Soccer is Saving My Daughter's Soul

Yesterday mom mailed me an article she cut out from her local newspaper. It was about three women who have been swimming in Lake Michigan through the frigid Chicago winter. She sent it to me because I have been swimming every day for the last ninety days. But here in the Pacific Northwest, we don’t have subzero temperatures; it’s usually about 40 degrees Fahrenheit when I jump in. The article talked about the little community these women have formed. In addition to the three of them, there are others who come just to watch and cheer them on. Some bring muffins and cakes. Others bring blankets and first aid supplies. The supporters come simply to be a part of this little community the women have created.

Last night I dropped my daughter off for her fifth soccer practice of the week. There has been no school in our city for over a year. The only time my daughter is with her peers is when she is playing soccer. This week high school soccer started and her practice schedule bumped up from twice a week to five days a week, sometimes for a total of seven different practices. 

I parked the car to wait out the hour-long practice but, it was a moderately warm night so I decided to take a walk. I grabbed a mask and strolled through the commercial part of the neighborhood I was in. After making two loops through the little village I returned to the field and spent the rest of my time circling the perimeter. 

As I circled the field I passed the car after car of parents sitting in the driver’s seat looking at either a phone or an iPad. Parents are not allowed to sit or stand at the sidelines of practices like they used to. It’s a gathering hazard. It was probably against the rules for me to be walking around the field as well and I tried to stay far outside of the border so as not to be noticed.

As I walked I realized how much I missed the old camaraderie we used to have at games. Rain or shine, we’d gather along the sidelines cheering our girls. Now, as the kids played, parents were forced to sit in their cars alone.

When my daughter was done with her scrimmage I met her at the edge of the field. Sweaty and flushed, she yammered on about the game. She was talking a mile a minute, filled with energy and excitement. In the old days, there would be lots of parents standing there, and as our kids approached, we’d each be touched by our respective child’s energy and it would be a little bit like the end of a party. Everyone smiling and laughing as we walked to our cars and went our separate ways.

I used to complain a lot about soccer. I balked at the idea of being a “soccer mom.” I whined at the hours that commuting to practices and games sucked out of my schedule. Now, without the ability to carpool because of COVID, those driving obligations are more than double, but I don’t mind because I can see how soccer is saving my daughter’s soul.

Soccer is the only time my daughter can be around other kids. Though she is masked and socially distanced if possible, she is with other people, in community. With each loop of the field last night, as I passed the solitary faces of the parents sitting alone in their cars, I felt exponentially more grateful for the experience that these kids are having. 

When we got home I remarked to my partner how much difference I noticed in our daughter. In just a week of everyday contact, it seemed her spirits had been lifted, her soul restored. I don’t know when these poor kids will go back to school, but for now, I am eternally grateful for the time my daughter has on the field with her friends. I vow here and now to never complain about soccer again.

My Secret Lover the Oximeter

For the first six months of the pandemic, I couldn't breathe. It started out episodically. When the numbers would surge or President Trump would do something extra stupid I would go into lung atrophy and struggle to breathe. I'd take long walks along the lake trying to get a breath. Even in the days before mask-wearing outside, I still couldn't get air deep down into my lungs.

My partner was getting tired of me holding my chest, dramatically widening my eyes as I tried to pull the air into my lungs successfully. I was becoming the crazy one in the house for sure. My teenage daughter would side-eye me in my moments of breathing panic and rhetorically question, "You okay Mom?"

I was beginning to feel like the boy who cried wolf. Every time I thought I really couldn't breathe, I could. I continued living. I could still exercise and work and cook dinner. But I spent my days craving the satisfaction of a full breath. Hour after hour all I could get was a little sip or a half-full experience. Around Thanksgiving, we had an outdoor social visit with a friend who is a surgeon. As we sat around the fire I tried to disguise my fish out of water breathing but eventually, she asked me, "Are you having trouble breathing?"

I was in a particularly stressed-out time then, thinking about the holidays, how I would manage emotionally. I told my friend how I was worried that one day I would just wake up and not be able to breathe at all. I told her I worried that I was COVID positive (even though I'd tested negative) and that I had one symptom-- trouble breathing.  She suggested I get an oximeter. "You can get one for $30 online," she said, "And then you'll know that you are getting enough oxygen, even if you are struggling."

It was a simple answer to my problem. When I got home that night I ordered one. The next day it arrived and I put the device on my fingertip. My oxygen scored a 98. That's an A-plus for sure. I breathed a sigh of relief and took comfort in the fact that I could use the oximeter when I was feeling a tight chest in the future. It would be my secret. When I was feeling like no one else believed me, I could go to the oximeter and tell her my problems. She'd gently hold my finger and make everything alright.

I tucked the oximeter into our medicine cabinet and went about my day. That was four months ago and I haven't taken the oximeter out once. But I know she's there. My secret lover the oximeter. I don't complain to my family anymore that I can't breathe. I have moments of stress and worry where I can feel the tightness in my chest but I just imagine my confidant the oximeter up in the medicine cabinet and remember that feeling of her gentle touch on my finger making everything alright. Just the thought of it opens my lungs again.

How Do Girls Become Badass Women?

I have two women friends who are good at all the things men are traditionally good at. Both of these women grew up in Idaho. I’m convinced that women who grow up in Idaho are raised differently. When they were girls, these friends both learned how to hunt and fish and camp, how to drive trucks, boats, and sitting lawnmowers. They learned how to ski and mountain bike and rock climb. And all the things that they didn’t learn how to do, like build a camper from scratch or rewire a toaster, they do anyway because they figure, why not?

I’m pretty handy myself. I fixed our microwave with a twist tie. I saved us a bunch of money by reattaching our torn soaker hose system with a tampon applicator. Just last week I rehung our gutters and rewired lights that were pulled down in the snowstorm. But I’m not like these can-do-all-things-male friends. They possess an attitude of confidence that I strive to emulate. I’m a tinkerer. I’ll try anything, but these friends, they embody a different kind of attitude.

Every summer when I was a kid we would drive twelve hours from our house on the South Side of Chicago to our grandparents’ cottage on a lake in Minnesota. We’d stay for a few weeks and fill our little city lungs with fresh air. We ate our grandmother’s cooking —  goodies we never got at home like creamed corn, hamburgers, heaping scoops of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.

We played hours of cards in the bunkhouse devouring the bags of chocolate Twizzlers our grandmother’s kept stocked with her kitchen linens. We wrote and performed skits with our cousins who journeyed to this midwestern paradise from their home on the west coast. The lake house was my favorite place to be.

Our grandfather, a stern Presbyterian physician was deeply invested in giving all of us grandkids a true lake house experience. He taught us to sein for minnows and took each of us out in the boat fishing with him alone at least once every summer. After dinner he’d stand up, stretch, look around the table and ask which one of the cousins was going to come in the boat to go fishing with him that evening. 

A few times each summer he took us in the small sailboat. He taught us all to water ski and required us to pick up twigs and rocks from the expansive hilly yard he’d mow with his gas push mower. We all helped in the garden picking green beans and tomatoes from their small crop.

Grandpa made sure we all got the same experiences at the lake, except for a few things that were only for the boys. One of these boy-specific experiences was driving the boat. Only the boys got to drive the boat. Though the girl and boy cousins were all about the same age, only the boys got to drive the boat. 

One summer when we were all between ten and twelve, the boy cousins got a lesson on how to prime the motor, pump the throttle, put the boat into gear, and pull the ripcord. But the girl cousins — my sisters and I — were not allowed to operate the boat. We still had fun — the boy driving the boat sat at the back with the motor, looking forward like a true captain and howled orders at the rest of us, crunched up in our life preservers, facing him, as he turned up the throttle and sped nose up into the middle of the lake. The all-powerful (boy) driver of the boat.

When we were kids we would all laugh about this, that the boys got to drive the boat. My sisters and I didn’t question this gendered line in the sand. There were lots of other subtle only-boys-do-this things that happened at the lake. The boys baited their own hooks. The boys pumped the gas into the gas tank for the fishing boat and the bigger motorboat. The boys operated the gas lawnmower. The boys hung out in the garage with Grandpa.

My two friends, the can-do girls from Idaho, never seem to question their abilities, even if they lack confidence, even if they’ve never done a task before. When I take on something like fixing the microwave, it’s a big deal. I second guess my every move. I often think of these friends who seem to simply skip the step of second-guessing. They just get right to whatever task is at hand. And why shouldn’t they? When they were girls, these Idahoans were expected to do all the things boys could do. And now as adults, they are badasses.

As the mother of a daughter, I’ve tried to impose ungendered expectations on my daughter. I have taught her to install a smoke detector. I challenged her to switch out the starter on our gas grill, which she did in less than an hour. I taught her to install her own hooks to hang her towels in her bathroom. I try to model doing non-traditional work like chopping wood or fixing the toilet. Sometimes I wonder if I have done enough to give her the confidence that will help her become a badass.

It’s inspiring to watch these friends of mine take on any challenge. It’s remarkable really. We’re in 2021 but we’ve still got a long way to go. We need to watch how we limit our girls. We need to give them every opportunity that we give boys. Every experience. It’s taken me a long time to have the confidence to mess with the electrical outlet in the house or examine the blade of the lawnmower when it’s stuck. I am slowly building my skill set, more confident each time I try something new, but I can’t help but wonder what kinds of things I’d be doing if Grandpa had taught me to drive the boat too.

Who Will Show Up for My 80th Birthday Tribute?

A few months ago my sister and I put together a birthday tribute for our mother who was turning 80. We collected video messages from friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors from her long life. We were overwhelmed with a response of over 85 submissions. Some people were so eager to toast Mom that they sent two video clips instead of one.

Since making that video I’ve been thinking about who would show up for my 80th birthday tribute. I’m not the amazing correspondent my mom is and, even before COVID, I’m wasn’t great at maintaining all of my friendships. Just this morning I made a list of five close friends I haven’t spoken to lately, and that’s just people who are local. My contact with my high school and college friends is abysmal.

I find myself in a self-proclaimed popularity contest that isn’t based in reality. I have some friends who I’ve moved away from. It’s not that anything necessarily happened to dissolve our friendship. It’s just time. Enough time going by not calling or texting or emailing that it no longer feels important. It feels apparent that neither one of you really wants to connect, so you both stop trying. Eventually, the juice that fed the friendship engine is all dried up.

When I think of those eight-five people who showed up for Mom’s video, I think mostly about the energy it must have taken my mom to sustain all of those relationships over all of those years. I don’t think I have that kind of energy.

When my mom was seventy, I collected letters from her friends and compiled them into a scrapbook. That project was smaller and much easier. Ten years ago we didn’t have the social media platforms or the proliferation of easily accessible contact information on the internet. I just went by stories my mom had told me about different people in her life and contacted them through email. For the video we made this year, my sister used Facebook and Instagram and sleuthed through friends of friends of friends to generate a comprehensive list.

By the time I’m eighty, there will probably be a chip in my head that can be remotely accessed to generate a list of people I’ve been a good friend to in the past five years. Maybe it will have colors- Green for those I’ve been in regular contact with, Yellow for intermittent, and Red for not at all.

Since creating my mom’s video I have thought about whether I’m creating enough green. Lately, it feels like my cache or yellow and red is way bigger than the green. I wonder how long (or short) my list will be when I’m 80?

My hope is that when I’m eighty the remote chip will have an option for looking at the past fifty years and averaging contact. It will be able to measure those concentrated contacts with friends from college or that group of friends I hung out with a ton in my twenties. It will be sensitive enough to calculate that one walk a year I take with an acquaintance.

Maybe there will be some kind of algorithm for “good friend” assessment and my list of green will be something I can be proud of. Maybe it will create a list of enough friends to create some sort of substantial project like the ones I’ve created for my mom.

Friendships wax and wane. I’m in close touch with someone for a few years and then we fade away, but the time we spent together doesn’t disappear. The long walks or rich dinner conversations we had don’t evaporate. They simply go into the coffers of memory. And some friends are constant. They never fade or go away. They’re always there.

And then there are new friendships, the ones that blossom in the empty space where an old friendship used to be. Thinking about what friends will show up in thirty years to say “Happy Birthday Laura. I love you!” is a futile exercise and again, not based in reality.

I’ve been stressing out, thinking I should send emails, write letters to resurrect friendships past. In comparing myself to my mother’s amazing showing of friends for her 80th birthday video, I lost sight of what’s real. What is real is that friendships come and go but the memories are always there. The experiences I’ve had with past friends don’t disappear just because the friendship has changed. I don’t know who if anyone will show up to wish me well when I’m eighty. Maybe I won’t even live to be 80 so why future trip.

For now, I’m going to be grateful for the friends I’ve had in the past, the friends I have now, and the friends I’ll make in the future.

Grounded by Necessity but Happy to Be Here.

I used to travel a lot, mostly because my partner loves to travel. We always had pretty flexible jobs and so we traveled several times a year. Now we don’t travel at all. We’ve gone nowhere for almost a year and I’m perfectly content. I don’t miss traveling.

I miss my family. I would love to see my parents and my siblings and my nephews and nieces and my favorite aunt, but I don’t miss the act of going to new places. I don’t miss the adventure.

Adventure for me is chaos. It means recalibrating my internal conversation to include an entire cocktail party of foreign stimuli. I’m more comfortable at home where I know my oatmeal is stocked. I have shoes for any occasion. I can get to that book I want to look something up in.

Suleika Jaouad, in her memoir Between Two Kingdoms, shares a theory about travel. “When we travel,” she says, “we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you're actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember.”

For me, the first part is enough. Just thinking about it, planning it is where I love to be. As long as I can stay in my head, focused there, imagining everything that will happen, my heart rate stays steady, my breath is calm and my worry meter is at neutral.

The actual travel is kind of torturous. I worry about the plane being on time, about missing connections. I worry about the hotel having our reservations. I worry about family dynamics. I worry about our house sitting empty while we are away. Though I play a good game and go along with it, the element of stress almost always outweighs the experience of joy for me when I travel.

Being grounded by COVID has given me the opportunity to travel in a fashion that suits me. I have found a way to enter the second phase of the trip without the worry. In the simplicity of my life now, spending the majority of my time at home, being unable to travel, I’ve found ways to go on amazing adventures without all of the stress that usually accompanies my trips.

In the last year, my travels have all happened without leaving my home base. I’ve planned many trips. I’ve plotted out the vacation, fantasized about where I want to go, what I want to do, what I want to see. And then I go on the trip — all from the confines of my safe and cozy home.

At the beginning of COVID, I became obsessed with this plague overtaking the world so I took a course in contact tracing, trying to understand how we’d ultimately contain the virus. I researched, studied, learned, and became invested in traveling more extensively into COVID country. That was my first adventure.

Once my curiosity was piqued, I planned my next trip — to become a contact tracer. The step in planning for this next adventure was to create a resume. After working for myself for the past twenty-five years, this in itself was a major undertaking, one that required lots of research and digging. After planning and preparing enough, I was able to go on the next trip, actually applying for and ultimately getting a job working as a contact tracer.

I’ve had other adventures too. I’m on the 85th day of jumping into the cold lake at the base of the hill my house sits on. I’m shooting for 100 days. I’ve taught myself how to make five different kinds of bread. I’ve ordered, installed, and learned how to maintain a hot tub in our backyard.

The energy that used to go towards adventures in another part of the world has been redirected. That energy of dreaming, planning, and going on the trip all happens at home.

The third part of Jaouad’s theory, remembering the trip, is different from other adventures I’ve taken. I don’t have photographs of the loaves of bread I’ve baked. There are no souvenirs from my job calling people every day to talk about their COVID-19 diagnosis. I don’t have to remember these things because they are in me. The trips are not time-limited. Rather, they are embedded into my being.

I have the knowledge about COVID that I sought to understand. I live the job that I wanted to get every day. I’ve memorized the recipes for those five kinds of bread and I can jump into the lake for 100 days or 1000. I can go into the hot tub anytime I want. It’s all here for me.

I know I’ll travel again. And I will be grateful to be able to move around the world more freely, even with the stress that I know comes with it. I’ll plan different kinds of adventures, go to different parts of the world, and create new memories.

For the time being, though, I am eternally grateful for this adventure-filled life that I have right here at home.

Who Cares About a Little Rain?

Today my friend Kate and I went for a walk. Our plan was to walk to the local coffee shop to get their specialty — Cardamom Rose Lattes. When we started walking it was warm and sunny, surprisingly so for winter in the Pacific Northwest. As we walked, it started to sprinkle a little bit, and then a bit more, and then it started to pour. We were several blocks from the coffee shop and were getting completely drenched. 

Neither of us had an umbrella and there was nowhere to take cover so we kept walking. When we finally reached the coffee shop we were drenched. Because of COVID the coffee shop is just to go so we couldn’t go inside to get warm and dry, but there was an awning and we stood beneath it until it was our turn to go in and get our lattes.

A table outside under the awning was free and we decided I’d stay outside and hold it for us while Kate went in to get our drinks. While she was inside I dried off our chairs with my gloves and sat down, chilled but happy to be out of the rain. 

While Kate was inside the sun came out and it turned into a glorious day. We sat outside and enjoyed our coffees, catching up on each other’s lives. We talked about our parents and our kids and our jobs. We talked about how to manage travel during COVID. We talked about how good our lattes were. But we never did talk about the rain. 

A few months ago Kate and I took our teenage daughters hiking in the snow. When we got to the trailhead we realized that Kate had forgotten the bag with her older daughter’s boots at home. I happened to have an extra pair of shoes that fit one of her daughters well enough and everyone made do. We had a great hike and there was no drama.

Kate is a drama-free friend. It’s not that there’s no drama in her life, or even in our friendship. It’s that she doesn’t add drama. When we were walking in the downpour today she didn’t shriek or run or freak out about getting sopping wet. There was nothing we could do about the rain so we just kept walking. There was no added drama.

The same was true for that day hiking. It could have been a big deal, even a deal-breaker where we aborted the hike, but it wasn’t. She had forgotten the boots, but she didn’t make a scene. She didn’t fall on her sword and say what an idiot she was. She just said sorry to her daughter who had to wear my ugly spare shoes and we got on with it. 

I’m fifty-two years old and I have many friends from different periods of my life. I love and appreciate each of them for their unique personality traits. In this era of social media and added drama — everything is a story or an event — I am especially grateful for this drama-free friendship with Kate. 

With Kate, it is refreshing that life just is what it is. The forgotten boots didn’t end up as a funny photo on Instagram because it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Posting a photo and making it an event would just have been adding drama, taking away from the real point of the day which was to hike in the snow with our kids.

And getting caught in the rain might have been the main topic of conversation during our coffee date or a funny friend photo on Facebook. We could have lamented our cold hands or wet pants but that would have taken away from the really important things we wanted to catch up on today. 

Adding drama to an experience is a distraction from true presence. It is a way to deflect away from what is actually happening. It might feel exciting or invigorating or funny for a moment, but it’s not satisfying on a deeper level. In a friendship or relationship, adding drama is often a way to escape a more authentic or intimate connection.

Life has natural drama without adding any extra. And really, who cares about a little rain?

Preschool for Grown-Ups

Every week I volunteer at the senior center near my house. My partner and sixteen-year-old daughter go too. Sometimes we go together, sometimes on our own. We all love it. Since COVID hit, the center has been closed for day programming and reconfigured to make and deliver hot lunches to homebound seniors. 

The work is incredibly monotonous but surprisingly satisfying. Each day we lay out close to two hundred lunch bags and hot food containers. Then we dollop out the meal for the day. Chicken in one compartment, potatoes in another, broccoli in a third. The meals vary day to day according to what donations have been provided to the center.

The volunteers push the different food items on individual carts, scooping in their particular item until the food container has a full meal. Then we go down the lines of food-filled tables and close the containers. When all of the containers are closed we put the hot food containers into paper bags with a few more goodies such as a piece of fruit or some cookies. Once all of the lunches are bagged we put them in carts and wheel them outside for another set of volunteers to load into a van and deliver door to door. 

From start to finish it takes about three hours to get the meals prepared and set up for the following day. This morning as I was scooping potatoes with another volunteer who was scooping bok choy, we started chatting. I don’t even remember what we were talking about, only that every once in a while one of us chuckled. She was going down one side of the aisles and I was going up the other. We were back to back so weren’t looking at each other.

I thought to myself, this is the perfect kind of socializing for me right now. It’s like parallel play in preschool. We’re both doing our own thing and coming back together periodically to check-in. Around the big room, other people were behaving similarly. 

At the long table where we cut fruit and cake into individual servings and prep ingredients for the main courses, one volunteer was chopping onions at one end of the end of a table and another was putting little pieces of canteloupe into containers for lunch tomorrow at the other. As they worked they’d chat periodically and I could tell that, like us, they were smiling beneath their masks.

We were all happily, independently working but also in community with each other. It’s kind of like pre-school for grown-ups. We all gravitate towards the tasks we are good at and enjoy. Tina seems to always find her way to chopping onions. She likes it. Today when I teased her about it she said, “I like knife work!” 

Troy breaks down all of the boxes. He has a Swiss Army knife on his belt; it’s perfect for him. He breaks them down and neatly lines them up in a corner. I like to put all the different parts of the lunch in the bags and fold them into tidy little bundles. The supervisor likes us to put the bags into groups of ten. I happily count them out and pause at the end to admire the finished product of our group handiwork.

Working at the senior center is one of my favorite activities of the week. I take a break from my workday on Wednesdays and sometimes Fridays and run over there for an extended recess. I realize that this level of socializing — in masks, while doing my own thing, not getting too deep, is exactly what I am capable of right now.

We’ve all been socially isolated for such a long time that regular human interaction can feel strained and awkward. But at the senior center there is no pressure. We all have something to focus on and when we do talk or engage, it is light and easy.

I remember when I used to work at my daughter’s preschool and the kids would often be doing their own things. One playing in the kitchen while close by another built with legos. Maybe the kid playing with legos would bring a creation over and put it in the pot on the stove and the kids would share a moment. They might exchange a few words or laugh at how silly it was to put a dinosaur in the soup. 

In preschool, the kids were never made to sit and have forced conversations. That would never have worked. There would have been four-year-old anarchy. To stay calm, engaged, and productive, they needed to focus on their own interests. 

As we move through life, from preschool to kindergarten, through elementary school, high school and into adulthood, we are socialized to entertain others, not ourselves. That’s where social pressure comes from and that’s why, when we’re out of the habit, we can’t figure out how to socialize.

Working at the senior center is my happy place, my preschool for grown-ups. I’ll definitely keep working there after the pandemic. Who knows, it may become all the socializing I need.