Had I grown up in my daughter’s world, in California over the last 20 years, I might have recognized that I was an athlete. Instead, it’s been the experience of raising my daughter in the more open, post-Title IX world of organized sports that has helped me understand that I really was a jock all along—and prone to sports zealotry.

I fulfilled my high school P.E. requirement with seasonal rotations of badminton and bowling. Outside school, I ran, biked, rode horses, and worked at a stable, where I could stack hay bales with the strongest of the guys. I learned to vault on and off a galloping horse, ride backward or standing upright on the saddle, leap from one horse to another at a full run, and play equestrian capture-the-flag in all kinds of extreme weather. I was part of an equestrian drill team that performed at summertime events like the Corn Days Parade.

But I didn’t play team sports, since little was offered for girls outside school. And I never thought of myself as an athlete. In fact, my recreational activities made me something of an oddball. Once when I was jogging, a farmer offered me a lift. He assumed I was in a hurry: Why else would I be running down a country road?

In the early 1990s, I moved to L.A. and had my first child. When Zoe was about 7 years old, she asked if she could play soccer. At the time, I was totally unaware that a whole industry of youth sports had sprung up around me: American Youth Soccer Association (AYSO), Little League, YMCA basketball.

A year later, with the help of a more experienced mom, I signed Zoe up for AYSO soccer. She took to it like the proverbial fish to water, or in her case, like a little Mia Hamm to a World Cup penalty kick. I was surprised by Zoe’s speed—Where did she get that?— her precision, and the agility of her moves.

She went straight to the All-Stars Under-10 team. I went more or less straight to becoming a fanatical fan.

On the morning of Zoe’s first all-star tournament, we planned to leave at 5:30 a.m. to arrive in Riverside at 7 a.m. When I opened my eyes at 6:05 a.m., I lay still for a moment, processing my disbelief. Late. Then the adrenaline kicked in, and I flew.

I had a lot of packing to do: soccer balls, cones, cleats, water bottle. Towels, change of clothes, warm boots. Band-Aids, Emergen-C, Advil. Food, drinks, ice. I leapt from bed, sprinted down the hall, grabbed my daughter by the shoulders, and shook her from sleep before darting to the kitchen to fling things into the cooler. Half done, I sprinted back to the bathroom. I had just pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt when I saw my husband’s lumbering form coming down the dark corridor. “What are you doing?” he asked, incredulous. “It’s 1 a.m.!”

One a.m.? Not 6? I’d read the digital clock wrong.

Zoe climbed back under the covers, fully dressed by then in her uniform, shin guards and all, and went back to sleep.

We made it to that game on time, of course, and to all the others in the years that followed. But I’d officially earned the title of Psychotic Soccer Mom, and I’ve haven’t been able to shake it since. I’m so glad.

Of course, there are good and bad psycho soccer moms. The good ones cheer on their young would-be Olympians, though often to excess. The bad ones do, too, but they also jeer at players and yell at the referees. Both spend big chunks of their lives in far-flung places, forgoing ordinary weekend tasks like laundry and grocery shopping in favor of spectating. Both can be loud and OCD, with noisemakers and banners and spreadsheets of game times. And both live vicariously through their kids, the good soccer moms with wonder and hopeful expectation, the bad ones with jealousy and dogged determination.

I hope I’ve been one of the good ones. I’ve given years of my life to being a soccer mom, and in the process have deepened my relationship with my daughter, who is now 21, in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

The truth is, my daughter’s engagement with sports has really rocked my world. It’s been a revelation to see how her experience has been so rich with lessons in self-discipline, teamwork, courage, and grit. I’ve seen her give her all to the game in driving sleet and hail, and in scorching desert sun. She once kicked a winning goal when she had a flu and high fever. She’s suffered blisters, abrasions, and broken bones that have kept her on the bench. But she has still gotten up in the dark just to be with her teammates. She has embraced, with blood and guts, what it means to be strong, fierce, and unwilling to accept defeat.

There are other ways to learn these lessons, to be sure, but not so many or often for girls as for boys. We expect our boys, in the course of their daily lives, to be rough and tumble, to get the wind knocked out of them before they get up again. But for girls, organized sports have provided the best arena to test their mettle.

I’ve stood on the sidelines for all kinds of competitions—soccer, baseball, basketball, softball, swimming, flag football. I have a son, too, and have spent countless, amped-up hours at his games. I love witnessing the whole fervent band of brothers camaraderie.

But I feel more like a visitor than an inhabitant in his world—perhaps because I’m a mom and not a dad, or perhaps because his experience better conforms to my preconceived ideas about boys in sports. But mostly, I think, because I am startled by a recognition of my daughter’s experience as one I, too, might have had 40 years earlier.

I think I have gleaned some of the same lessons over the years, of endurance, strength, and tenacity. But I have done so by other means, and over a longer arc of time. I would have loved learning them, like my daughter, on the soccer field.

Now that it’s August, AYSO soccer season is starting up again. I’ll wander up to Culver City’s Lindberg Park and enjoy the little-girl mayhem of the Red Hot Tinkerbells team, 6-year-olds charging like blazes down the field toward the wrong goal. And then I’ll wait, impatiently, until next summer, when the Women’s World Cup gets underway in Canada. Warrior women on the soccer pitch. I’ll be there. And though she’s abandoned her Mia Hamm aspirations to pursue a career in science, maybe Zoe will, too.

The post I Was a Psychotic Soccer Mom appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the time I applied for the job, I was a graduate student in the master of fine arts program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Like my peers, I thought I’d make my way as a photographer by teaching.

But then one day I stumbled on an ad in Artweek for an editorial assistant opening at the Friends of Photography, a nonprofit organization that Ansel founded in 1967 to present exhibitions, publications, and educational workshops in fine art photography. Jobs like that didn’t come around often. From my vantage point as a student, a paying job of any sort in the arts seemed a rarity, but one with a living legend was unimaginable.

Figuring it was a long shot, I put a letter and resume in the mail. To my surprise, I was called to an interview—and I got the job. I packed my newly minted graduate degree and few possessions in a small U-Haul truck, hitched my old powder-blue VW wagon to the back, then descended from the Sandia Mountains, straight-lined it across Arizona and the Mojave, and arrived at the sleepy seaside town of Carmel, California.

Carmel was socked in fog, and cold. And this was in May. The sun didn’t really come out until October. I remember driving around the peninsula both day and night, headlights bouncing wildly through the fog, pine trees looming in and out of focus. Bundled in sweaters, I had arrived in a new and different world.

The world I’d left behind in New Mexico was as different aesthetically as it was in terms of terrain. My graduate program was recognized nationally as a lab for visual experimentation. We were about breaking rules, not observing them.

And yet, here I was, working for the man who wrote the rule book on photography. Ansel is famous for having invented the Zone System, a mechanical process for reading light and exposing and developing black-and-white photographs. He published several definitive volumes on photographic techniques—depth of field, the use of filters, and the chemistry of film processing.

It wasn’t where I expected to find myself. In fact, when Jim Alinder, the Friends’ charismatic director, asked me in the job interview what I thought about Ansel’s work, I hadn’t known what to say. I think I mumbled something that must have been passable, but only barely, I’m sure.

In Albuquerque, we referred to Ansel and his peers, with some superiority, as the “rocks and roots” school of photography. Such hubris. As if we were capable of producing anything that could begin to match Ansel’s visual elegance and technical proficiency. Ha!

It brought me up short to meet Mr. Rocks and Roots himself. I was expecting someone formal and aloof. Ansel was anything but. He was big, warm, erudite, and funny. With his bola ties and crooked nose—a souvenir of a tumble he took as a small boy in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—he was utterly unintimidating. Until he started to talk photography.

Ansel was equal parts artist and scientist. Visiting him in the darkroom after viewing his prints felt like meeting the wizard behind the curtain—except in this case, what was behind the curtain was a huge, state-of-the art-laboratory, in pristine order. The darkroom stood as a sleek counterpart to the rugged business of his hauling photographic equipment out into the landscape where, with infinite patience and a precise combination of lenses and filters, he captured his famous images.

The darkrooms I’d frequented as a graduate student were reasonably well equipped, but my approach to developing photographs had been a bit slapdash, happily accommodating accidents, and always looking for shortcuts. Ansel’s photographs were not just the result of his having caught a moment in time, but of his having interpreted and expressed that moment later, in subtle gradations of silver. Ansel used to say that the negative is the score, and the print is the performance. I could hum a tune. He was conducting an orchestra.

A collection of Ansel’s exquisitely meticulous photographs is on view now until July 20 at the Getty Center. “In Focus: Ansel Adams” includes prints that were originally purchased by Leonard and Marjorie Vernon, prominent collectors who played an important role in the stewardship of the Friends of Photography. Their daughter, Carol Vernon, and her husband, Robert Turbin, recently donated the set to the Getty.

The Vernons were kind, wonderful people who were fixtures in Carmel, even though their home was in Los Angeles. Leonard was a successful industrial developer who loaned his keen business expertise to the Friends’ board. Together, he and Marjorie also shared a passion for photography, and collecting.

The Museum Set on display at the Getty spans several decades of Ansel’s career; nearly all of the photographs were taken long before I worked at the Friends. They are drawn from some of the 70 photographs that Ansel selected as the best from among his thousands to be part of this collectors’ set. Production of the Museum Set began in the late 1970s, and was still underway when I was in Carmel in the early 1980s.

I spent three-plus years at the Friends. I don’t know whether the half-dozen of us 20-somethings on staff were seen as energetic minds, cheap labor, or both. In any case, it proved to be a work-hard, play-hard chapter in all of our lives, filled with gallery openings, workshops, the publishing of monographs, and visits from a constant stream of famous people. I learned as much about gallery lighting as I did about book publishing and archival print handling.

After a year or so, I was given the privilege of running the summer workshops with guest faculty that included amazing artists like Annie Leibovitz, Roy DeCarava, and Mary Ellen Mark. Ansel and his staff took participants on field trips to Point Lobos to photograph the rock pools, surf, and cypress trees. At day’s end, we adjourned to Ansel’s magnificent home in the Carmel Highlands. Martinis were served while we gazed at the Pacific, hoping for a glimpse of the “green flash” at sunset, one of Ansel’s favorite pastimes.

Ansel and his wife, Virginia, were gracious hosts who loved to open their home to guests. Their house was magnificent: high-ceilinged, with huge picture windows, and Virginia’s orchid collection silhouetted against the coastal view. There was a massive stone fireplace with an ancient Chinese drum mounted on the wall above it, and a grand piano, which Ansel—trained as a classical pianist before turning to photography—often played. Among his regular visitors were accomplished musicians—the most famous being piano virtuoso Vladimir Ashkenazy.

One of my favorite memories is of Ansel’s 80th birthday party in February 1982. There were three exhibitions of Ansel’s photographs on display that month in and around Carmel—at the Friends of Photography, the Weston Gallery, and the Monterey Museum of Art. On the night of the big bash, Ansel attended each opening, crossing the peninsula in his white Cadillac, with its “Zone V” vanity license plate. He was serenaded by an 80-piece marching band from Salinas High School and presented with the Medal of the French Legion of Honor. One hundred guests from all over the world flew in for a sit-down dinner. A chef presented an enormous cake that was supposed to represent Half Dome—except the chef had never actually seen Half Dome, so you might have mistaken it for Space Mountain, or maybe Vesuvius. Ansel loved it all.

Ansel was an ardent environmentalist—not just as a photographer, but also as an outspoken activist. He met with three presidents: Carter, Ford, and Reagan. After his visit with Reagan in July 1983, Ansel returned to Carmel fuming about James Watt, Reagan’s controversial secretary of the interior, who advocated for the deauthorization of national parks and oil drilling in wilderness areas.

All this will be on my mind when I gather with other museum visitors to gaze at the impossibly perfect images of “Moon and Half Dome” or “Dogwood Blossoms in Yosemite National Park” at the Getty. I will think of Ansel’s articulate, statesmanly defense of our natural resources. I will think of his alchemy in the darkroom, teasing silver gelatin into an exquisite luminescence. I will think of him holding court in his living room, telling the story of how he captured the sun streaking over those boulders at Mt. Williamson, in Manzanar. And I will revel in the memory of being a young person in Ansel’s orbit during that heady time. We learned from Ansel the importance of looking closely, very closely, at the world. And, though few of us would get it right, that preserving the wonder and beauty around us is a worthy goal, and in its way, a sacred pursuit.

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