So today is my last match of this junior team tennis season. Actually we are to play two matches at two different locations, to finish the season before the deadline — and I am exhausted. All the text messages arranging practices and setting up matches with the other coaches from the other clubs, and then arranging to have courts reserved at my club on weekends busy with other adult league matches.
It is a lot.
I have to admit there has been a part of it that has been enjoyable. I have had some adorable fourth grade boys on my team. They look at me with wide eyes and call me “Coach.” Their families are great — appreciative and take the tennis seriously. But why am I coaching junior tennis? Well, because if I did not do it, my daughter would not have a team.
This is not the first team I have coached for one of my daughters — not by a long way. And in the fall I refereed 15 soccer games. Why did I do this? When I barely know the rules of soccer and loathed doing it? Because if I did not do it my daughter’s teams would not have enough parent points to make it to the playoffs.The soccer league threatens the parents that if they do not help out enough, kids don’t get to go to the playoffs. They coerce you. I don’t really blame them. Someone has to referree the games if they are to go off.
Well, next year it won’t be me.
I have done PLENTY of heavy lifting to get my kids into sports at those early years when parenting is the most important. My kids by now, I suspect, are athletes for life. They have been doing sports for most of their lives. As the Jesuits used to say, “Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man.”
But I am sick of it. I will drive kids wherever and help when I can, but I myself am stepping back. I am going to outsource it. I am going to pay for professionals to coach (and referee). Pay experienced people who know what they are doing. And like it.
I read an article last week that prompted me to reflect deeply and at length about parenting — “Oh, the Places They’ll Go—If You Let Go.” The author economist Stephen C. Miller made the point that if you are doing so much that are over-committed, exhausted, and therefore short of temper with your kids and spouse — then you are doing more harm than good to the kids in your parenting, even as you think you are helping them by being so involved. Kids, if they had the distance and perspective to see it, would tell you to spend less time being “busy” for them and be in a better mood enjoying the moment with them. That makes a lot of sense to me. I think it is a fine line — on the other hand, you don’t want to be one of those parents who don’t get their kids involved with enriching sports and other extracurricular activities. You want to help your children find their joy in life by exposing them to different life experiences. You hope that by doing so they will fall in love with something and pursue it. Be well rounded and interesting young adults with purpose and direction in their lives. And not be one of those kids sitting around indoors watching Netflix or playing Fortnight all the time. Couch potatoes staring at screens hour after hour. Taking an active, not a passive, role in life.
I don’t know.
But I do think it is time to take a step back. I have written about simplifying my life by getting rid of social media, paying much less attention to politics, and getting closer to what really counts. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I would like to take concrete steps to push away some of the dissonance that surrounds me in my life, although now I am talking beyond youth sports.
I think the first ten years of my parenting was an orgy of literature and sports. Starting back in 2006, it was all new: I was acting on adrenaline. Over many years my daughters and I read all the famous children’s literature night after night — for years. We memorized poems. We made movies together. It was that first full flush of family life with babies and young children; it was all encompassing. I cranked back the emotional expenditures I gave to my job to give my best energies to my daughters. I lost touch with certain friends. My life changed.
And there is really no going back.
But it is time to make an adjustment. My oldest is a almost a teenager now. It it time for me to step back and for her to step forward. It is time for my involvement to lessen and for her to develop her own unique maturing identity. Less me, more her. A small but important change. It is already well underway. Isn’t natural that it should be thus?
Like so many other aspects of life: how to find that happy medium, Aristotle’s Golden Mean.
Maybe it is just the end of the academic and sports calendar for 2018/2019 and so energy and morale is low, but I think this is safe to say: No more youth sports coaching. No more refereeing. No more.
Maybe other parents enjoy it.
Let them do it then.
I could almost not garner enough energy to write the final emails and text messages for the final weekend of junior team tennis, or to attend our final practice. I did them late. I had to make myself do it. I was done.
Enough.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
