I'll Mature When I'm Dead (21 page)

Speaking of which:

That’s the sound of what we writing professionals call the Segue Warning Horn, telling our readers to hold on tight on as we make a sharp turn and attempt to get back to our original topic, which you may recall is youth sports.

Here’s the problem: A lot of parents are insane. You may be one of these parents without even knowing it, because the craziness takes you over gradually.

It’s not a problem when your child is really little. My daughter started playing soccer when she was four; at that stage, the parents have no choice but to be mellow. You can’t take the games seriously, because four-year-olds are unaware of many key elements of soccer. The ball, for example. The players may notice it on occasion, but they don’t feel the need to become personally
involved
with it. They have other things on their minds. They’ll see one of their friends, and they’ll think, “Hey! There’s Stella! I’ll give her a hug!” Also at any random moment they might feel the need to lie down, or skip off the field, or do a cartwheel, or get some nose-picking done. What with one thing and another, they don’t have a lot of time to devote to the ball.

So at this stage your role, as a parent, is to watch for those rare moments when your child and the ball are in the same general vicinity, and then shout: “Kick the ball!” And then, on the off chance that your child does kick the ball, you shout: “No! The other way!” That’s it. You do that for maybe forty minutes, during which time either (a) nobody scores, or (b) both teams score eighty-seven times, and then it’s time for cupcakes.

So in the beginning the soccer parents are fairly relaxed. But pretty soon the kids start to get the hang of the sport. The games become more competitive; score is kept; league standings are published. There are no more cartwheels.

This is when some parents start to change. They shout more, and their shouting takes on an urgent, even angry, tone. They shout at the officials, and sometimes at the coaches, but above all they shout at the kids. These parents will
tell
you that sports are about having fun, but they clearly are not having fun, especially when they—excuse me, I mean when their
kids
—lose. Again, not all parents act like this. But a lot of them do, and they’re the ones who tend to dominate the sideline mood, which becomes more and more serious.

The parents of my daughter’s team have, so far, managed to resist this trend. We’ve been together for five years, and we’re still fairly mellow on the sideline, unless you count my wife, who is both Cuban and Jewish and therefore genetically programmed to produce more words in any given hour, awake or asleep, than the entire state of Wyoming. But hers are generally words of encouragement, such as “Good try!” and “You can do it!” and (to our daughter) “Stop fiddling with your hair!”

The rest of us parents watch the game and cheer as needed, but we’re also chatting, reading, texting, and occasionally, during evening games, sneaking snorts of adult beverages that some thoughtful parent has snuck in along with the snacks. We view games at least partly as pleasant social events. Our daughters do, too.

We were not prepared for the Disney World tournament. We began to realize what we’d gotten into when, in our first game, the opposing team showed up with a large, professionally made team banner on a pole at least ten feet long, which two of the fathers planted in the turf. That’s right: a
banner
. It would not surprise me if, for home games, they also had a blimp.

Another intimidating factor was that the opposing girls were larger than our girls. I’m pretty sure some of them were wearing brassieres. They went through an elaborate warm-up routine, and at various points did these coordinated military-sounding cheers, like small brassiere-wearing Navy SEALS. When the game started, the opposing parents—most of whom were wearing team colors—shouted intensely the entire time.

They killed us. And the thing was, the more goals they scored, the more intensely the parents shouted. It was as if they wanted their girls to
destroy
our girls. I will admit that I developed a strong dislike toward those parents. I wanted to go over and tell them to shut up. But I didn’t, for fear they would impale me with their banner pole.

We played two more games in the tournament before we were, mercifully, eliminated. We got creamed in both of them, scoring a total of zero goals. In one of the games, when our girls had fallen far behind and clearly were going to lose badly, the opposing parents, who were wearing matching team T-shirts, started an organized chant calling for
more goals
.

And these were parents of nine-year-olds. The parents of the older teams were even more intense. Everywhere you went at the tournament you saw people staring unhappily at the field and barking instructions at their kids. Occasionally, when a team scored, there would be a brief outburst of joy from the parents of that team, and reactions of disgust from the opposing parents. Then everybody would resume staring and barking. The air was thick with parental pressure. It was a festival of grimness.

You might be thinking: “You’re just being critical because your team got its butt kicked.” There may be some truth to that. Maybe if our girls had won, I’d have loved the tournament. Maybe I’d have bought a professional banner.

But I don’t think so. I think that no matter what happened, I’d have found the tournament to be kind of depressing. I think that parents—not all of them, but a lot of them—are sucking the fun out of kids’ sports. They’re making it clear to their kids that they think sports is about winning, and
only
winning. This is a reasonable value to instill if you honestly believe your child is going to become a professional athlete. But you need to remember two things:

Such as not being a jerk.

 

 

Your kids don’t need you shouting at them on the playing field, any more than they need you shouting at them in the classroom. Let them play the game and figure out for themselves how they feel about it, without having to worry about your feelings, too. Make it clear that your happiness doesn’t depend on the score. Cheer for your kid, sure, but do it
cheerfully
. If you can’t manage that, take a walk; the game will go on fine without you, because it’s not about you.

And if, while you’re taking your walk, you happen to pass a girls’ soccer game, and you notice a group of parents who are sitting and chatting in a relaxed manner except for one Cuban-Jewish woman who is so animated that calming her down would require tranquilizer darts, stop and say hi. Maybe we can offer you a refreshing snuck-in adult beverage. Because you are, after all, an adult.

Right?

O
n my son’s wedding day, when I saw him standing up there in front of everybody, waiting for his bride, I had this sudden, intense awareness of the passage of time. To me, it seemed as if only a few days had passed since Rob was playing happily in my living room, flying his remote-control helicopter.

Then I realized that in fact only a few days
had
passed. I got him the remote-control helicopter as his wedding gift. He may be a grown man, but he’s still a guy.

Anyway, it was an amazing feeling, watching my son get married. The whole weekend was very emotional for me; I cried like a baby. And that was just when I saw the bill for the rehearsal dinner.
³⁴

But seriously, before I say anything that might be construed as a criticism of the vast and constantly expanding wedding-industrial complex, which currently accounts for 38 percent of the U.S. economy, let me state for the record that I
loved
my son’s wedding. He found a wonderful bride in Laura—a smart, beautiful, warm, talented, and funny woman who is absolutely perfect for him. They had the best wedding in human history, and I am not saying this solely because I had many glasses of champagne and danced with approximately twenty-seven women
simultaneously
to “Play That Funky Music, White Boy.”

So I have no complaints about the wedding. I must say, however, that the
planning
of the wedding was a tad stressful, in the same sense that the universe is a tad spacious. And for good reason: Planning a modern wedding is comparable in scope to constructing a nuclear power plant, although the wedding is more complex because—to pick just one of many examples—a nuclear power plant does not require floral installations. These used to be called “flowers,” but that was before the florists—excuse me, I mean the floral-installation artists—realized that “floral installations” is more professional, as measured by how much you can charge for installing them.

Which brings us to budgeting. Here’s my advice for parents who are going to be planning a wedding: At the very beginning, decide exactly how much money is the
absolute maximum
you are willing to spend. Write this number down on a piece of paper and
keep it with you at all times
. That way, when the wedding is over, you can pull it out, look at the number, and laugh until a streamer of drool reaches all the way down to your feet, which will be bare inasmuch as you can no longer afford shoes.

Here’s the problem. The bridal magazines, which depend for their existence on advertisements for the wedding-industrial complex, have for decades been hammering home the three core principles of the modern American wedding:

These principles resonate powerfully with your modern bride-to-be, because ever since she was a little girl she has been fantasizing about her wedding day. This is not true of your modern groom-to-be. When he was a little boy, he was—I state this with authority—conducting experiments to see what happens when you set fire to He-Man action figures.
³⁵

But the bride has been dreaming for years about having a fairy-tale wedding, patterned after the wedding scene in the Walt Disney animated film
Cinderella
, wherein Cinderella and Prince Charming ride off into the sunset in a horse-drawn carriage while the cute little mice wave goodbye. What they
don’t
show you in this film is parents in bare feet paying the bills for the carriage rental, the horse supplier, the mouse wrangler, the sunset-installation professional, etc. Because all of these things cost money. And if you hold the wedding in New York City, as we did, all of these things will cost
extra
money, because you will be paying for
unionized
mouse wranglers.

True Story: My wife inquired, at the hotel where we held the rehearsal dinner, about the cost of renting a projector and screen so we could show pictures of Rob and Laura as guests arrived. The hotel said that, counting the fee for the two workers
³⁶
required, by union contract, to set the equipment up, it would cost us—I am not making this up—
eighteen hundred dollars
. Which of course is more than it would cost, outside of Planet Manhattan, to
buy
a projector and screen, as well as a used car to drive them home in.

My point is that putting on a modern wedding is an expensive and complicated undertaking, which is why many people these days hire a professional wedding planner, whose function is to make it even
more
expensive and complicated. The planner works closely with the bride, as well as the only other really essential person in the wedding, by which I of course mean the bride’s mother.

At this point the groom is pretty much out of the picture. If the wedding were a solar system, the bride would be the sun; her mom would be another, slightly smaller nearby sun; the wedding planner would be a third sun; the caterer, floral installation professional, photographer, videographer, cake design engineer, etc., would be planets orbiting these suns; and the groom would be an asteroid the size of a regulation softball 73 trillion light-years away. Sometimes the groom gets so far out of the wedding-planning loop that the planners forget to invite him to the actual wedding and the bride, at the last minute, has to marry a member of the catering staff. (This happened to Madonna
twice
.)

Fortunately Rob made it to his wedding, and, as I say, it was a grand day. Rob looked handsome and nervous; Laura looked radiant; they both looked beyond happy. For me, the highlight of the service was the exchange of vows, which was performed by six union vow-exchangers.

No, seriously, Rob and Laura wrote and spoke their own vows. Hers were funny and smart and sweet, and Rob’s—I say with a father’s pride—were amazing. When he told her, with pure and simple eloquence, how much he loved her, his voice broke, and every woman watching went
aww
, and Laura’s eyes shone like moonlight on a mountain lake. And if you could watch that—your son, the boy you used to carry on your shoulders and tuck in at night, now a grown man putting his heart out there in front of everybody for the woman he adores—if you could watch that and not spill tears all over your tuxedo dress shirt, then you’d be missing out on the one thing that made all the wedding hassle worthwhile. I’m talking about the champagne.