Why I'll Be a Soccer Mom Until the Last Whistle

Hi, friends – I'm a soccer mom through and through. I didn't plan it, it just happened, but we've been in the game for over a decade now and I love it. I need a good three feet of space from everyone else on the sideline, I move with every play, I feel every tackle, I love the elegance on the field, I love the emotion, and I am a total die-hard fan.

When I miss a game, I suffer in silence and keep one eye secretly on the live score app to see how our boys are doing. My husband recently showed me an article saying that when boys are little, they spend way more time around grown women than around men.

There's the daycare teacher, there's the elementary school teacher, and yes, in most families it's still, sadly, more often the mom who works part time and is around more day to day than the dad. Soccer (or a comparable sport in the teen years) would suddenly bring reliable male role models into the picture. The coach, the ref, the older boys on the teams in the age groups above...

Here, social classes and backgrounds all mix. It's about team spirit and muscle, about scouts and wins, about losses and injuries, about moving up and getting back up when you're flat on the ground. And everything is so wonderfully clear and simple:

There are good guys and bad guys, your favorite team and the opponent. And the feelings on the sidelines are so real, so unmasked and pure, sometimes so revealing, but also so entertaining to watch (as long as it doesn't turn violent – that happens too, of course, but that's not what I mean here).

I see how the teams show each other no mercy on the field and then shake hands afterward, sometimes laugh together, maybe even apologize, maybe know each other from the year before, when they played on the same team before one of them switched clubs.

I love it when our boys tell us about practice at dinner, all fired up, when they act out plays for us in the kitchen, when they get worked up or high-five each other and tell us about their big ambitions.  When they question the coach's decisions or when a very special play finally worked for them.

I already spent my own youth on soccer fields. I was a fan of my big brother's team, I was constantly in love with somebody on the roster, but I was often bored too, so I brought my unicycle to the field to practice circus tricks. Three times I even got to go along to Spain as the mascot on the team's tour. Twenty-four-hour bus ride included.

Even today, with my sons, I love the rough, the real, the hopeful, the movement, the tension. The way everyone comes together when someone needs help after a foul. We've even held an opposing player's hand – of course we have – while we waited for the ambulance because his parents weren't there.

I can't tell you how many practices I've watched because it wasn't worth driving home. Out in the country, the drive home and back is sometimes just too far. I packed my running clothes and made it my own workout time, treated myself to a new book and just read, or put the laptop on my lap and wrote and worked.

Around my kids, but not in charge of them. That outside view was always the best part when they were smaller. Watching them without being the one they turn to, without having to explain anything or do any parenting, because that was the coach's job for those couple of hours.

The loveliest kind of relaxation, and a chance to get unbelievably proud. To just watch them. In a different context. In their passion. In their losses and wins. In their group, their team, with all the dynamics that come with it.

Oh, but of course I've also cursed right along with the other moms and dads. When it was too windy and rainy again and there was no shelter. When we had to show up in the middle of nowhere an hour and a half before kickoff, yet again.

God, the corners of the Bergisches Land we've gotten to know (that's the hilly countryside east of Cologne)! How grateful I am for my GPS. My parents still had to unfold paper maps to find the most remote fields...

Soccer Mom Forever

But all of that lives on as memories I carry with me. Like how our twins competed so fiercely that we figured it might be a good idea to pull one off the field and put him in goal. "Machine!" they yell when he shuts out the other team, "Octopus!" It was a good idea! The talents are so well divided.

How we can spot our own kid, or in my case both of mine, by their stride as the team jogs onto the field. From far away. How we can tell from behind when they're annoyed or happy. How we can hear in the scream after a fall whether someone's faking it or it's a real injury. How we cook extra pasta before games and push dinner later on practice days.

How many weird little plastic pellets we've shaken out of soccer socks, how many times we've aired out stinky shin guards, how many jerseys and thermal shirts we've washed. How we've celebrated wins and comforted away losses. How we've talked through red cards and tried to head off injuries.

How we've watched teammates come and go, how at some point a switch to a new club came up, how a child on the team who had fled to Germany suddenly found a new family with a teammate. How our kids grew, how their voices got deeper, their faces scruffier, their gestures more grown-up.

And how we then pause for a moment and realize that this isn't just soccer. It's childhood. The teen years. Our kids' lives. Happening right in front of our eyes. And how we then notice how special it was and is. The years on the sideline, the conversations on the drives there and back. The shared experience. How much life is packed into it. How much happiness.

And then we think: Thank you for all of it. Simply: THANK YOU for the intensity and the craziness. For the gratitude and the full, busy life. Because what's still part of our everyday routine now will someday be our sweetest memory. I'm convinced of that. Are you?