My rookie era: As a working mother, I had forgotten how to have fun. Then I played my first floorball match

I’d spent a season on the sidelines at my daughter’s floorball matches, watching 10-year-old girls brandishing sticks to smack the ball past the goalies and into the nets. Floorball is like hockey but played on an indoor court enclosed by knee-high boards that keep the ball ricocheting around as if in a giant pinball machine. My daughter’s games were fast-paced; every few minutes players dashed off the court, their ponytails swishing, and were replaced with substitutes. The ends of their sticks had brightly coloured plastic blades that could send the ball flying with astonishing speed.

After my daughter’s games, I handed out high-fives and orange slices, suppressing my envy. The girls looked like they were having fun.

I had forgotten how to have fun. As a working mother with three young children, it had been a decade and counting since I’d slept through the night. The years had passed in sisyphean drudgery: packing lunchboxes, hanging out laundry, bedtime routines that dragged on for so long that I left the room to scream into a pillow. Each morning I rushed to work with tiny Vegemite fingerprints on my trousers and on my days “off”, I answered work calls at the aquatic centre while my toddler sobbed her way through swimming lessons. When a crucial work deadline loomed, I’d inevitably get a call from our daycare to collect a vomiting child. I was tired of feeling that daily life was an ordeal. It was time to play.

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I recruited mothers in the school car park, cajoled colleagues at office morning teas and even followed a friend off the bus when she mentioned she’d played hockey as a child. Eventually, after a few weeks, I managed to assemble a women’s floorball team of seven players.

Our team showed up for our debut match at a local primary school, on a balmy Perth evening in March this year, in the lowest division of the league, with no sticks and several pyjama-clad children in tow.

As the sky faded to pink, I walked towards the bright lights of the gymnasium. I could hear women cheering and sticks clacking. I was so nervous I was trembling.

The minute the game began, it was obvious we had no ball-handling skills or strategy. We were a pack of galumphing labradors: shouldering each other, stealing the ball off our own teammates, and turning helpless circles as the ball was lost in the fumbling under our feet. More than once, I swung hard and missed it entirely.

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The referee’s whistle shrieked at our many infractions: a stick lifted too high; a goalie who had dropped to two knees; a stick thrust between a player’s legs. Unaccustomed to sprinting, I was soon panting and sluggish but, when I staggered off the court for a break, my substitute teammate waved me back on. She clutched her quadricep – a suspected sprain.

At half-time we were too stunned and breathless to brainstorm tactics. One teammate dashed to the toilet, calling over her shoulder: “I’ve had three kids; my pelvic floor can’t handle this!”

The second half began with the other team’s goalie stifling a yawn as she waited for the ball to stray on to her half of the court. Meanwhile our own goalie, in her enthusiasm, leapt over the ball and kicked in a goal for the other team.

My feet ached as my orthotics were pushed to their limits. My wrist throbbed. Then something remarkable happened: I remembered I had a body. Chasing the ball, my mind had no space for anxious rumination about climate change, interest rates or microplastics. I momentarily released my mental load and rejoiced in feeling the burn in my legs as I ran, the ache in my arms as I stretched out with my stick, and the furious thudding of my heart reminding me that it had always been there, doing its job.

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That day, we lost 16 to one. The other team applauded when we scored our only goal. In 35 minutes of game time, I had laughed at myself, fallen over, cursed and cheered. I was hooked.

Our team plays once a week and continues to languish at the bottom of the ladder. We rarely train together. But some evenings, if there is a lull between dinner and the chaos of bedtime, I steal outside to practise hitting the ball. Through the windows, I see my children illuminated in the kitchen. The double-glazed glass muffles their argument and I hear the scrape of my stick on the paving and the thunk of the ball bouncing off the deck. Crickets trill and a flock of white cockatoos screech across the sky.

I used to think team sports were pointless: why should I waste my precious time pursuing a ball? But after spending years accounting for my time in six-minute units and wringing every moment for productivity, I’ve realised that the pointlessness of floorball is, itself, what brings me joy.

When I look at a photograph we took after our first game, I see our flushed, blotchy faces and the sweaty hair pasted to our foreheads. We are radiant. We look like women who have had some fun.