Jerkface Tinkerbell’s Guide to Life
Helmets are optional — especially for douchebags.
My daughter is ten. She wears purple ski pants with pink and black paint splatters on them. Her ski helmet is white with a big pink dot on the top like something from a candy shop. She’ll tell you she’s a hardcore skier, but when you see her on the slopes, with her blond hair and pink cheeks, she looks like an adorable woodland fairy wrapped in gore-tex.
Every Saturday, I drop her off in the morning to train with her ski team and coaches at a nearby ski mountain. When I meet up with her for lunch, she gives me a rundown of how she spent the morning. Usually, it includes an update on the snow conditions or descriptions of drills they do with names like ‘showtime’ or ‘squashers’.
Today when I met up with her, these trivial topics were not on the table. Instead, she wanted to tell me about three big events that were out of the ordinary.
Chapter 1: Tinkerbell
Because of the holiday and the crummy weather, a lot of kids on her team hadn’t shown up for training. So instead of doing drills with a gaggle of chipper kids her age, she’d ended up training with a group of 17 and 18-year-old boys.
It sounded intimidating to me, but she said it was motivating to think that the older kids — who were much…
