Playing to Win

Fio wrote this several years ago and hopes you enjoy it.

I was not born to be a football mother, but I did my best to become one. I attended every one of my fourteen-year-old son’s freshman football games and yelled when the other mothers did. In fact, due to a congenital bellow, I became quite an asset to the maternal cheering squad.

There were seven of us who sat semi-together at the games. Pat and Jean attended the same church and would spend their Sunday School hour collaborating on blood-curdling spirit signs. Barbara and Frances, whose sons were stars, were our football experts and would tell the rest of us what was going on. Maxine and Gayle and I contributed our presences and a great deal of motherly anxiety.

The whole thing started one day when we repeated to the perky young cheerleader sponsor our sons' complaints that the cheerleaders never showed up for freshman games. She promptly formed us into our own squad then and there and we had such a good time that we kept it up. We were terrific, reviving such oldies but goodies as "two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate" and "all the way that-a-way." Our specialty was the wave, which was little more than a ripple with just seven participants.

We were not universally appreciated. Our sons did not recognize classics when they heard them and thought we were making the cheers up on the spot. We embarrassed them terribly. Finally we realized us that it wasn't the cheers that the boys wanted; it was the cheerleaders, cute little sixteen-year-olds bopping around in mini skirts. But by that time, we were having so much fun that it didn't matter.

Recently, my son had to decide whether or not to sign up for football again next year. He wrote out a list of the reasons to stick with it and the reasons to quit. He had learned a lot about football and liked his coach, but athletics don't run in the family and the year had been tough on him.

He mulled his decision over for several days, then signed on the dotted line. "Mom gets a kick out of the games," he told his father. "I wanted her to be able to enjoy herself again next year."

Somewhere along the line I'm a winner, and so is he.