“Can you please come to my game.”
“If you want to.”
The messages are my son.
It’s four o’clock and his game is at five. The game is more than an hour away.
His sister plays on the girl’s middle school team. When he is away, she is at home.
We discussed and agreed at the start of the season that mom and I would go to the home games.
Keep it simple. Keep it fair.
But he asked.
How many more games will he play? How many more chances will I have to see? How many more times will he ask and want me there? How might all of these change—if I don’t go?
I know we agreed as a family, when both teams were playing, to only go to home games; but there are times self-made rules need broken. We don’t need a reason. To know, and when, is enough without explained reason or defining of why.
I gather my things. I go.
It’s a two lane and no shoulder country wind through darkness and falling snow. I’ll be lucky to make it by half.
I am lucky with twenty-six seconds to spare.
It’s a B-team middle school game in which he’ll likely play for only a few minutes.
None of that’s the point: he is.
Seventh grade has been a growing year: for live more than anything—challenges, realizations, disappointments, admitted fears.
Through all of these, we speak trying to make lesson and learn from the trials. But words and acts are different things, and some lessons need lived in order to be known.
This is one.
Sometimes, certain moments throughout every age of life, what we most need is to know someone is there for us, standing and rooting in our corner, when it seems no one else notices.
Words and acts are different things.
I go. I am there—for him.
That’s what fathers do.
