Category: Parenting Page 2 of 3

Selling Our Souls to Soccer?

On August 5, 2022

Josiah came home to us at nine months old and found the ping pong balls on the second day. They were the perfect size for his tiny fists and he crawled around the house with one in each hand, clicking on the tile floors.

His first word was daddy and his second word was ball and I’m not bitter about that at all of course.

All his favorite toys centered around soccer. On Sundays after church, we ate at P-Square and while we waited for our rice and beans and mishkaki (P-Square had the best mishkaki), he and his sisters would hunt around the plastic tables for bottle caps. Soon he had enough so that each kind was a soccer team – like, Fanta was Manchester United and Sprite was Liverpool. Gil made him a soccer field out of green pressboard and Josiah spent hours playing bottlecap soccer, arranging his “players” in perfect formation.

Every year for his birthday, the only gift he wanted was the new version of the FIFA video game. So every fall, we figured out a way for somebody to bring us FIFA 2014 or 2015 or 2016 out to Tanzania. His parties were soccer themed for six years in a row.

He mastered a diving header at three and a bicycle kick at four. He played soccer before school, at recess, and after school and usually came home with his lunch uneaten because he played then too. When I nagged him about eating lunch, he asked me to make him something he could shove down his throat in 30 seconds.

In Tanzania, I loved that Josiah loved soccer and I loved watching him play. He joined the HOPAC team and had a couple of practices and a game each week. Maybe twice a year, he had a tournament on a Saturday. Often, Gil was his coach. On Sunday evenings, families would informally gather at HOPAC and play together – all ages. Soccer almost always happened at HOPAC so it flowed easily into our lives.

Two years ago, we moved to America, and I started hating soccer. Josiah was quickly recruited for an AYSO club team, and we said yes because during the pandemic, we were eager to help him make connections. And thus, the full force of what it means to have a kid play club soccer crashed down on me, with evening practices and games almost every weekend – year-round.

I threw several little hissy fits last year. I seethed against the hurried family dinners and the lack of free time on weekends. I mourned our busyness and inability to spend more time in ministry. But then I looked around and other families didn’t seem fazed by this. Driving an hour to a tournament every Saturday was apparently normal life for American parents. I experienced serious culture shock.

Gil and I have never had aspirations for our kids to go far in sports. We don’t have lofty goals for college; we drive past the community college five minutes from our house and cheerfully announce, “Hey kids, wave hello to your future college!” I rail against this American culture that tells me I must push my children to reach their potential in every area, that success in school and sports or arts is the ultimate goal of parenting.

Josiah always said he wanted to be a professional soccer player when he grew up. And I would always smile condescendingly and say, “That’s a nice dream, Buddy, but it’s not going to happen. Choose something else.” This was usually followed by, “Get off your backside and do your homework.”

Unfortunately for me, this summer the coach of an elite team invited Josiah to be a starter on his team. He told us that Josiah could likely play for a Division I college. And possibly become a professional player.

Two Stones In My Pocket

By Amy Medina

On May 6, 2022

In Fear, Parenting

It’s practically a miracle that I got married.

As a young person, I was colder than Elsa to guys my age. I avoided talking to them at all costs, and when I was forced to, I used sarcasm. In high school, one guy told me that I made him cry and another rebuked me for being mean. These interactions have been embedded in my memory for 30 years because I remember how stunned I was to hear them. In my head, I was a nice person. I never set out to be a jerk.

My harshness was not for lack of attraction; I had as many crushes as the boy-crazy flirt. I was simply terrified of people. I was not timid; I loved being on stage and performing when I had a script telling me exactly what to say at exactly the right moment. Real life gave me no such script.

I gained confidence in college, though even Gil remembers that my first interaction with him was intentionally distant. So it is pretty miraculous that I figured out how to be friendly enough for him to fall in love with me.

I now recognize that my reticence was very much connected to insecurity. Around people my age, I was easily intimidated, and I felt young and insignificant. I was too proud to be nervous and groveling, so it was easier to be cold and sarcastic.

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is always the secure who are humble.” My insecurity made me unkind, anxious, unfriendly. As I’ve aged, I see in myself the link between growing more secure and how well I love others.

Mothering African Hair

By Amy Medina

On September 8, 2021

In Adoption, Parenting, Race and Diversity, Third Culture Kids

Of all the things a new mother stresses about, her kids’ hair is usually not one of them. But for me, it was.

I felt an invisible weight upon me that if I was to be a good mom to my girls, I must get their hair right. This was not a completely imagined pressure. I learned early on that in both African and African-American cultures, well-maintained hair is important. I already knew my competence as a white mother to two black daughters would be questioned in many ways. So I was determined to prove myself capable of at least caring for their hair.

I read Black hair blogs. I watched YouTube videos. I even bought and read a book on the subject. I tried a ridiculous number of hair products. Yet still, I was anxious. It was harder than I thought, and despite my best efforts, I could not turn myself into a Black hair artist.

Raising Up a Child in an Age of Deconstruction

By Amy Medina

On April 28, 2021

In Parenting, Third Culture Kids

“I never knew it would be so hard to win my children’s hearts,” recently lamented a friend with adult children.

In my younger parenting days, I idolized those parents who were five or ten years ahead of me in parenting. You know the ones–their kids were polite, respectful, happy, Christian kids. I longed for my little ones to grow up like them. But now I have teenagers, and those older friends have young adults. It’s been with increasing dread that I’ve watched these further-along families crushed under a mountain of sorrow over their young-adult children who are walking into destruction.

Not all of them, of course. But also not just an occasional prodigal; there are far too many to count. These are families who did all the “right things”: gave their kids boundaries, were actively involved in church, ate family dinners, limited media consumption, guarded against porn, played games together, were intentional about their kids’ education, taught family devotions. They trained up their children in the way they should go, but when they were old, they still departed from it.

Parenting Tips (Or Not)

By Amy Medina

On December 8, 2019

In Parenting

Anyone who has tried to teach an unmotivated middle school boy deserves, like, 50 million gold stars. Especially when sitting next to this boy at 9:00 at night, trying to stuff math concepts into his brain for a test the next day. This exercise is like stuffing a frozen turkey. Or tunneling through the Alps with a pickaxe.

And the boy is like, “Why do I have to do it this way? Why can’t I just do it the way I want to do it?”

And you’re like, “Because you will get the ANSWER WRONG.” And your voice raises in pitch and volume with each word.

And the boy just sits and stares at the gecko on the wall.

So then you (very calmly) set the timer on your phone and tell him, “Well, for as long as you sit here doing nothing, that’s how much time you’ll lose on the Xbox this weekend.”

And then he sighs and says, “Fine. I’ll sit here all night.”

And then you become a raving lunatic who storms to the bedroom to demand that the boy’s father remove the Xbox from the premises immediately. So the boy’s father dutifully storms out and makes a big show of yanking out wires and heaving the Xbox onto his shoulder and taking it….I don’t know…somewhere else.

And then you win the Parent of the Year Award.

(This is all a hypothetical scenario, of course.)

After spending over a decade controlling everything about your child’s eating and sleeping and playing and learning, there’s this difficult transition in parenting when one day you are startled to discover that your child is becoming an actual person. This often means a whole lot of wonderful, as you see this child become someone who cares and cooks and sings and unexpectedly surprises you with what he is capable of. And suddenly you realize that you are talking to her in an adult sort of way about adult sort of things. This child is actually becoming your friend. This is delightful.

But along with the wonderful, you realize that this child who is becoming a person is capable of forming his own thinking and choosing what you value…or not. This person might holler, “Why do I have to study? It’s my life, why can’t I choose to fail?” And you can holler back at this person, “As long as you are under my roof, you don’t get the option of failing. Too bad for you!” But inside you start getting the sneaking suspicion that there’s only so much you can do. Because even though for a lot of years you’ve been the controlling presence in that person’s life, you don’t get to be in control forever. Or even much longer. This is terrifying.

And you look down the road and see that it won’t be long until this person will be independent of you and she will decide who to marry and who to worship and what to love. And there’s not much you will be able to do about it.

Suddenly you find yourself grabbing hold of every minute. You panic one day when you realize, “I haven’t taught her about eating disorders yet!” so you casually bring up the topic on the way to the grocery store and she looks at you like you might have lost your mind (which is possible). And you decide that maybe you’re not actually as tired as you thought you were when his bedtime conversation turns to why God doesn’t always answer our prayers. Because when will you get another chance to talk about it?

So you eventually bring back the Xbox. But you find a way to teach (again) about the importance of math homework, about the value of hard work, about what is worth treasuring in this universe, and about grace. Always about grace. Even for parents.

(That’s the most important part.)

She got picked for the varsity team as an 8th grader, played as a starter for every game, and they won the international school tournament!