We missed an important email, and showed up late to indoor soccer this week.
My 11 year old, Paige, looked at me with heavy disappointment.
Her love of soccer is almost all she knows.
I apologized to her, and checked my spam folder.
Still not sure why we hadn’t received the message,
I shrugged my shoulders, and we started packing back up to go when the coach came over and suggested she stay for the next session.
It would be all boys he said, many in high school,
but he had seen her play last week for the first time, and already knew she could hold her own.
On the field this daughter is incredible.
She runs drills and rewinds soccer clips at home.
She has excellent ball control, and can name players that retired two decades ago.
She says things like, “Oh, he’s known for not smiling much.”
For Christmas, all she asked for was soccer stuff.
I regularly hear people commenting with awe-struck voices from behind me as I sit on the sidelines and none of us can take our eyes off of her;
But self-confidence is a tricky thing.
Her own harshest critic.
Sometimes other people have a belief in you, though, even when you don’t.
Her eyes shifted to the boys entering the gym, some twice her size, and she looked up at me and said she didn’t want to do it. “Actually, can we just go?”
I had seen the coach watching her last week as she ran her drills.
I had seen him nodding again and again at her, while she was only fixated on the ball.
I knew he was taking notice then.
I knew she saw a room right now full of young men and intimidation,
but that coach was seeing the thing that I saw.
After some coaxing he convinced her to stay, “just for awhile,” and kick the ball around some.
Before long he had wooed her to join the warm up.
Within a half hour, she was facing off against a wall of chests and adam’s apples,
just her again and that ball.
Giant after giant came against her,
but she would just zip around them and score.
Around her 7th goal that day against all boys, most already on the select teams,
I heard a dad behind me in the stands comment to the other dad he was sitting by,
“I heard this last year was her first year playing,” and heard the other dad reply,
“Well, you’d certainly never know!”
Before long I heard, “Maam? HOW old is she?!”
“She’s 11,” I said. I turned around with tears in my eyes produced by pride, and found her again;
Only eleven years old…
Paige ended up staying for the entire practice, and limped a little having taken a hit and a boy twice her size down to the gound,
and as we packed up to go (for real this ) the coach came to us, again, asking her what her plans were for advancement, and if she had thought about it yet.
I smiled at her as her eyebrows raised.
Little did he know that was all she thinks about.
That hour in the gym, sticking through what first looked daunting, and coming out having proven herself meant that she had stood out more than usual to the coaches that day:
The only one with the pony tail.
The coach invited her to start coming to the select team practices, before she has even tried out.
She beamed at me in the hallway, red-faced.
Rain poured outside like the whole world knew this was a big moment, and it wanted to present itself ready, and cleaned up; Fresh.
I snapped a picture of her in that moment: On her way to achieving her dreams,
all the doors being opened up.
This morning before school I asked her to do a quick, simple chore, and she carried on like I’d asked her to resurface the hardwood floor.
Midway through, from her fainting couch, she wailed about how I “never help her,” and how hard the task was.
I “had no idea how hard.”
Rather than save her from it, and do it myself, I breathed deep, and I let her struggle some.
I was raised in the era of hard chores and harder consequences.
I hated it then, but as I’ve grown I’ve started to see the benefits of how it shaped me more.
It made me the type of person that never gives up.
After she had completed this task, and we got in the car for school, I turned the radio all the way down, and as we drove I talked to her about it.
“Honey, I need you to know why sometimes I will let you struggle some.
You see, if I always rescue you, or let you take the easy route, you will never have a chance to grow.
If you repeatedly get rescued, your brain will start telling you that you need that rescuing,
and the moment you’re faced with something hard, your first thought will be that you need someone to help you, because you’re sure you’ll fail on your own.
When we struggle, or face hard things, it teaches us just who we really are.
Just like Sunday, when you decided to stay and play against all those boys you were scared of at first.
You proved to yourself you could not only play side by side with them, but you could BEAT them. BEAT THEM.
How else would you have ever known?
I need you to know that in times when I let you struggle, it is not that I’m abandoning you, or not caring, and so often I WILL come to assist you, but please know that I am always watching, waiting for you to realize that you are capable of so many things all on your own:
Chores, problems you have to solve, chasing your dreams…
I hope that one day you see what I tried to do in this.
I hope you realize it was one way I was loving you.”
I could see in her eyes that she got it.
She, my deep-feeling, listening one.
Shaped, not forsaken.
After all, even for dough to rise, it has to be pressed down.
Lately I’ve been focusing on some transformations of my own:
My health, breaking free from depressions and anxieties, and getting back to who I once was.
In the last year I’ve realized just how often the things I say to my girls are things that I needed to hear from someone when I was young.
I hope that as I face the difficult things that are sure to come I can see in my mind the mental snapshot of her red, beaming face that day,
ripe with achievement,
having just surprised herself,
and I can remember my own words:
You can do it.
Keep going.
Try something else if what you’re doing doesn’t work.
See yourself through the eyes of someone who loves you,
and then, with a face glistening with possibility,
step out into the fresh world.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
