Letter to My Children: Soccer

Dearest Beloveds,

Recently this conversation took place over the kitchen counter. “I can’t believe I am actually going to write about soccer.”

“I am here to help,” rejoined your father.

As you both know, your mother did not play soccer beyond the bumblebee stage of games. The bumblebee stage is when small earnest legs attached to round bellies swarm around a soccer ball for the entire 15 minute half. Cheering your bumblebee soccer stages was a joyful and affirming experience for your mother. It was cuteness personified.

Now we have entered the soccer stage where things feel serious. I mean serious as in “thought of/discussed beyond the time when the shoes are on.”

We now have entire dinner conversations around such terms as “offside”, “nutmeg,” “rainbow,” and “hat trick.” The two of you and your father bounce between these terms and comments about your teammates. I listen and watch and try to keep up.

Crew was where your mother became serious. It was crew where entire meal conversations were hijacked by the sport. I still laugh aloud at Bonnie Garmus’s description of rowers from her amazing book, Lessons in Chemistry.

As any non-rower can tell you, rowers are not fun. This is because rowers only ever want to talk about rowing. Get two or more rowers in a room and the conversation goes from normal topics like work or weather to long, pointless stories about boats, blisters, oars, grips, ergs, feathers, workouts, catches, releases, recoveries, splits, seats, strokes, slides, starts, settles, sprints, and whether the water was really “flat” or not. From there, it usually progresses to what went wrong on the last row, what might go wrong on the next row, and whose fault it was and/or will be. At some point the rowers will hold out their hands and compare calluses. If you’re really unlucky, this could be followed by several minutes of head-bowing reverence as one of them recounts the perfect row where it all felt easy.

So I get it. I get the need to rehash, to plan, to relive, to wallow. I get it.

I also grok the need for you all to enact on a field of grass (or recycled tires) the ups and downs of life with other people. Collective joy surges through your teammates (and the spectators) when a play goes well. We all feed and share in that emotional high together - it is a wonderful feeling. We practice being gracious, not gloating in wins.

Conversely there are the slumped shoulders and dead eyes that accompany, “we were mercy ruled Momma, 7-0.”

“Well, you tried your best. You left it all out on the field.”

“Yes. We could not have done anymore more.”

And that right there is the crux of it.

In sports we enact and practice the ups and downs of life within a container. On and off the soccer pitch we have the choice to engage fully. Or not.

I recommend engaging fully.*

That is, after all, why we are here.

Here here. Alive. And, as Baba told me a few months before he passed. “The point of life is to enjoy it.”

Enjoy all of it - that is what this is all about.

*If either of you ever become a rower I share this story now. I vividly remember one morning on the bay. The morning light was pearlescent on dark water. We were rowing in pairs through the eight and I had a thought.

I had, at that point, been pulling. But not all the way, not race hard. It was more like a solid 7 - but not a 9 or a 10. It occurred to me that the only way I was going to continue to get stronger was to pull a 9 or 10 every time I put my blade in the water. That way I would be getting maximally stronger every time. So I did. Never forgot that.

And yes, you can now laugh at your Momma giving you a paragraph about water and terms that you don’t understand. You are welcome.

I love you.