190. The Power of Mine

ListenerWriter Gina DeMillo Wagner shares how one of her daughter’s volleyball drills ended up teaching her about using her own voice.

Pre-Order Gina’s new book, Forces of Nature, a memoir about her brother’s death and her complicated relationship with her family. You can also hear Gina on Terrible, Thanks for Asking, where she talks about her experience as a young caregiver.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

When my daughter was in middle school, I signed her up for rec league volleyball. It was a non-competitive program that cost $75 for the season and featured volunteer coaches and teams with names like “Dig This!” “All About That Ace” and “Empire Spikes Back.” …In other words, the stakes were low. No one was looking to launch their kid as the next Olympian. The primary goal was to have fun and try a new sport.

Twice a week, I sat on a wooden bleacher inside a humid middle-school gym, watching the girls learn how to play. Most of the girls didn’t know one another. Some were very shy and fearful of the ball, but they kept showing up, Kept learning. Kept trying.

My daughter was barely five feet tall and wore hot pink kneepads over her red tights. She had a streak of temporary purple color in her hair, which she tucked neatly into a ponytail. Somehow, even when her team was losing, she was always smiling. In fact, all the girls were. Even when they stepped up to serve and missed. Even when a teammate would try to pass the ball and it’d collide with the net instead. They laughed it off and tried again.

They were having FUN.

There was only one thing I loved more than watching the girls play, and that was listening to the advice from their coach, Debbie. Coach Debbie was maybe in her mid-late 50s? Her daughters had played in the same rec league years ago and now were off at college. She had the presence of a wise aunt or maybe a professional hype woman. Her voice was somehow both strong and gentle. Whenever she spoke, the girls immediately turned their heads and listened.

Coach Debbie liked to do a drill that she called “The Power of Mine!” She had the girls stand in a wide circle, like spokes in a giant wheel. Debbie was the hub. She tossed the ball into the air, and the girls took turns stepping forward, shouting MINE and bumping the ball upward for the next girl to claim.

The shouting was just as important as making contact with the ball, Debbie insisted. If the girls mumbled or acted afraid of the ball, she’d yell, “Use your voice! Claim what’s yours! Your voice is strong! Make yourself bigger! No one can take this away from you!”

The first time I watched this from the bleachers, I almost burst into tears. With each repetition, each thud of a fist against the ball, I felt an electric surge, like lightning striking my feet, coursing up through my legs, into my stomach, exiting my throat.

I’d grown up in a family where I didn’t have a voice. My parents split when I was five. My mother had untreated mental illness, and from a very young age, I was caretaking her and my brothers, one of whom had a rare genetic disability that caused him to be loving one minute, and violent the next. My home life was chaotic and dangerous, and I didn’t dare tell anyone about it because I worried telling would send my mother over the edge. Instead, I laid low. I quietly took care of the cooking and bills and physical care of my brothers. I kept myself small and unseen.

Now I wonder how it would have felt to have a coach like Debbie come into my life and insist that I not only had a powerful voice, but that I could use it. I could take up space in the world. I could claim what was rightfully mine. How would it have felt to be seen and empowered in that way?

At one point during the volleyball drill, I looked around at the faces of the other parents in the bleachers and recognized in some of them what I was feeling. I saw a few moms smiling wide. I saw one who, like me, looked like she might cry. Another was laughing and clapping YES. THIS!! THIS IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT!

At that moment, I think we all realized what a bargain our $75 participation fee was. The girls weren’t just learning a new sport. They were learning a new way to move through the world.

I can’t go back in time or change my personal history. It’s impossible to know if someone like Debbie could have stepped in and changed my life with her pep talks and confidence-boosting drills. There will always be grief in that for me – the what-ifs, the longing for what I never experienced as a kid.

But I can watch my daughter receive all of it. I can find joy and comfort knowing that she is surrounded by adults who will empower her to be her fullest, best self. Adults who want to hear her voice, want her to claim her ideas. Who believe that she can reach for the toughest balls and knock the hell out of them.

It’s a message I wish more girls and women could hear. So maybe we should repeat it to ourselves. Maybe we should stand in a wide circle and practice this until it becomes muscle memory, until it’s etched into our collective psyche:

Use your voice.

Take up space in the world.

Claim what’s yours.

Mine.

Mine.

MINE.