Pride and Impatience

With games at 10:15a and 2:00p today, the Boy’s soccer season officially ended. Sweet Fucking Mother of Christ, thank you from the bottom of my Tabasco®-warmed heart.

I’ve never been a soccer fan per se. I just don’t get it. Just as some others don’t get baseball or boxing (heathens all of them). But I found out some time ago that the local league allowed/encouraged three-year-old kids to play. I did the math, sized up the Boy, fudged some numbers in my checkbook, and signed him up. It seemed a right smart move all those months ago. Organized sports would allow Emerson to experience a sense of camaraderie, learn a different type of discipline (one that comes from having teammates depend upon you and vice versa), assist in lessening the deficit in his hand-eye coordination bank. Etcetera, etcetera. Soccer was to be the perfect introduction of my son to the world of competitive sports.

I was wrong. And not just a little wrong. But the big, hangover kind of wrong where you realize too late that five Woodfords on top of several draughts on top of an empty stomach was simply not a good idea.

Emerson took to soccer in much the same manner I might take to clogging or celestial navigation. It was a poor fit from the beginning. But where he is concerned, I have always been optimistic. Positive. And I presumed he would grow to like the sport, the commingling with new kids, the eager reinforcement of ideals and discipline from his coaches.

This did not transpire.

There are no words or actions that could possibly convey the love I have for the Boy. Simply put, he is the light by which I look upon the world. So the frustration—dare I say, the anger—I felt each week as I stood, paced, held my head in my hands, and seethed on the sidelines as seven young boys played their collective asses off at the game of soccer while my Boy either stood at the opposite end of the field making faces, playing in the dirt, playing inside the opponents’ goal, sitting down, standing on his head with his skinny little ass swaying in the air, or pulling his shorts up as high as they could go was, if not foreign, then hypocritical. To calm down I reminded myself that he is but three years old. But you see, every other kid on that field was also three years old and they somehow managed to recognize the game, kick the ball, work together, and score goals—every single week without the help of Emerson who actually saw substantial playing time.

The most frustrating thing for me was to watch him run around on the field acting retarded. I mean really retarded. Had any mental health institution representatives been on hand, they would have sheepishly turned away, being forced to acknowledge, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think there is anything we can do for him. Good luck, Mr. Ryan.” The clincher is that there is an honest to goodness retarded kid on his team (if not retarded, then very, very “Rain Man-ish”—only without the personality). This kid ran circles around Emerson. He would hang tough, score a goal, and kind of stand there rocking back and forth looking far superior to my little monkey who would be lying down making dirt angels at the other end of the field. I could almost hear the voices in his head saying, “Yeeeah…Yeeeah…definitely better than Emerson…Yeeeah…” But three-year-olds are a forgiving clan. They operate largely on autopilot. So my kid is not a soccer player. There are worse things.

I think what bothered me more than Em’s inability to take part in the game(s) was my inability to be okay with it. It is such a small thing, isn’t it? Why would I expend that rare commodity of energy fretting it? But we are who we are and we do what we do. And we try to figure it out as we move along.

My Boy is no soccer player. The fact is indisputable. But you know what—he stuck with it. He went to practice each week. He showed up (at least physically) to each game. He went out there and he had fun in his own unique Emerson way. He did all I will ever ask of him which is to march to the clichéd beat of his own drum. I most certainly respect that. And I recognize that any problems I have with his level of participation are my own. To be sure, I have my expectations of him. And in agreeing to go out onto that field when he clearly did not want to and to make any attempt to kick the ball when it came near him, he satisfied those expectations. A remarkable feat for such a young boy.

There was only one failure this soccer season and that failure was mine. My failure was in the ever so slight embarrassment I felt as he stood half a field away from his teammates doing pirouettes, playing in the dirt, making silly faces at the heavens. And while I never lost my enthusiasm or ability to encourage, I probably didn’t praise him as much as I could have. And I’ll likely regret that for a while. For he sweated and he ran and he tried. I know grown men who have yet to do that. At three years, he has an enviable leg up on the elder population.

It is 1:00 in the morning. The Boy is sleeping. He is sweaty as he most always is in sleep. And he is nothing shy of perfect. I was impatient with him today, a product largely of my own fatigue. But just before he finally gave way to sleep he looked at me after story time, and a sip of juice, and all other stall tactics and whispered, “Daddy, I love you so much.”

And I you, Boy.