The Soccer Experience

You know that commercial where the mom confesses to putting her kids in soccer just so she can use her Clorox bleach pen on the grass stains? It's been on my mind all week as my three kids started soccer.  Haley played once before, when she was four (well...can doing cartwheels next to the goal be considered "playing"?) but this was a new experience for Jake and Nathan.  When I was teaching and didn't have any spare time, I vowed that once I did have a few extra minutes, they'd start some organized sports.  Soccer, here we come.

But there was a little part of me that wondered if I just signed them up so I could take pictures of them.  The Sports Mode on my camera doesn't get used enough.  That voice got louder today during Jake's first game, when my attention during the first few minutes of the game kept wandering to another mom on the sideline who had the same camera as me.  While I shouted encouraging things like "go Jake!" and "get in there!", I wondered whether or not she was also a scrapbooker and if she knew what she was doing with her camera better than I do (not a hard thing to accomplish!). 

But then Jake made a goal. He looked at his dad first and the smile those two exchanged? Worth every penny of the sign-up fee. Then he looked at me and we had that flash, that connection that seems to grow stronger as he gets older---that ability to know just what he was thinking, even though he might not even know it.  He was glad for himself that he made that goal.  He was glad for his team. He was glad that his dad saw it, glad that I saw it, glad that his friends did, too. Jakey is my tenderheart and he's easily bruised, but that goal seemed to erase the past two weeks' worth of dents and dings.

And while I didn't get his smile on camera, it doesn't matter.  I learned that my intentions were good, that soccer would be good for all my little brood (except for Kaleb, who wasn't happy at all about an hour in the heat in the stroller). That it wasn't about the pictures but the experience.

Go Jake!!!

Identity

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer."

Rilke said that in his Letters to a Young Poet.  Of course, I'm not young.  And I'm only a wanna-be poet. But this idea of questions and answers and finding out who you are has been on my mind a lot lately.  If you'd asked me three months, one week, and three days ago who I was, my answers would've been completely different than they are now.  Now, I'm full of used-to-be's:  I used to be an English teacher.  I used to be a working mom.  I used to be the mom of three kids.  I used to be a runner.  I used to be known as the owner and gardener of a lovely yard.

Now, though, the answers have changed.  Now I'm an English teacher on an indefinite sabbatical. Now I'm a stay-at-home mom.  Now I'm the mom of four kids.  Now I'm hobbling around in a walking cast with a stress fracture. Now my yard is more weeds than flowers because I'd rather goo at my baby than pull out my garden trowel.

All of which has made me realize something. One of the big questions, the one I'm finding the answer to gradually, the "who I am," is both always changing and always staying the same.  Some things change---work, attitudes, circumstances.  Some things don't.  And for me, the things that don't change are these roles: mom, wife, writer. To me, a writer's a person who needs words like she needs air, someone who is always trying to write better. Maybe I've cobbled that definition together because my scant publications (a few poems in college literary mags, some articles in Simple Scrapbooks magazine) hardly qualify me as a "real writer."  But I love words. I love fooling around with sentences. One of my favorite possessions is my Roget's Super Thesaurus. I notice grammar errors and point them out to my husband Kendell (who couldn't care less!). And I live my life looking for those ellusive answers, with a pen and a notebook or my keyboard as my map.