The toughest thing about being a parent is having to sit back and watch as your kids go through hell. Of course, hell is relative and what feels awful to them may seem meaningless to you. I’m in a situation where our horrors align. My kid is going through a terrible moment in time and I am fairly certain that all I can do is listen.
I have very vivid memories of the first few weeks at Iowa State. To begin, I was a walk-on football player. That meant I was invited to try out by the coaches but I wasn’t known to anyone who was playing and didn’t have a scholarship, so I wasn’t living with anyone from the team. Try to imagine walking into the gym for initial evaluations. Everyone is doing their 40yd sprints and shuttles, etc. and here I am, this gangly black kid in the heart of white-ass Iowa alone and even more alone because the handful of people who look like me and want what I want are treating me like I am not even there. It got worse when I showed some speed, because then I was competition. People had to stop and think, ‘is he trying to take my spot?’ I was, actually. I wasn’t trying to do it maliciously, because that isn’t who I am (outside of video games) but I did want a chance to play and I hoped to start one day. So, to quote Imagine Dragons, “Uh oh, the misery. Everybody wants to be my enemy.”
My kid is a better player than I was. He has more raw athletic talent and more drive and determination. He earned a varsity spot as a 14 yr old sophomore. That means everything I talked about in the paragraph above is magnified. Except in my story we had leadership that worked hard to mold us into a family (oh, and I caved under the pressure and quit, btw). In his story he doesn’t have that. All he has is a room filled with hateful boys who don’t appreciate anyone or anything but themselves and cannot accept that he is ahead of them. Oh, and in the absence of a head coach they’ve decided to get downright violent about it.
So, I have a hard time standing idle the more I learn about what is going on.