Confessions of a Newtown Sports Parent

Every fall weekend, we always seemed to be rushing between events — soccer and baseball, cheer and soccer, softball and cheer, football and soccer. Throw in the midweek practices and the schedule becomes cumbersome, and you really start feeling the weight of it.

The kids rarely complain – the parents do that all on their own.

That’s usually the way it is. As long as the kids like it, they don’t care. Take them somewhere they don’t want to be and they’re a nightmare – but as long as it involves friends and having fun — smooth as silk.

As usual, it’s WE who are the problem.

We sign our kids up for all these things, and then we look at the calendar and groan. We rummage through their closets for another clean pair of socks, and we groan. We fold our tired bones back into the car for the umpteenth time, and we groan. We thrash from field A to field B, and we groan.

The collective groaning from all these parents driving all these kids to all these activities can be heard far and wide – listen closely - despite the relatively low decibel level, the cumulative impact of all that groaning will flat-out deafen you.

But those little buggers in the back seat, they're not groaning. Back there, if they’re really into it, they’re loving life. For them, it’s just another stop on the fun train. It’s we parents pumping out all the negativity.  And what's ironic is that we’re likely the ones that pushed them into doing all this stuff in the first place.

When my son played both football and soccer in 5th grade, he was always tired after the rigors of football practice, and the practices were on different days, so he considered soccer practice his “easy fun time.”  And on game days, since he never played much in the football game, when he played soccer he was in “football shape,” and ran rings around the other kids who were practicing/playing just one day a week.

It was fun to watch.

But the schedule drove us crazy, of course. Football three nights a week, soccer one night, two games on Saturday — and that was just him. Our daughter was doing soccer and cheer as well, and THAT meant four nights a week getting HER where she needed to go and two places on the weekend.

And that wasn’t fun.

There is always that shared moment when two parents are rushing two kids from one field to the next, and their eyes lock for a millisecond, two cars skidding through the same lot in opposite directions as kids switch jerseys. On the surface, the look says “These kids are killing us, right?”

But deep down, you know the truth.

The truth is that what we all share in that tiny little moment of subconcious clarity is that “this really stinks right now because we don’t have a second to ourselves and these kids don’t act like they appreciate anything we do for them but it’s really our fault for allowing them to do too much stuff anyway but soon they will be gone and we will pine for the days when our lives were this hectic and they truly needed us.”

But for now, it’s safer – and less sad – to just look at each other.  And groan.