, maybe in the lower 10 percentile among c. i. users. With the thunder bats going, verbal communication is pretty much impossible. I have magazines along to ease my pain.

 

I haven’t missed a meet all year. I plan out-of-town business trips around meets so I’ll be there. The meets are full-day events--sometimes two days like this one—and I often sit for six hours to watch my kids perform for two minutes. I’m usually with my wife who I can talk with in sign, but we tend to run out of things to say to each other after the fourth or fifth hour. This weekend I have a heckuva lot more communication down time to burn.

 

But this is one of those father-son bonding opportunities. My boy, truth be told, communicates mostly with my wife. He doesn’t know many signs—an outcome of the very common signing-dad-with-implant-signing-wife-with-hearing conflict—and for the last year he (and the rest of the family) have been increasingly frustrated because I continue to practice with my second c. i. singly and I’m not doing very well with it. So it’s good for me to go out on dates with Tony when there’s no recourse but to talk to me. I know I should do this more often, just so it isn’t a cheerleading meet every time.

 

Ooops, time to end this blog and wake him up. Get him dressed, eat breakfast, check out of the hotel, and then onward to the big second day of competition. After Day 1, his team is in first place among 26 others in his division so they have a shot at Grand Champion. He doesn’t care if he wins or loses (an attitude I wish could be preserved in amber), but I’ll be thrilled if they do. I’m more competitive than he is, and I want my money’s worth after 12 hours of sitting and hundreds of dollars of Indianapolis. And oh yes, those thunder bats. I’ll hear them in my electrodes for a week or more.