The Zen of Football

Okay, so I've now gone to two of Bar Mitzvahzilla's Freshman high school football games. This hasn't been without some great effort. Being a bit football challenged, just showing up took a lot of resolve. I knew that good moms go to their kid's games. So I had to go. That was that. No matter that each of the games have been away games, and I mean away - like the first one thirty miles north and the second one thirty miles south. And no matter that I soon learned a cruel fact of being the visiting team: our stands invariably face west into the setting sun in the 100 degree Arizona heat. But it's football, right? Suffering's part of the game.

So far our team lost one game and won another. Yesterday I found myself actually enjoying myself, sitting next to Husband and jumping up and down with all the other lunatic parents. The only thing I can't stand is Husband's preachy philosophizing about the game: what plays the coach should have played, what plays he might play, all the possibilities in the world, apparently, that have to be muttered into anyone's ear nearby. Considering that and the guy yelling "'Go Birds" intermittently, I think ear plugs could make this really good.

By the end of the two games Husband was muttering about something else: Bar Mitzvahzilla hadn't played. Today after practice he told me he doesn't expect to. Husband hit the roof but I chose to look at it in a more Zen-like manner.

When I was watching the game yesterday I forgot that my son hadn't actually been on the field because it seemed to me that just being a part of a team was something too - that his team playing was him playing. There were about four injuries during the overall game, moments during which both sides got down wordlessly on one knee and they and the spectators all showed respect for the injured player by clapping as he was taken off the field. Where would Bar Mitzvahzilla have gotten that experience, exactly, if not for football? That kind of reverence, of control, of understanding that sometimes you're a part of something bigger than just yourself. These are lessons I didn't learn till I was forty - that sometimes you just have to do a whole bunch of work and never know if there will be a payoff. That the work itself has meaning.

Also, football's brought some unexpected benefits. There's the fact that he got to start high school knowing a lot of kids, and coming from private school that was a big deal. There's the fourteen pounds of pure muscle he's packed on his frame. There's the fact that on game day he gets to strut around campus in his jersey. And, not least of all, he gets to look up from his position - yes, right now his position seems to be standing and not playing - and see two parents and a sister who love him enough to schlep all over the planet to show support for his team and his endeavor. And sweat.

He can also see his mother who's learning, after nearly eighteen years of marriage to a football fanatic, to enjoy the game.

Do you ever feel like you should keep a list of all the things you did to show love to your kids that they don't appreciate? Giving out any sage advice to children lately? Football anyone? 

The Better Version of Me

Bar Mitzvahzilla is in the summer football strength training program for the high school he'll be attending in the fall. We're carpooling with a neighbor whose son is also in the training and this neighbor and I have marvelled in the past at all the things we have in common. We drive the same car. We live in the same neighborhood. We're both from Chicago. Both of our sons were preemies but are fine now. There are other little things.

So the other day was my first time to drive her son home from training. He got in the car, pushed over some of the garbage Daughter had scattered all over the backseat and I say, jovially, I think, "This car is just like your mom's. Just dirtier."

Then Bar Mitzvahzilla looks over at me with a smug look on his face. He says, "Yeah mom, except for her GPS and DVD player."

I look at my empty dash, where the GPS should be and the roof where the DVD player should be and say, "Oh."

"And her car is spotlessly clean." The absolute joy of having a teenager! First he destroys the car by spilling every known object and food in it, and then he insults me for having a messy car. And the joy of needling me!

I look at him.

The neighbor kid, a polite person, unlike my son, pipes up from the back, "My dad can't stand for either of our cars to have a speck of dirt on them so he gets my mom's car cleaned every week."

It's then that I realize that my neighbor is actually living the better version of my life. Her car, while the same model, is highly upgraded and clean. Her husband, a neatnik, keeps it clean. She has a high-powered executive job and I am, um, whatever this is. She has a weekly cleaning lady. I have to trade Bar Mitzvahzilla time on his Xbox to get the toilets cleaned. Final proof: during the break between summer sessions, their family is going to Vancouver, which is in Canada; we're going to Flagstaff. If you don't know where that is, look at a map of the State of Arizona. It's where I-40 and I-17 intersect. Not quite as glamorous.

I drive back into our neighborhood, dejected. As we turn the corners to swing around to their house - a basement model of my one-story with about 500 more square feet - all the garbage in the back of my car shifts and crunches with each turn. There's dead silence except for the movement of the garbage.

I drop him off, make a U-turn and my kids and I make our filthy way home.

Did you ever feel that your life might be mirroring someone else's, but not necessarily in a good way? Do you ever feel like certain components of your life are evidence that your whole life is a wreck - like me and my wreck of a backseat? Ever raised a snotty teenager?

The 'F' Word: Football

Today was the NFL Draft. I mention this not because I care, or for some reason I actually watched it, but because it means that football is coming. It's unavoidable, marching inexorably closer and closer to me with each passing day. The first sign? The NFL Draft. Then sometime in the middle of innocently enjoying the one hundred fifteen degree days of my Arizona summer, a TV set will suddenly flick on and that'll be it. Pre-season looping into the regular season and the endless fascination around here with All Things Football.

Husband has something else to be especially gleeful about this year: high school football. Bar Mitzvahzilla is already training to be a punter for the high school team.

Since somehow, even though he's still in eighth grade, Bar Mitzvahzilla is already in a "kicking clinic," I had to take him shopping to buy some football cleats. Of course, I wanted him to just use his soccer cleats and call it a day, but it turns out that's unthinkable. There are actually very specific, different, cleats for Baseball, Soccer, and Football, and they're differentiated by something elusive in the pointiness and spacing of the spikes. What do I know? I was a hippie in high school.

Here's something else I learned: when the male Sales Associates at Sports Authority found out that Bar Mitzvahzilla would be playing high school football, they all got starry-eyed. You would've thought Bar Mitzvahzilla was Joe Montana. Here's my son, the computer game addict, the ten-year-old in a teenager's body, being fawned over by these grown men. My son as an object of adoration, and for something he hasn't even done yet. And for something that has a bit more to do with brawn than brains. The hippie inside me cringed.

So there will be no peace for me. Football on TV day and night and actual live football games requiring the attendance of a real flesh and blood mother - an enthusiastic mother - on the other days.

How's your sports enthusiasm? Do you watch the NFL Draft? Have you ever watched your child get admired for something and realized how completely separate he/she is from you as they're growing up?  What was your "label" in high school?

My Seventeenth Anniversary Gift: The Super Bowl

There was this thing just nagging at my brain, something I just couldn't figure out. What was it that was bugging me? I knew it was something important.

There was Husband's hubub - his fury of preparation for the Super Bowl this weekend. How he's been working a lot of weekends in preparation for absolutely, positively having this Sunday off. There's been the usual countdown to the game, the other teams falling away, the kids and him enrapt in each game in our family room while I write in my office.

But something was bugging me. Then I realized what it was: our seventeenth wedding anniversary falls on SuperBowl Sunday.

Being married to whom I am married to, was there even a chance in the world that we were going to go out on Sunday? All of his machinations, all the scheduling and rescheduling, the elaborate dancing about on the calendar - had he even noticed? How big of a shrew would I be exactly to bring this up?

This is what I remember. It was 1992. Husband and I were Very Seriously dating. We were actually in love, which was pretty amazing because I had plunged off the cliff of leaving my first marriage in 1989 not knowing if anyone would ever love me again except for my ex-husband who assured me, as I was leaving, that no one ever would. And then, in 1991, I met Husband, and, by 1992, love indeed. We went shopping for rings. I even kind of designed my ring. Then he went down there and picked up the ring. And then? Nothing happened.

I don't know what he was waiting for. The ring was in the house, I was in the house, but the ring was not on my finger.

Finally, I just picked up the phone and scheduled a fancy dinner out for us at a nice restaurant in North Scottsdale. That seemed to jog his brain into some activity. He brought along the ring and proposed. If I had left it completely up to him, I'm sure seventeen years later I'd still be sitting on his ratty old couch in his ratty old house in Tempe, rolling my eyes and waiting to get that ring because Husband can't actually coordinate anything. Except, apparently, for the Super Bowl. That he can schedule.

So I'm going to have mercy on him. I'll plan our dinner out - on Saturday night, the day before our anniversary. And then on Sunday, my gift to him:  I will sit down like a proper wife and I will stay there, next to him, glued to my seat, watching the Super Bowl.

Any excruciating proposal or engagement stories? Any conflicting special days?

The TV Looks Smashing

Okay, I went to the football game on Sunday. I went, I sat, I ate, I was enthused, I was crestfallen, I stayed till the bitter end.

And I thought, Whew, that wasn't so bad. I'm glad I got that out of the way. Now football is over.

But guess what? Football, apparently is never going to end. There is never enough football.

Before we left for the game, the TV was on in our house - a must-see game. Okay, fine. But certainly once we were done being at the actual game, that would be enough, right?

Well, apparently I don't read minds very well. We came home, on went the TV. There was a Bowl game on - the Soup Bowl, I think. The next day, another Bowl game. And every single day this week, Bowl after Bowl after Bowl. Today is Wednesday. There is a Bowl on TV. Who ever heard of football on a Wednesday?

Normally Husband is such a TV snob that, except for football, he can't stand to have the TV on. The last series we actually followed together and watched on an ongoing basis was Seinfeld. It was a long, long time ago. Because of his TV snobbery, I've missed every major TV show of the last ten years. But for football, he makes an exception.

"Football is real," he tells me. "It's not a bunch of actors spouting lines. This is real drama. You don't know the outcome. It's exciting, things change from minute to minute."

I look at the TV. I see a bunch of top-heavy guys crunching against each other to make their way across a big field of grass.

"Shakespeare is drama," I say. "Not football."

He says, "Anyway, the season's over."

I perk up. "Really?"

"Tomorrow night's the last Bowl game."

"Is that it, then, till the Superbowl?" I am chortling with glee.

"Well, that's it for college football."

Just as I'm about to do a little dance, he continues. "But there are NFL Playoff games every Saturday and Sunday starting this weekend till the SuperBowl."

"Oh."

I glare at him; go back to my office.

Cardinal Sin

Husband has been off from work since December 24th and that should mean a lot of things: togetherness, bliss, quiet time, romance. Of course, it hasn't.  Instead it's meant this one thing instead:  football.  My nemesis.

Sometimes, in moments of despair, I think, How did this happen to me? How did I end up married to someone whose idea of a really fun, relaxing day is watching football? After all, I'm one of seven sisters, for goodness sakes. That meant no brothers watching football in the house growing up. My father was an immigrant from Poland - that certainly meant no football. He could never understand the importance of American sports - compared to life and death in Siberia during the war? Bah! And because he died right before I turned fifteen, I then lived in an all-female household. No football at all. My whole life was somehow football-free, safely tucked away from the misery of listening to screaming fans on football fields yelling and drinking and eating and throwing punches over the outcomes of games.

Then I married Husband almost seventeen years ago.  Well, actually, I started dating Husband nineteen years ago.  Two years of all the warning signs.  Two years of hugging him and having him position me just so - so he could see the TV with the football game on over my shoulder or over the top of my head. Two years of primitive satellite dishes already beaming football games from all corners of the globe into whatever house we were living in until we moved into this one and a TV that now has about two hundred channels.

And now there's Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter.  Those traitors.  Husband has brainwashed them into loving football. He has taught them all the most minute play information, the philosophical differences between a first down and a fourth down and what you'd want to try for and what you wouldn't if, let's say, you weighed about 300 pounds and wore tight knickers each day to work. And Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter (even my daughter - who should rightfully be shopping with her mom at the mall) sit there glued to the set, analyzing each game with Husband, fascinated by who will make it into the play offs by wins and who will make it by being the wild card.

And to make it much, much worse, Husband has bought tickets to the Cardinals/Green Bay game here in Phoenix this Sunday and nothing, but nothing, will save me from my fate. I have to go. 2:15 kickoff on January 3rd. I can't bring a book and I can't bring my laptop. Bar Mitzvahzilla wants me to wear a cheesehead and Daughter wants me to wear a Cardinal jersey. They should be glad if I get in the car without first being tranquilized.

But here's what I'm going to do: breath deeply, smile happily, know that this should absolutely be the last game I have to go to in my lifetime (I'm averaging one every thirty years), be a good mom/fan/wife for four interminable hours. And then? Never again.

Footballed

My husband is from Wisconsin. This means only one thing: that the Green Bay Packers are an essential part of his existence. Even though he moved to Arizona in 1978. He's told me the story of the Packers many times, how they're a scrappy team, well-loved and cared-for by the town of Green Bay, and how there's a loyalty there that isn't found in other NFL franchises. And I get it, because he's told me this so many times, but I can't help it - when he talks football in any way, my eyes glaze over and I start backing out of the room.

Despite all the years I've spent trying to be a sterling example to my children of a football-despising, yet interesting and involved mother, my children have been converted over to the religion of football and Green Bay Packers mania by my husband. They love it. They even watch it on purpose when he's not home.

Just my luck, the Green Bay Packers will be playing the Cardinals right here in Arizona in January and my husband has the opportunity to buy four tickets to the game. He can't buy three, for just him and the kids. It's a set of four and guess who's the fourth?

When I was a college freshman at the University of Arizona, since I didn't know any better, I thought I thought that's what you did in college: go to the games. So for my first one, I shlepped over to the stadium with my dorm friends, climbed up about a thousand sticky steps to get to a tiny, hard plastic chair with people breathing down my neck behind me, and then watched the game. After a short period of time, I realized that the students sitting above me celebrated successful plays by dumping their beer on the crowd below. I sat there as long as I could take it: my feet stuck to the bleacher, wedged in a seat, with beer raining down on me.

When I got back to my dorm room I made a vow - much like the ones my Holocaust Survivor relatives always made around me my whole life - I said, "Never Again!" For the rest of my college career, I was apparently the only person on campus who didn't go to the games. The dorm would empty out, the campus end up desolate like a ghost town, and I would sit peacefully in my room, the roar from the stadium coming in my window.

Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter give me baleful glances. They want me to come. It's a family thing. Of course, they can't go unless I fill that fourth seat. I hem and haw but somehow I know that in January I'll be wedged in a hard plastic stadium seat, my eyes glazed over, my feet stuck to the concrete, with beer raining down on my head.