“Appreciate” This Advice While You Can

You get a lot of advice, most of it unwanted, as a parent. It comes in the form of tips, projections, judgments or sometimes, delusional nonsense. A good chunk of it is practical, as in it describes specific actions you can choose to take, or not, but some of it is abstract and useless. And no advice is more abstract and useless than “Appreciate these days while you can. It will be over before you know it.”

I acknowledge that this advice comes from a sweet place. Usually older folks reminiscing about the days when their grown children were ungrown children. And time being this fickle, fleeting thing is something that virtually every human on the planet experiences. But there is quite literally no way to capitalize on this advice in the slightest.

Think about it this way: Has anyone in the history of the human species ever appreciated a moment or time of their life enough as it happened that they didn’t miss it later in life? I’m not talking about changing as a person and not wanting to go back to earlier days. Like the thought of having to do high school over again being really unappealing or something. No, more like, “those days were so amazing and awesome, but I don’t miss them even slightly because I really appreciated them as they were happening!”

Appreciating moments as they come does nothing for whether or not you miss the days. You may look back on your past with indifference or disdain, but it won’t be because you appreciated them enough. Our memories are too weird for that. Time is this fire that burns our memories and often times the only rubble that is left are the good parts. Think of a picture of someone as a baby. An “ahhhh” coupled with a blast of nostalgia erupts from our brain, with the delirium from a lack of sleep, chunky poops, and crying completely filtered out. We just psychologically delete them.

Let me give you a personal example: Two of my kids are five and two. They both like sitting on my lap and reading books. When one hops on my lap, the other one is usually inspired to do the same. The trouble is, they both have very different definitions of “reading.” One prefers reading in the conventional sense, you know out loud and in the order indicated on the book. The other prefers flipping pages, pointing at random things, going backwards, and reading pages over again.

This almost always leads to screeching fights, turning the magic of reading into a tedious nightmare. In some amount of time, a year maybe two, this will go away. Someday, I may look back with reverence and miss it if you were to show a picture of me reading to them. The reality of having two screaming, whining kids on your lap is actually pretty lame, and telling myself I will miss this someday doesn’t help the present and won’t make me miss these days any less.

Sentimentality is inevitable. I feel it constantly. I look at photos of my nine-year-old, even as a toddler, and those days look like ancient history. I look forward and see the expiration date on her childhood looming. I remind myself to enjoy this time, but it does not matter. Some days are still shitty. You will miss earlier days in your life. (And probably you will convince yourself that the world was better then too.)

-B.S. Lewis

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The Night Soccer Got Real

“They are crowding the kickoff. They’ve been doing it all season!” If an hour before this particular woman yelled this, someone had pulled her out of a crowd and asked her if she cared about spacing on kickoffs during a soccer match, I would have bet at least my appendix that her answer would have been a very quizzical “no.” But on this particular Monday night, she cared very much. She wasn’t alone. On this particular Monday night, almost all of us on that sideline cared.

I refer to her as that woman not because I’m trying to protect her privacy. I just genuinely have no idea what her name is. While we’ve spent the last several mornings seated in each other’s general vicinity watching our respective daughters playing soccer on the same club team, I had never even made contact with this woman, let alone talked to her. I’m sure there are some perfectly nice folks amongst the parents of my daughter’s soccer-mates, but the coincidence of our kids being on the same team struck me as a flimsy reason to strike up a conversation.

Because for most of my now 8-year-old daughter’s “career” as a soccer player, this was just an activity to get her out of the house and wear her down, like an off-leash Labrador at a dog park. (One of her early soccer coaches, a guy name Tank know the deal. After a practice which consisted of four-year-olds running around aimlessly for a half-hour, he closed things out with having them run to a tree at the opposite end of the park and back three times in a row.) The sessions were usually six fleeting practices, hardly enough time to talk about anything that was worth talking about, and each new class meant new parents anyway. Even as the kids got older, with brains and anttention-spans developed enough to understand the concept, soccer, soccer was still just something they did every so often, less about the competition than it was the giggling and snacks. And we, the bored parents, cheered them on regardless of skill level, celebrating their effort, secure in the knowledge that we were doing something positive for our kids.

When we signed our seven-year-old up in the fall of 2022 for a club league that aimed to provide “soccer experience to youth in the community, where players learn the importance of citizenship, teamwork, positive attitude, effort, fundamentals, and sportsmanship, in a safe and welcoming environment,” we expected more of the same. And that’s mostly what we got. Sure, there were actual games now, but aside from a few belligerent weirdos, most of the parents on the sideline were just pumped for 45 minutes to go by without hearing a whiny request for snacks. The games are so unserious that goalies were verboten.

When the request from the coaches, three volunteer dads, it should be pointed out, donating time I never would, to keep the girls together for the spring session, we thought next to nothing of it, signing her up for another go. In hindsight, this was the first sign of trouble. Now, for the first time, she would be working with the same coaches. Coaches that were taking soccer seriously. Coaches that noticed the deflated soccer ball that we had our daughter use and told her to get a new one. Coaches that could observe how or indeed even whether our daughter improved as a soccer player. Coaches, in short, that were trying to mold our daughter into a bona fide ember of a bona fide soccer team.

Noe of that is bad. Working hard at improving and learning about teamwork are objectively good things. But the change was palpable and jarring .An activity that was once all about fun and effort began to generate a whiff of expectation and winning. While no official score was kept, it usually took paying a minimal amount of attention to know who was winning and who was losing. And we, the parents, were paying more than the minimal amount of attention. The wholly unshocking truth is, watching your kid win is a hell of a lot more fun than watching your kid lose.

It was in this crucible of child competition that I saw a girl throw an elbow at another girl in an effort to accommodate her dad’s bellowed request that she “get the ball.” That I heard the first grumblings of complaints about the referees. (A function filled by disinterested high school students who mostly wander the field like skittish squirrels not blowing any whistles, lest the sideline of carnivorous parents lash out at them.) It was also the first time I saw looks of minor reservation on some girl’s faces, seeds of thought planted that would grow into realizations that this whole soccer thing actually carries with it performance expectations and that it is actually a bit of a drag. And, most strangely, it was the first time I hear a relative random person call out my daughter’s name.

Certainly there had been cheering before. Run-of-the-mill “good hustle” and “pass the ball” but nobody had used my kid’s actual name. It wasn’t nasty or anything. The opposite. “Nice stop!” They said, commending her on thwarting a goal attempt. But it was surreal hearing all of these quasi-strangers knowing my daughter’s name and lauding. This cheering was not the result of these other parent’s being particularly concerned with my daughter’s development as an athlete or human being but because they wanted the soccer team performing as optimally as possible. This player-specific commentary was applied to every girl on the team.

All of this burgeoning competitive drive and sideline enthusiasm coming from us adults, most of whom haven’t played a competitive sport in a decade or two, finally crested and spilled over in the final game of the season, a rare Monday night reschedule of a rained-out Saturday game. There were all of four teams in our “league” meaning you got to see the same games play out over and over. With massive disparities in talent and age, it is pretty easy to see where your team sat on the hierarchy. There was the bad team. There was the good team, and our team, one of two in the middle.

Our final game was against the good team. A group of tenacious 4’4 killers who had eviscerated our team twice already b margins big enough that I stopped counting. While this team was filled with burgeoning athletes who could move fast and dribble the ball at a semi-competent level, their biggest advantage was their on-field aggressiveness. At seven and eight, there are still a large number of girls who can’t quite get past the general sense of rudeness in running up to someone and kicking the play they are playing with away from. This, coupled with an awareness of the risk of collision, means you consistently see a mass of girls converging on the soccer ball like a rugby scrum, with an outer layer of girls orbiting the action, unsure how, or even whether to get involved.

There was no such hesitancy on the good team. Just a series of prepubescent long-haired soccer assassins with a cold-blooded nose for the ball. By the third game, for reasons I cant quite articulate, us adults had had enough. Even thought I didn’t know their names, I and the rest of my fellow parents were united on the sideline by our desire to will our daughters to victory. Dogs on the sideline were kept well outside of petting distance from the bench. Conversations having nothing to do with soccer led to reminders to cheer on your teammates. We, the millennials, spent 45 minutes ignoring our phones. There was only the game.

The coaches, who usually ambled down the field attempting to impose some order amidst the chaos by directing players and suggesting the occasional play, were every bit as invested. That night they sprinted back and forth with the ball, imploring the girls that inevitably sagged behind the action, exhausted from the physical and Sisyphean ordeal of running back-and-forth endlessly in pursuit of the ball, onward.

Thie sideline joined in with the encouragement, pushing each girl to give it her all. The very air on our sideline crackled with a mix of resentment and determination. Any rule-breaking by the other team in pursuit of a competitive advantage would be promtly called out, even if it went mostly ignored. We wanted this.

Of course, it was was all for naught. While I am pretty sure the third game was closer, it wasn’t close enough that I could tell you how bad the deficit was. Screaming parents and intense coaching alone aren’t enough to overcome a pretty massive talent disparity. But everyone’s collective investment in the game made watching it a hell of a lot more fun, despite the loss.

The game also lead to one of my proudest dad moments. With the other team in the midst of one of their many breakaway goals, my daughter was the last, best hope at a stop. At a dead sprint, she tried to get between the other play and the ball. It was the fastest I had ever seen her move. Though she came up a foot-and-a-half short, I was giddy with her effort.

But mixed in with the pride was also the stark realization that all that effort was mostly the result of peer pressure. As she gets older, I will become increasingly relegated to the sideline of her life, it will be other people’s voices, or at least what she imagines them to be, that will resonate with her. But no matter, I’ll be watching and screaming my head off for her.

-B.S. Lewis

If you like something I wrote and want to send some cheddar my way:

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