Soccer Hearth
The Hearth
Essay

The Things We Cannot See

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SoccerHearth Dad · Published · 8 min read
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A young soccer player looks through a car window toward a soccer dome at sunset, with her ball and bag beside her.
Most of youth soccer happens behind a door. In winter, it is often a heavy door, attached to a soccer dome or a school gym. A child climbs out of the back seat, shoulders a bag that seems larger than she is, and heads toward it. Halfway there, she turns, or doesn’t. The door opens, lets out a burst of warm air and whistles, and closes again. Some parents go inside to watch. Others wait in the parking lot, drive to a nearby coffee shop, or run an errand before returning. In a crowded winter dome, there is not always room for everyone along the sideline. Even when we can watch, we see only part of what is happening. For the next ninety minutes, an important part of our child’s soccer life unfolds out of our sight. The Empty Spaces Consider an ordinary competitive season: a few practices a week, a game on the weekend. Even a parent who watches every available practice and never misses a match sees only part of the hours a child spends learning the game. And the hours are the easy part. We do not see the coach's reasoning when the lineup is set. We do not hear what the center back said to our daughter after she lost the ball in the fortieth minute. We miss the moment in Tuesday's drill when something finally clicked. Most of all, we cannot see inside the child herself: what she is afraid of, what she is proud of, what she has quietly decided about whether she belongs. What we do see comes from the sideline, at a distance. A missed tackle. Eleven minutes on the field instead of thirty. A coach who seemed to say something sharp, though from forty yards away it is hard to be sure. From these fragments, we build a whole picture. The trouble is not that the picture is incomplete. Every picture of another person is incomplete. The trouble is what the mind tends to put in the empty spaces. Researchers at University College London once asked people to play a computer game in which some rocks hid snakes, and a snake meant a mild electric shock. Their stress did not simply follow the shocks. It was closely tied to uncertainty about whether a shock was coming. Uncertainty is not a neutral blank. The mind experiences it as weather. Anyone who has refreshed an inbox at eleven at night, two days after tryouts, knows this weather. Rejection, if it comes, is painful. Waiting is a different kind of hard. It is the waiting that fills the house. When we cannot see, we do not stop looking. We start guessing. And our guesses are not always generous. A child who comes home quiet must be unhappy, or perhaps something happened at practice. A coach who spends more time working with another player must see something in her that he does not see in our daughter. A few minutes on the bench become a sign that she is falling behind. Sometimes our concerns are justified. Sometimes she is simply eleven, tired, and would like a sandwich. The difficulty is that we cannot always tell the difference. The Question Behind the Question Here is the part that took me longer to notice. When we cannot see the field, we look for another window. And the nearest window, almost always, is our child. "How was practice?" "Fine." “Just fine? Did you scrimmage? What worked? What do you need to improve? Did the coach talk about last weekend’s tournament?” “No.” “Nothing about the games?” “No.” Each question sounds reasonable. Together, they can turn a ten-minute drive into an interview. The child, who went to practice to play soccer, finds that she has also been appointed the family’s correspondent from a place her parents cannot always see. I recognize myself in those questions more than I would like to admit. I have asked too many of them, sometimes when my daughter had barely settled into the car. I wanted to understand her practice, but I was also trying to settle my own worries. We can spend an entire drive trying to understand our children without noticing that they may be spending the same drive trying to understand us. Children notice our faces. They may learn which answers make the car go quiet and which make it warm again. A child may begin answering the question behind the question: not What happened? but Are we all right? She may leave out the bad touch or say “fine” because it is the answer that lets everyone breathe. Our uncertainty has not disappeared. It has crossed the front seat. That is the quiet transfer: a small responsibility handed over without anyone noticing. Keep the adults calm. No parent sets out to give a child that job. But worry sometimes finds its way there. When it does, what matters is that we can take it back. It may be as simple as saying the next day, “I asked too many questions yesterday. I was worried, and I let that worry become yours.” One hard drive home does not have to define the next one. A research team at the University of Toronto asked young athletes, aged eleven to sixteen, and their parents about the car ride home. In discussing the research, the lead researcher described the car as a kind of private space. Some athletes, she said, put in headphones and looked out the window. A few admitted to pretending to fall asleep. She interpreted these responses as attempts to steer the conversation. There is gentle comedy in this, if we let ourselves see it. The parent leans forward with questions. The child leans back against the window, eyes closed, breathing a little too evenly. Both are trying to manage something they cannot see clearly. But the headphones are worth taking seriously. They may be the child doing her own work. She has her own version of practice, and it may not match ours. The eleven minutes that kept us up may have seemed fair to her; she knows who has been at every training. The sharp word from the coach may have been a joke we could not hear. Or it may have stung, and she wants a night, or a few kicks against the garage door, before she says so. As children grow, they may tell us less. That is not always distance. Sometimes it is simply a person becoming her own. What We Carry Home None of this means a parent should stop paying attention. Some things deserve our concern. The difference is not necessarily how strongly we feel, but what the feeling rests on. Concern may begin with something we saw or heard: a child who no longer wants to go, a coach whose sharpness shows up every week, a sore knee that has not gone away. Sometimes one serious incident is enough. Concern can lead us to listen carefully, protect our child, or speak with another adult. Speculation, by contrast, can start from a fragment and grow in the dark. It is in a hurry, and it wants the child to settle it before we reach the driveway. It may help to sort the two, even silently. What did I actually see? What am I guessing? The first list is often short. The second can be long, and darker. Noticing the difference does not make fear go away. Understanding a fear and no longer feeling it are not the same thing, as anyone who has lain awake knowing perfectly well that the noise downstairs is the furnace understands. But noticing gives us a choice about what to say in the car, and what to carry ourselves or share with another adult who can help. At the end of a game, every family leaves the field with something: folding chairs, the cooler, half-eaten orange slices nobody wants. We also leave with a handful of moments. A good pass. A bad touch. A look on the coach's face. And, if we are not careful, the story we invented to fill the space between them. The moments are worth carrying. They happened. The invented story is usually heavier and less accurate, and it has a way of ending up in the child's bag instead of ours. The Years We Cannot Read Yet There is one more thing we cannot see, and it is the largest: the future. A parent watching a nine-year-old cannot know whether this season is a beginning, a detour, or the last year before she discovers she would rather swim. A tree, as it happens, has the same problem. Each year a tree adds a ring of new wood. In favorable years the ring may be wide. In years of drought, or when neighboring trees crowd out the light, it may be narrow. Nobody standing beside the tree can see the ring forming. It becomes visible later, when the years can be read together. A narrow ring is not a secret strength, and it is not a failure. It records a difficult year in a tree that kept growing a little through it. What the tree becomes depends on all its years together, and on the soil and light around it. Kierkegaard wrote in his journal in 1843 that life must be understood backward, though it must be lived forward. Youth soccer is lived forward, one season at a time. Understanding, if it comes, may arrive years later. And when it does, it will be hers to tell, not ours. None of this makes waiting easy. The inbox will still be refreshed. The door will still close. But perhaps the door is not only a barrier. It is also the place where the child does something without us: tries, fails, recovers, and makes a small decision of her own that nobody will ever report. Much of what we fear happens where we cannot see. So does much of what we hope for. The door opens. She walks out, bag over one shoulder, scanning the lot for the car. We do not yet know what she is carrying. That is all right. We can let her decide what to bring.

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