Two years ago, Jenny Mohammed, a 34-year-old full-time mother from the Bronx, was flipping through television channels while nursing her 6-month-old son, Kai, and landed on a reality show about roller derby. She was so enthralled by the hard-charging women dressed like pinups that she Googled pictures of roller derby girls and put up a shot of one in electric-blue eye shadow on her refrigerator.
Mohammed spent the next year skating around a nearby paved reservoir while pushing Kai in a baby jogger, all to try out for the Long Island Roller Rebels league.
She is now a member of the Ladies of Laceration, one of four teams in the league. "There are moments when it's very clear that I am in a very different place than a lot of the girls," she said of her single teammates. "I've seen girls get hit extremely hard where their neck snaps, and I think, 'What am I doing here?'"
In her basic track pants and tasteful diamond stud earrings, Mohammed does not look as if she would elbow an opponent. Then again, roller derby girls are no longer just single women in fishnets who flash their underwear at fans. Today a growing number of mothers play, too, whether they're stay-at-homes who shun conventional mommy-and-me groups or executives looking for a diversion outside of home and office.
"Part of the reason I think moms are attracted to roller derby is that they get to develop a new persona," said Melissa Joulwan, the author of Rollergirl: Totally True Tales From the Track (Touchstone, 2007). "When you're a mom, you have to put your child first, and I imagine it's liberating for a mother to go back to who she was before she had a child, to just be a woman, instead of a mother."
There's no official record of the number of roller derby players nationwide, let alone how many of them are parents. But team managers, players and a spokeswoman for the Women's Flat Track Derby Association agree: they are seeing a modest rise in mothers joining leagues. Last year, a mothers-only league of 17 women was formed in Austin, Texas, after Cathy Parkes, its founder, recruited talent from the parent pool at her daughter's preschool.
Mothers drawn to the rough-and-tumble game said it helps them release the stress of raising children and prove that being responsible for a child doesn't mean you can no longer throw body blocks. It doesn't hurt that wearing roller skates also makes them feel sexy, they said.
"I'm a mom, and I teach high school," said Margaret Fackler, 27, a member of the Texas Rollergirls in Austin, who goes by the rink name Olivia Shootin' John. "But when I'm out there, I'm a rock star."
For Maggie Benavides, 37, a mother of three boys in Milwaukee, getting in on the action raised her self-esteem. "I got my youth and spirit back," said Benavides, a social worker who plays for the Brewcity Bruisers. "I don't feel old, even though the other girls will tell me, 'I got my first grownup job,' and I'm like: 'Your first grownup job? My skates are older than you.'"
Modern-day roller derby — which was revived five years ago by a group of women in Austin, who used a flat track, instead of a banked one — is an hourlong game made up of two-minute sprints. Each team has four blockers and a sprinter (or jammer), whose goal is to skate through the pack without getting knocked down by the other team.
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