I coached my kid's first game last weekend and I learned some things about myself that I'm still processing
My son is six and it was a soccer game against another team of six year olds which means it was essentially controlled chaos with shin guards, nobody tracking positions, three kids picking grass at any given moment, one kid on the other team who was clearly a year older and built like a small freight train. I went in thinking I had the right temperament for this, I'm pretty even keeled, I don't have a sports rage thing, I coached this way in my head for weeks before it happened and felt genuinely prepared. Then the referee, who was a teenager getting paid forty dollars, made a call that was incorrect and I heard a sound come out of my mouth that I did not consciously authorize and my wife looked at me from the sideline with an expression I've seen maybe twice in eight years together.
It wasn't bad, I want to be clear, I didn't yell at anyone or embarrass my kid, it was more like a sharp noise of disagreement that surprised me more than anyone else. But I was playing rolling riches on my phone that night after he went to bed and found myself replaying the moment and then replaying some other moments from the game where I'd felt things I didn't expect to feel, a tightness when they scored on us, a specific kind of pride when my son did something right that felt bigger than the moment probably warranted. I have some money saved up and I'd bought him decent cleats and a ball and we'd practiced in the backyard and somewhere in all that I had apparently developed stakes I didn't know I had.
The thing I'm processing is that I don't totally know where my investment in him ends and my investment in the outcome begins, and I'm not sure those are supposed to be the same thing at six years old with grass picking and a teenager referee. He had a great time. He asked on the way home if we could practice tomorrow and I said yes and meant it completely. I just want to make sure the version of me that shows up to the next game is there for him and not for whatever that noise was, and I think recognizing the difference is probably the whole job.