I live slow except for this one thing; soccer. My son plays for a club that is miles away in LA and with the notorious LA traffic we spend at least 1.5 hrs in the car on our way to practice. I know. Crazy. On one hand I have carefully plucked most noise from our life since I left work to live freely and make the most of our time on earth, and yet we chose this faraway team, because we believed it was the next best step for our son, the goalie, because the team excited him, and he felt he could advance. In exchange, during the the past year, traffic has occupied a valuable portion of our family life.
The way we coped was audio-books; we listened to The Undoing Project, Inventing Ourselves, Steve Jobs, Norse Mythology to name a few, and found them interesting and educational. We had genuine conversations and many times I found myself grateful for the time we spent together in the car. Yet as the fields started jumping around LA taking us further and putting us through more traffic, I couldn’t tune the road out but was constantly reminded I am in it. We lost interest in books, my son has started either sleeping on our way, exhausted from school and then homework, or putting on his earphones while he caught up with the world soccer. But almost every single drive he continues to thank me sweetly over and over again, he is sincerely grateful and this is so important to him, so yeah that makes it all worth it.
Also, once we get there, he starts practice and I start walking around the perimeter of the stadium, glancing at the practice from time to time, under the big blue or dark sky depending on the season, and my husband who works nearby joins me, all is well. In a way I am grateful to be around city kids and witness their genuine kindness, humility and talent, and see my son among them, however disorganized, at times frustratingly so, the team may be compared to our previous super neat suburban one.
It is not just the commute. There is nothing slow about soccer. It is loud, competitive, emotional, up and down. It is not about winning but developing at this stage, yet it feels good when they win and horrid when they lose. And then there is drama; though most parents are pleasant, courteous, and fun, sometimes parents fight, parents gossip, snub, sometimes coaches favor some players over the others, and other times the refs can be unfair and so on. The past weekend, during the last game of the tournament we had to flee the fields with hundreds of others because it was suspected a grudging parent in another division had a gun. But that is another story.
I had never been a soccer fan, in fact I disliked it even in my 20s. It all changed when we became soccer parents but I admit I still haven’t developed a love for the game the way my husband and most other parents do (I don’t attend each and every game), though I learned to appreciate its likeness of life; living even in the best of the circumstances, life is a struggle and you need to pass the ball, put in your best effort, be unfazed by the attacks, and believe that you will succeed. I find myself in awe of these kids (for the past 9 years) alight with determination, connection, intelligence, commitment, joy, and sometimes anger in all its earnestness, on the field.
For now we continue to drive. Not for long, not for long I tell myself… But I certainly hope soccer will continue to be a part of our lives for a long while.
