Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Friday Happy Hour Video: From Soccer Dad, on Mother’s Day

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I don’t go in for that “selfless mothers” trope any more than I go for the “teachers are heroes” routine. Pay the teachers and don’t make the mothers hide their light under a bushel, I say.

Yet, I just spent two years writing and one year promoting a book about how Scout’s teacher mom I raised her. And naturally, I called it Soccer Dad.

Yes, I dedicated the book to her, writing an opening note

about my wife, Cristie Bosch, who appears in this book far less frequently than she would if it were titled Soccer Parents. It’s called Soccer Dad because I write best when I speak for myself, and my own experience. My wife, of course, was my full partner in this soccer parenting effort, from getting Scout signed up to her first tyke’s soccer program to counseling Scout throughout her college soccer experience. Ask the bartender at the Ohio University Inn the evening after we dropped Scout off at college: Cristie and I shared the joys and the sorrows equally. We also sometimes differed in our emotional reactions to games and their consequences. But most of that tension was creative, and all of it helped the two of us see this strangely shaped project from another point of view. And another point of view—sometimes any other point of view—is often exactly what a soccer parent needs to maintain perspective in an often-warped world.

Ultimately, how we performed as soccer parents is probably just a measure of how we performed as parents. However well or poorly we did at both, Scout’s mom and I did this together, and I dedicate this book to her.

… and of course I was very happy she got some love by Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan (and Trib photographer John Kim) in a piece on the book launch last month.

But still, it must be said: Cristie Bosch is a hero teacher, and also is a mother who gives more than she gets—as all mother birds do—and as Scout well knows.

Scout, who has flown off with her old teammates on a post-graduation tour of Europe, leaving Dadbird to hold down the Mother’s Day action around here. As usual, I’m scrounging for a last-minute gift.

I was touched by this moment a couple years ago, and I’m touched by it again, as we go into this weekend.

We’ll watch this together Sunday, and there won’t be a dry eye in our house.

What I’m Talking About When I’m Talking About My Book

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A prominent cultural critic of the modern youth sports scene, with whom I have happily become a regular correspondent, lamented to me in a dark winter month that there’s more going on in the world than youth sports—I think Minneapolis ICE shootings were happening at the time—and confessed she sometimes wonders if she ought to be casting her critical gaze upon more vital vistas.

I told her that depends on how she looks at it. Surely there are more important issues than youth sports. But there’s no more important question than raising children in America at a moment when our values seem pretty far afield to what our nation’s founders were thinking about, 250 years ago and what so many of our nation’s heroes have demonstrated ever since. And youth sports is a dramatic and relatively apolitical prism through which to view what we are teaching our kids about life.

I wrote, “You must know that when you talk about youth sports—especially on the spirit level you talk about it—you’re talking about American values, you’re talking about raising kids, you’re talking about love and the meaning of life.” I told my correspondent, who has been participating in this youth sports dialogue much longer than I have, to consider my email a pep talk. “Consider me pepped!” she replied.

Thinking about that exchange now, as I consider how long and how deeply I’ll want to be part of this conversation, assuming Soccer Dad has strong soccer legs, I’m reminded of one of my favorite speeches, an RFK stump speech from his presidential campaign in 1968. As Kennedy’s speechwriter emotionally explains in this classic clip from a podcast, Kennedy was annoyed by LBJ’s frequent citing of the growth in the Gross National Product as evidence of the health of the nation.

Why?

… the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

In the series of conversations about Soccer Dad that are beginning to drop into my calendar over this summer and into the fall and for however long after that, I hope I’m not talking too specifically about travel sports. I hope I’m ultimately talking about the health of our children, the quality of their education and the joy of their play. I hope I’m talking about the strength of our marriages and the integrity of the parents and coaches who people our kids’ childhoods: Our wit and our courage, our wisdom and our learning, our compassion and our devotion—if not to our country, specifically, to one another, at least.

If I can manage to be talking about that, I don’t think I’ll get tired of it anytime soon.

Sales Mode: The End

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I mean, most of the people who I know well enough to really admire or even love, have by now read Soccer Dad and told me with energy and imagination that I wrote a book that is excellent and true and that it moved them, in one way or another. (Maybe some of them haven’t, but what kind of sad creep would focus on that?)

Also, my publisher (the individuals who work there having become part of the above-named group of people I really admire or even love) will soon tell me how many books I’ve sold to date.

Well how could the reality of the latter paragraph, however good it is, begin to compete in any meaningful way with the pure spiritual joy of the former?

There are many more conversations for me to have with other people about all this soccer and parenting stuff. But the happy heavy damage this project did to my soul: It’s all over but the shouting.