by Dawn Davies
I wondered how this would end. Would the vet give Moose a shot that made him all better? Would she embrace him, unchanged? What would be the point of taking him back to her? To surrender him? To get more meds so we could continue to slap coats of paint over the rusted depths of his disabilities?
The traffic on the way to Kendall was what you would expect it to be: similar to battling your way down a long, hot, overcrowded road to hell. On any given day, I would rather rub honey on my bum and sit in a red ant pile than point my car toward Kendall, Florida, but here we were, and the traffic had slowed. Outside, car engines groaned, and tires gobbled the road with a hollow, feverish, unhealthy hum, and all I could feel was ten kinds of wrong. Moose lay panting in the back, the wound in his side oozing. He wouldn’t look at me.
As I drove closer to our exit, I realized that nothing good would come of confronting a woman who dumped her helpless dog and stopped taking my calls. Moose would be euthanized, despite our best efforts. The weight of what I was driving to do pressed on me until I screamed and pounded the steering wheel. Around me in other cars people wore looks of sour discontent as they drove, unhappiness wafting off them like the migraine waves of heat coming off the asphalt. No one had seen my tantrum, or if they had, they hadn’t cared. The traffic slowed to a crawl and my mind wandered.
I would have to tell the children, I knew, though it would break their hearts. Children can hold hope for a long time without it burning their hands, far longer than adults can, which is what allows them to complete the act of growing up in a world where people lie, where people let you down all the time, a world where love isn’t always enough, a world where, sometimes, you have to give up on someone else in order to save yourself. Yet, losing this kind of hope can break a child’s heart. This is why parents lie to their kids. Because they aren’t ready to see them lose hope. I understood this, which is why I decided I would lie to my children about Moose. I would lie the consummate dog-death lie that parents all over the world use: Moose had found a home on a farm. Perhaps a farm with deaf owners who were also certified dog trainers. This was an excusable lie, a lie without malice, a lie I would like to believe, a hope I would like to hold, for the truth was breaking my heart, too.
I saw an exit I had never noticed, and wanted to take it, this exit I dreamed would turn into an empty road, a country road, one that would lie protected from the sun by a curved canopy of bending trees, trees that don’t grow in Miami, soft sunlight dappling the dash, the car weightless on the gravelly dirt, the sound of the tires fading into a peaceful hum.
We would drive west, this sick dog and I, toward the Everglades, a magical part of Florida where the air felt new, and zummed with ozone and post-rain plant juices, mosses, and paisley-shaped, snake-made eddies, swirling quietly in watered curves, the slicing of wind in the grass, where the shaded undersides of things took away your heat, put out your fire.
I no longer heard the car engine, or the radio, which I had played to drown out the whimpering of the dog and the sniffling wrench of my own tears. It was silent. Deaf-silent, as I thought about flying, without even the whisk of the wind in our ears, to a farmhouse under a live oak, with a wide porch and acres to roam, where a gentle man with the scent of meat and egg rubbed into his hands would meet us on the steps and cup Moose under his hard, white-hot jaw and cool him into deep belly breaths, and hold him in his arms until he slept, and when he awakened, his nerves would be untroubled and still, and he would be loved by a soft-skinned toddler, and stand nose to nose with her, kissing slices of pepperoni from her pursed, pillowed lips, until the cries of delight from long-legged, slow-moving birds would call him to the yard, where a puddle of water and a muddy hole awaited him, and he would dig and splash and play, and he would hear the breath of his own lungs fill his ears, and when he barked, he would hear his own joy.
And I told myself I was driving him to this place, told myself that Moose was going to a farm, he was going to a farm, the best farm there was, praying to hold that hope in my hands for as long as I could stand it, though it burned me through and through.
SOCCER MOM
There’s that embarrassing mom thing where, if you’re like me, and you’re at a soccer game watching your children play in, say, a tournament, and your soft, delicious little child, the one who still sleeps at night with a stuffed horse, is making a drive toward the ball, and she reaches it, pulling ahead of several lesser children, feigning out a slow-thinking defender, putting out an arm to steady herself against the face of said slow thinker, squaring up to shoot, and you are watching her from the sidelines, wearing shorts short enough to allow you to survive the oppressive heat yet long enough to cover the ugly purple thigh veins your pregnancies gave you, pacing and tripping over a cooler full of Capri Suns and orange wedges, and at the same moment your child is about to make contact with the ball, your own foot reaches out and kicks the air like a marionette. You cannot help it any more than you can help gagging the first time your baby has diarrhea, or yelling “fuck” in front of your preschooler when you grate a hunk of knuckle skin into the pile of Monterey Jack cheese on taco night.
Then there’s that thing where, if you’re like me, after you’ve watched a number of children play soccer for a number of years, and although you have never once played soccer yourself, you begin to believe you have developed a nearly psychic coaching gift, and in a series of brilliant illuminations of strategy that assert themselves only after you shingle your hair into the bobbed, highlighted helmet the other soccer moms are wearing, you realize you know exactly who needs to come out and who needs to go in in a given game to win it, and you see your husband on the other side of the field, coaching the game, and you pull out your cell phone and dial him up. You watch him reach into his pocket, check to see who is calling, see that it is you, and decline the call. You call him again.
“What?” he says. You can hear him scream this from the other side of the field a portion of a second after it comes through the phone.
“Pull Kristi out. Put Maya in goal. Move Alexis to midfield.”
“Right,” your husband says, and he hangs up. He makes no substitutions and ignores your frantic waves, then as your daughter makes another run for the ball, you kick your foot in the air again, this time screaming, “Shoot it!” as if your telling your child to shoot the ball is what will make her do it, as if she, who has played soccer for five years, would never think of this on her own when running up on the goal. There is another battle for the ball and you involuntarily kick the air a third time, as if you are a frog on a dissection table in Bologna and Luigi Galvani is electrifying your muscles with a charged scalpel. You can’t stop yourself from looking like a sideline fool. You cannot not kick. It’s a thing soccer moms do, and nearly against your will, you have become one.
When is it you realize you have allowed your children’s accomplishments to begin to replace everything you have ever done? Oh, it’s now. It’s right here on the sidelines of this under-watered, crispy field in the sports complex designed with the maximum legal square feet of asphalt parking lot and minimum legal number of trees. It reaches nearly one hundred degrees here in peak sun, and your naked neck broils like a steak while you watch twenty-two children burn a collective 6,600 calories. You haven’t seen the inside of a gym in three years because you have been too busy washing sports uniforms and returning them to the proper bedrooms, and checking gear bags, and feeding your progeny supper at four in the afternoon in time to get them to their various practices, which you must stay and watch, because that’s what the good soccer moms do. You must appear to be a good soccer mom, even though you are barely holding it together, and you just want to go home and take a nap and pick the kids up after practice is over. But the good soccer moms will notice if you don’t stay and they will judge you for it. You know this because you yourself judge the “bad” moms who drop their children off, firing bitter darts of jealousy from your eyes as they drive away to meet a friend for coffee, or grab a massage while th
ey know their child is safe at practice. Even though they tell everyone they have to go “pick up a prescription,” or “take another child to math enrichment,” you know and you judge them.
Your soccer mom status is cemented by a few other behaviors. First, there is the belief that your daughter is an irreplaceable anchor—the star, if you will, even if only in your own eyes—on any given team. Or your son is the star. Or your stepson is. Or it’s not soccer, but lacrosse, or it’s not lacrosse, but football, or basketball or baseball or softball or dance, and at any given moment, two or three or four of your kids play on several different sports teams and you spend your afternoons, evenings, and weekends coordinating practice times and carpools with other mothers whose children are not as good as yours, mothers you would ordinarily have no interest in spending time with, though it’s not because their children are boring or average, it’s because their mothers talk too much. You drive to windswept fields teeming with hundreds of other children, and plunk your ass in a folding chair while your children exercise, watching them with the same obsessive interest slower members of society have in reality TV shows. Sometimes you bring snacks. For yourself.
Next is the unhealthy obsession with outfitting your children like professional athletes. Sporty kids need gear, so if you are a regular person like me, you fork over whatever you can swing, handing down cleats and outgrown gloves and gear bags to your smaller children in the gear queue, occasionally shopping at Play It Again Sports in a neighboring town where no one you know will see you buying used sports equipment. You forgo new clothes for yourself, or luxuries of any sort, in order for these children to have the extra-thick shin guards, or properly fitting Under Armour, even though you remember playing childhood softball and basketball in sneakers from Kmart and cheap, silk-screened team T-shirts without any ill effects, except for the fact that you did not get a college sports scholarship. You begin to believe that your children need this gear in order to have the athletic opportunity they deserve. If you are rich or a sociopath who cares not one whit about running up the credit card bills, you buy the best of everything you can find at Dick’s or Soccer Max, thinking, almost against your will, that a $160 shell-out in football cleats for a nine-year-old now might translate into a professional football career that will allow your little QB to one day buy you an upscale house and a silver Escalade. As if a pair of cleats will be the thing that turns your child into a winner.
Then there is the schedule juggling. If you are at all like me, after you recover from the cost of the gear, and the league entrance fees, insurance fees, uniform fees, and conditioning coach fees, and your children are safely ensconced on their various teams, you use the last of your money to purchase a master organizer they sell for moms who are trying to get a handle on a schedule every bit as complicated as a teaching hospital’s surgical schedule, or the daily flight schedule managed from an air traffic control tower of an international airport. You spread out all the practice times and game times for the Bombers, the Eagles, the Blazers, the Knights, and the Intimidators on the kitchen table and begin to input data into the organizer, carefully orchestrating who has to be where when, and what time dinner needs to be on the table on various nights, and which sports events coordinate with school events that can’t be missed. If you are lucky, your child will not be on both the school team and the travel team of the same sport in a season, as that is a scheduling state so stressful that it has been known to cause mothers to develop trichotillomania. You can easily spot these poor women: They are the ones quietly plucking out their own eyebrows or eyelashes at red lights or in sports complex parking lots. They look pinched and backed up, because they have had to train their bowels to follow a certain schedule, as they have no time of their own to take a dump from seven A.M. until midnight on weekdays or at any time during the weekend, especially if they still have preschoolers at home.
This schedule reckoning takes a spreadsheet and enough wheedling and favor-trading with other carpooling moms to where the high-stakes détentes you manage to sustain are of the kind you might find at an international political summit. If you are like me, this herculean effort makes you cry at least once per season, or drink alone at night after everyone has gone to bed, or take Percocets left over from previous surgeries.
Then there is the ill-lighted, miscast pride that comes with knowing that you birthed a remarkable athlete. When other parents can’t help but notice your child’s extraordinary athletic ability, your ego swells as if they are complimenting you, and you can’t seem to separate your child’s personal accomplishments from your own. This is the shameful part of soccer momming. It is heady stuff that can weaken the soul. You see your child twist in space in an artful way, and watch them outrun or outthink a competitor, and even though the competitor is a ponytailed princess who sleeps with her own stuffed animal at night, your mind has reduced her to enemy status. Instead of seeing her as a person, you categorize her as an obstacle for your child, the star, to overcome, and what’s more, you created that star. It came out of you. You did it. It’s yours and there is a dirty aspect of ownership that comes with watching your child play sports, so when you think about it in the heat of the moment, the other child is a dangerous condottiere that you yourself must overpower. It’s awful and thrilling at the same time, because it is the only bit of power you feel in your life. You are triumphing, by proxy, over a nine-year-old child. Bully for you. Kick the air and scream “Shoot it!” until your voice is hoarse and you will later need to cool down by overeating at the postgame fast-food restaurant after the victory you had nothing to do with.
If you are like me you cannot stop these thoughts and actions, even though you know you are a walking cliché, and it is something you swore you would never become. Like kicking an invisible ball on the sidelines like an idiot, this suburban movement is a part of something that has its own tide, a tide that moves in and out with the seasons, a tide you feel yourself drowning in on occasion, because after all, you were the tattooed, boot-shod rebel who swore she would never live in the suburbs and drive a minivan, and yet you have ended up rocking that minivan hard and living in the burbiest of burbs, which, frankly, bores you to tears, but is so, so safe and so good for the children. You are the woman who swore you would stick your kids in daycare the moment your maternity leave was over so you could go back to building your career, but that plan scorched up like a dried leaf the moment your first child was placed in your arms. You quit work “for a while,” planning to go back when the child started school, but here it is ten years later and your second or third or fourth child has yet to start kindergarten and you have found yourself working pro bono as the chief operating officer of a very small, cluttered business called Your Family, which seems, at times, to have no purpose. Others might tell you to check your privilege for complaining about such a luxury, but it is more confusing and complicated than simple middle-class comfort. It is the battle between a loss of identity and its crooked bookend: the promise that women can have it all, the promise that we have choices, yet are looked down upon for choosing this path when we could have done “so much more.”
Maybe, if you are at all like me, you struggle with job skills required for being a soccer mom, and must hide these struggles, because your natural skill set has slowly revealed itself to be the kind that prefers simplicity and order and quiet, and you know you are forgetful, and you know you will make mistakes because you are forcing yourself to do this hard job as best as you can when really, you would be better suited for a different job, a simpler job, say, perhaps as a painter (house or art), or a philosopher, or a clock repairwoman, or an artisanal baker of gluten-free masterpieces, or even cheesecake on a stick, which you sell at local farmer’s markets. At times, especially during the middle of a given season, you may remember college, when you had the luxury to write short stories for fun and you wrote one about a married woman with kids who fakes her own death and uses a new identity to start over in the Pacific Northwest, a place that seems cool an
d woodsy and quiet, a far cry from standing in four inches of palm tree shade on the sidelines of a sports field, or your sour laundry room, or the inside of your sweat-soaked minivan.
You might even attempt to become the best soccer mom in all the land, wearing the bobbed hair helmet, keeping the minivan vacuumed, remembering which child wears which uniform, remembering to never again leave the middle defender on your daughter’s team, who you are responsible for driving home Wednesday nights, at the field like you have done twice before, only you become easily overwhelmed by the responsibilities, often forgetting to bring the orange slices on your assigned game day. This deficit requires you to occasionally dump your kid on the field and race to the grocery store, buy oranges, race home and cut them up, and bag them and bring them back to the field, often missing the first quarter of the game. Or you forget to turn in the cookie dough or gift wrap fundraiser orders, or worse, you forget to sell the cookie dough or gift wrap at all.
Why do you suck so badly? If you are like me, it’s because you either didn’t read the job description of what parenting would be like before you signed up, or you were not willing to extrapolate “years of extreme sleep deprivation and constant chaos” from everything everyone has said since the beginning of time about parenting. It’s as if you got drunk and joined the Marines on a lark and now want out, only there is no way out without going to prison.
Lest I appear to be one-sidedly bitter and negative, let me say this: Despite living your life on the sidelines, or setting up mission control from a seven-passenger vehicle shaped like a manatee, or listening to audiobooks through headphones to protect yourself from soccer mom colloquy, despite your bobbed helmet of hair reducing your sexual attractiveness by a factor of ten, despite worrying about your contribution to the collective cultural anxiety of women’s achievements by staying home and devoting all of your energy to a few non-influential people who don’t even thank you, and despite such an overall uncooperative reality, there is something golden about this time.
