Heresy

I have a confession to make. When it comes to football, I play Loose End. I don't get football. And in Husker territory, to admit this is to commit heresy.

Dan and Lucy will be playing their second games of the season today. Both of them are excited. Each of them will be running the ball. Don't ask me what positions they're playing because I can't keep the positions in football straight in my head. Tight End, Full Back, Half Back. What's up with that? Run around, knock people down. Whistle blows. Stand around for twenty minutes. Line up. Run around and knock people down some more. Fascinating.

I feel like I should go watch and cheer my kids on. But the truth is that I'd rather poke my own intestines with a pickle fork than stand around in the rain watching football no matter who is playing. Give me a rink and a hot cup of coffee. Give me a game with forward and defensive lines: a game that's easy to understand. Give me a game where size is good, but speed and skill are all: a game in which the skills required to play are complex. Give me a game that moves.

About the possibility of learning more about football, I feel much as I felt about algebra and French in high school: I prefer not to, as Bartleby the Scrivenor would have said. Now life has given me the assignment. A good parent would learn this even if she doesn't want to. I want to be a good parent, but I HATE FOOTBALL.

Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I dreaded the day when I have would have to take the course that would satisfy the language requirement. Without that course, I'd have no PhD and would have wasted hope, desire, years, and thousands of dollars. I waited and worried until everything else was finished. Finally, I just had to take that course or pack myself in and live with failure. So I enrolled in a French class for graduate students. I was very very pregnant (this seems to be a running theme in my life) and I had to squeeze into the seat. When the baby kicked I worried about it breaking a foot on the desk that pressed into my tummy. I took copious notes; I highlighted every line in the textbook; I made flashcards and carried them with me everywhere. I got a D on the first quiz and further humiliated myself by weeping in class.

I hate failure. So, I made myself keep going. I made more flashcards. I checked out books by Foucault still in their original French and practiced translating. I underlined what I had highlighted in the textbook. I'm not sure how, but I did ultimately pass the course and even did well in it if the grade at the end of the semester suggests success. The larger success was that I learned that I can learn, even when I don't really want to, if I set my mind to it. I haven't used French since taking the course and the truth is that I've forgotten almost all of what I learned.

Except this: when I most dread learning and ask myself why, the answer that returns to me is that I am afraid I can't. I may tell myself I don't like the one who teaches or I may tell myself the subject is boring, but the cold hard reality is fear. I'm afraid of failing.

I think Lucy might be the only girl in Lincoln playing football. She isn't just the only girl on her team. I haven't seen another girl playing on any team. She is the only one so far as I can tell. It took her coaches a couple of weeks to figure out that she is a girl. I don't think Lucy worries about failure too much. She wants to learn football. She wants to play. So she marches up to the practice fields three or four times a week and runs drills and knocks people over and gets knocked over. And she gets back up. What is it, I wonder, that Lucy will learn from me if I refuse to learn football? Will she get somehow that football really is a boy's game after all because even her own mother finds it too hard to grasp? Will she learn that some things are beyond her girl body to learn and she shouldn't even try?

No, I think I have to suck it up and learn a bit about football. I may never use that knowledge again after this season (or after the kids give up the game, which I secretly hope they will sooner rather than later). But for this autumn in addition to learning to skate, which I want to do, I have to learn enough about football to not be a Loose End.