You know that a minute of soccer is very expensive at my children’s school. They hardly let them play in the yard. It is a battle that I consider lost in the face of new times, but not so my son Teo, who is five years old and still has energy left. Now they are focused on dinosaurs and from time to time they bring dinosaur stuff to class. Books, dolls, whatever. The other day he brought a ball that had been half-forgotten around the house, a blue plastic ball with a dinosaur printed on it, to see if it would fit that way and they could play a game. He didn’t sneak in, apparently, but when I found out I felt a pang of pride. There is nothing like checking that your child is developing along the right path. That he has enlisted on the right side of history.
Teo’s maneuver didn’t work, but perhaps it helped open a crack in the system. Yesterday she told me that a pious monitor had lent them a small ball and they had been able to play soccer for a while in the patio. Teo had made himself some shin guards for the occasion and showed me the rudimentary mechanism he had devised to protect the leg. He would roll the tracksuit into a glob almost to the knee, then stretch the sock to hold the structure in place. He was very happy with his invention of the homemade shin guard. I asked him if someone had shown it to him and he raised his finger with a mysterious and severe air: “It was in my head & rdquor ;.
Current football childhood has more merit than ours. When I was a child there were two basic options, or at least I remember it that way, at school and everywhere: football or nothing. In my school the same thing happened with the subject of Religion. There was Religion or ‘nothing’. Now I’m surprised it was legal, but it was as is. Neither Ethics nor Values: if you didn’t do Religion you were going to ‘nothing’. My parents signed me up for ‘nothing’ and I suddenly found myself with the only one who didn’t go to Religion either, because he was a Jehovah’s Witness, and we were in a room that wasn’t even a classroom, doing nothing in ‘nothing’ class, and without tell us anything because he didn’t play soccer and I did not relate to those who did not play soccer. I don’t remember the details of this vital episode, but soon my parents sent me back to Religion, to sing Christmas carols listlessly, after my unsuccessful passage through ‘nothing’.
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Teo can now choose between 200 sports, 400 after school and 700 toys at home, and turns out he chooses to play football, whether on the patio, in the living room, on your computer, on the beach, in town or in the square. I feel the moral duty to accept all his proposals to play, even if sometimes it costs me more than getting out of bed. My son can choose and he chooses well, we did not choose anything.
In my case, at least I still don’t know how to choose. Neither the job nor the car nor the dishwasher, nor the kind of life I spend… Sometimes I seriously think that I have not chosen anything. Sometimes I try to analyze it and I realize that one thing leads to another, without really knowing why, and you just fit it in and adapt. Everything is – let’s go back to school because (almost) everything was already at school – like that day when the girls in class got together and shared the boyfriends. One approached me and she told me that it was my turn to be her boyfriend, that she had chosen me, and I ‘okay’. I shrugged it off and thought it was a bit weird, but it actually works like this, no matter how much embellishment is added. It’s actually what happens.