The sky is gunmetal gray as I pull the blanket tighter around me. My fingertips are freezing in my thin gloves and I fumble as I pull on a rain poncho as the rain that has been threatening all morning finally starts to make good on its promises. My phone tells me that it is 44 degrees and that there are at least 25 minutes left in the game. Tomorrow, I will be on the sidelines again and will leave the game with a sunburn across my forehead, the gloves on my hands replaced by sandals on my feet.
There is nothing like the joy of spring soccer in Minnesota.
My son had a soccer tournament this weekend, four games spread over three days, all held in a distant suburb with excellent fields and not nearly enough shade. This is my son’s first year on this club team and I’m still getting to know the other parents. During his high school season, I spend every game with a group of parents that I adore and whose children, in some cases, I’ve known since they were six years old. We watch the boys and we chat about the game and books and the realities of parenting teenagers. It is the best.
His club games are a quieter affair for me. I say “hi” to some of the parents and make the occasional weather related joke or comment about a particularly good play, but mostly I’m quiet, watching and listening. At the tournament this weekend, there was a lot of sideline conversation about the busyness of the upcoming graduation season. While my son’s team is mostly 9th and 10th graders, several of the players have older siblings finishing high school this year, so there was commiseration about all the planning and the million end of the school year activities.
As I watched my son warming up on the sidelines, waiting to get subbed back in, I tried not to do the math on how many more games he has left before he, most likely, hangs up his cleats and heads to college.
I have been sitting on his sidelines for 10 years. I’ve sat through freezing rain, falling snow, blazing heat, and perfect fall days where living in Minnesota felt like the gift that it is. I’ve been sunburned and mosquito bitten and had my teeth chatter so hard I worried I’d lose a filling. I’ve watched as my son’s middle school had a perfect, undefeated season and as his futsol team lost almost every game. I’ve seen him score goals, draw penalties, get yellow cards, break his wrist, sprain his ankle, knock the wind out of a kid on a clean but hard hit, find his voice, be surly in defeat, and be on fire with joy.
I’ve gone to every game that I possibly can, missing a few every season because of work or illness, but if I can possibly make it, I go. I can’t begin to count the hours I’ve spent in the car because of soccer - driving to practices, driving to games, waiting out a practice in the driver’s seat with a book to pass the time. He mostly remembers to say “thank you” for the rides and the snacks and the way that I try not to bug him too much when we are headed to a game, knowing that he wants to get into his pre-game zone.
And while I sometimes don’t love the thought of heading out into a cold January night to bring him to 8:30pm practice, I almost never complain about it. This isn’t because I’m some kind of saint or martyr around all of this… it’s because I feel stupidly, embarrassing grateful for all of it.
I’m grateful to be in the place in life where we can afford to pay for club soccer. I’m grateful for the ways that soccer has shaped him as a person and an athlete. He works so damn hard.
Mostly, I am profoundly grateful to get the chance to watch one of the people I love the most do the thing that he loves the most.
Sometimes I hear parents complaining about the hassles of kid sports and I think there are sometimes valid complaints to be made. It can be time consuming and expensive. The driving gets old. There can be drama and weird team politics and lord knows other parents can be real assholes about all of it. There are also times when it is clear that the kid doesn’t want to be there or is just trying the sport out for fun (a totally good and valid thing to do). I’m not here to wax nostalgic about my son’s brief foray into YMCA basketball or rec league lacrosse. Those teams were fun (sometimes) but they weren’t an essential part of who he is.
We all have an epicenter inside us and soccer is currently at the center of his. At some point several years ago, soccer switched from an activity to an identity. To love this specific boy at 15 is to love someone who wants nothing more than to be as good as he can possibly be at this one thing.
When he is on the field, he is the embodiment of his own childhood dream.
As we get older, I think we often become more private about the things we want most in life. We harbor secret hopes about jobs or money or babies or relationships or wanting to be a successful novelist (sigh). There will come a day, and it is coming far too soon, where being really good at soccer won’t be my son’s biggest dream anymore.
And I don’t know if I’ll know what the next big dream is for him. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to watch it come true for him in real time.
I probably won’t be the first person he tells about it, might be demoted to the third or fourth phone call he makes. This is all developmentally normal and appropriate, this pulling away. I want him to be a fully functional adult male without mommy issues. But also… if I think about it too much at this exact moment in time, I might cry so… moving on!
I posted this poem on Instagram the other day, inspired by the graduation talk during the game.
It feels like time is chasing me. My sideline days are numbered and I want to hold on to them with both hands. What a gift it has been— to know him, to know what he loves, and to get to watch him do it, week after week.
I feel exactly this way for Kiernan about dance and debate. So so so lucky to get to watch her do it and help and be a person she talks about it, and so aware of how fleeting it is. Life is both so short and so long and I can’t believe how fast it’s gone.
If you haven't yet, I would recommend listening to Mary Louise Kelly's book It Goes So Fast. You are currently in a very similar situation as the one she was in in the book, and I think it'd compliment your feelings very well :)