For my twelfth Christmas, I asked my parents for a trampoline. They bought me a small one, the kind you find in gym classes and toddlers’ playrooms, and we all knew it wasn’t what I had meant. We also all knew I shouldn’t have asked for one in the first place, because a big trampoline was outside a reasonable Christmas-gift price range. My parents, who are good parents, strove to not spoil us, while maintaining an outdoor space worthy of more than a centerpiece doomed to rust and sag further with each passing year.
They did the right thing. It was a good lesson for me. It should have been a good lesson for me. What ended up happening is that some small, buried seed of my 12-year-old self persisted, lying dormant until the day it came into possession of some disposable income and outdoor square footage. Then, when for the first time in my life I had a backyard of my own, it went right out and bought my kids that trampoline.
It’s a big trampoline.
The trampoline looms over three-quarters of our usable yard space. The trampoline is the biggest one in our neighborhood. The trampoline was an impulse buy and also a buy 22 years in the making.
Momentarily, I did hesitate. I wondered whether it would make our backyard look trashy, and it does. I wondered whether the kids would get bored and never use it, and they haven’t. They love it. Everyone loves it. Overnight, we’ve become popular. Our kids’ birthday parties this year were a cinch: Everyone wanted to do the same thing.
At the first post-trampoline party, I had a feeling what was going to happen, so I asked the other parents to each take a shift helping me police headcount, and nobody did it. We had 14 kids over that day and most of the time they were all on the trampoline together, jumping like beans.
Do we sound reckless? I want you to picture the trampoline. If you’re picturing it, you have to first go ahead and string up the safety net, because even trampolines in the mind’s eye aren’t supposed to not have a net. Other parents, though, are always telling me that they’re glad we have one. They’re so relieved! Like I’m going to be the one person who didn’t get the memo about nets. Like I’m going to whip it from the trampoline right when their kid’s doing their first double tuck flip.
With those other parents, I know what’s happening. A trampoline’s one of those things where, if you don’t have one, you quietly pass judgment on people who do. Like, you might be driving past a house with a trampoline and a statistic pops into your head about the number of skull fractures trampoline users suffered last year. Then when you have one, the statistic still lives in your head, only now it bears a tiny asterisk next to it, and the asterisk reads: pools are worse.
No one here’s doing flips. My kids’ preferred trampoline game is sea-creature tag. Most of the time they play that, or a leftover from Halloween called Pumpkin Ball, where they curl up into pumpkins and roll. We’re not worthy of our trampoline. That’s one of things that’s so delicious about owning it.
The trampoline’s an indulgence. We won’t keep it forever. When the springs start to wheeze, when the first bloom of rust starts to appear, when I have to herd the kids onto it instead of off, then we’ll know it’s time. How long will it squat in that graveyard of used trampolines, the Craigslist free section? Not long, I don’t think. I’ll put it up while it still has some life left, something to pass on to the next school of sea creatures and 4-year-old party czars.
But not anytime soon. I like the trampoline. I use it more than I thought I would. Not in the ways I pictured using it, though. I lie out on it at night after the kids are asleep. I barricade myself underneath it with lawn furniture while the 3-year-old looks for me during hide-and-go-seek. I goad shier grown-ups into jumping on it, because the trampoline’s a great icebreaker. You always have something to talk about with the person you’ve just seen launch a tiny gang of preschoolers into the air with their cannonball.
The kids: Are we spoiling them? Totally. Only so far, none of us has come down from the high.
Susan Anspach is a product of Northern Virginia’s schools, swim teams and cultural mores. A mother of three, she plays trampoline tag as a clown fish.