—
I played in my first soccer game when I was six. My father wasn’t the coach that year, but his enthusiastic sideline guidance prompted the league to give him three options. Option one was to be less vocal. This option would have been an exercise in futility. Option two, stop coming to the games. Another invalid choice. Or Option three, coach.
Starting the next year, when I was seven, and continuing for eight years until I was fifteen, my father coached my soccer team. I think he enjoyed it and, looking back, it was the best part of my week, too. Saturday games were typically followed by a standing lunch date. It gave my father and me some much-needed one-on-one time. I had two older sisters, so one-on-one time in my house was rare, but sharing time between him and I was unheard of.
Because of sports, my father and I were able to develop a special language. Our conversations often revolved around RBIs or batting averages, touchdown-to-interception ratios, or yards per carry. When he helped me with math, he wove in sports analogies to drive home the concepts. My father and I learned to communicate with each other in metaphor, our own code of sports-related communication. Even after I went off to college, my father would call just to see if I watched the game the night before, or if I was planning to go to the game that weekend. That must have been hard for him, too, as I went to college at Florida State and he graduated from the University of Florida.
It has been through our mutual love of sports that my father and I have always been able to have open lines of communication. Its how he tells me he loves me, and how I know it’s true.
◊♦◊
My son plays a different type of game. In our neighborhood, there are two groups of children: the inside group and the outside group. The outside group is just that—outside. Their daily sport mirrors whatever sport is currently in season: hockey in the driveway during hockey season, football in the road during the Fall, or baseball in the backyard in the Spring. This was the group I belonged to as a child. The old cliché of coming home when the streetlight turns on was as true in my neighborhood as it was all over the country.
But my son belongs to the inside group. He is part of the group of kids that build with Legos, or draw comics, or play video games. Okay, so mostly they play video games. And because my son is not allowed to play video games during the week, he devotes the entirety of the weekend to them. While he plays video games, he simultaneously watches YouTube videos of other gamers playing the game, often the same game at the same level. To me, it seems like information overload, but to him, it is the way things are done.
Because my son fashions his weekends around gaming, he has little interest in sports, either in their real-life form or on television. No matter how many times I have tried to get him interested in watching sports with me, my attempts have been unsuccessful. He doesn’t want to learn the language that my father and I speak.
Instead, my son speaks a different language: one of hit points and damages. His language revolves around crafting and mining and who you can destroy with what. Because his favorite game is Terraria, his language includes phrases like the Wall of Flesh or the Eye of Cthulu. I want so badly for him to speak my language, one of ERAs and OPSs. But he speaks a different set of statistics, a different type of game. If I want to communicate with him, I have to learn his language. It is unfair to ask him to learn my words, to be part of a world that he has no interest in. It is wrong of me, as a father, to force my words upon him.
So, I am learning. I am learning to speak about things like Duke Fishron, and the Wall of Flesh, and Skeletron Prime and the Moon Lord. Instead of studying the roster for the Rays, I am discovering how to defeat Golem or Plantera. If we’re being honest, I have no idea what most of these “bosses” are, nor could I identify them if given a quiz. I cannot tell you how to create a stadium to fight one of the creatures, or why any of this is relevant. I can’t, as of yet, speak that language. But he can. And really that’s all that matters.
—
◊♦◊
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
◊♦◊
◊♦◊
Sign up for our Writing Prompts email to receive writing inspiration in your inbox twice per week.
—
Photo credit: Getty Images
