- distressed parents

One of the moms (with a seven or eight year old skater) lugs her homework to the rink with her to study. She sits in the icebreaker lounge amidst five or six other moms, a couple flirtatious dads, the male ballet coach, and six or seven rambunctious kids playing video games, and she actually... studies.

I don't know how she does it. Somehow between buying a snack for her daughter, chatting up friends, and dealing with the clunks and bings of the video games, she manages to learn something: accounting at the moment, I believe. Partly I'm impressed and partly I'm depressed. I am impressed by her ability to concentrate and her drive to be successful -- her eschewing of fun for work. But I am equally depressed that she would feel so driven as to have to endure the distractions.

I sat down to chat with her one day; she set aside her book on Basic Accounting, smiled, and said Good, I needed a break. She told me that she was from Vietnam, that her father was an American G.I. in the war and her mother was Vietnamese. She never met her dad, and her mom died when she was five. She came to the States as a teen refugee, and had a child while unmarried in high school. She didn't know who her child's father was.

Just your typical skate mom.