I was in high school, sitting in my Youth Group Director’s living room with a bunch of other high school kids, and I can’t say for sure who was there, but I could make a few guesses. Most of us were girls, kids I’d known since I was six. Boys were active in the Youth Group too, but this was a Bible Study, and something that happened before the pizza, and the air hockey, the jokes, and the Nightcrossing – the greatest, most wild, most terrifying game you could play in an old Presbyterian church with all the lights off. Boys showed up for that, which was just fine with me. I liked the intimacy of this smaller, female group (save for my Youth Group Director). I liked that his wife joined us, telling us stories of what it was like being a teenage girl. I liked that we could talk about Psalm 23 and admit how terrifying it was, and in the same breath ask for prayers that we’ll find a date to PROM.
It was spring and I can’t remember how it came up, but my Youth Group Director shared that his daughter, a girl just barely in Kindergarten or first grade at the time, had not been invited to a birthday party. He said he wished he could just jump into her skin and feel her sadness, so that she wouldn’t have to.
I bent my legs so I could rest my chin on my knees, and looked at my shoes. “That is so dumb,” I thought.
Hadley’s soccer season has started. On the weekends, we unfold lawn chairs, sit on the sidelines, and watch. Maybe I’ve seen four games so far, I can’t remember, but watching her, I remember with a twinge what my Youth Group Director said about his daughter, and what I thought in response. While she goes after the ball, I go over the memory in my head, hoping to discover something better than my brutal reaction to a father wanting to hold sadness for his daughter. The best I can come up with is, “Well, Callie, at least you didn’t say that out loud.”
I understand now, wanting to take on sadness and frustration or whatever hefty thing it is so my kids don’t have to.
But I’m also glad I remembered my reaction, albeit disrespectful, as well, because of its honesty. I worry all the time about my girls being sad, and what it is I ought to do about it, but I think I should think about how teenage Callie thought about it, and maybe, thirty years later, I can say this: It’s not our job to take these things from our daughters.
You know what my Youth Group Director was really great at? End of the year slide shows. He put together the pictures he’d taken all year of us, and set the whole thing to music. Here we are working in Tijuana, or New York, pounding nails into walls for homes for people to live in. Here we are in the Youth Group room, playing air hockey, a slice of Dominoes pizza in one hand, and reaching for the puck with another. He captured memories for us. Here’s you in your yellow overalls and your hair-sprayed to the death bangs. Look at you having fun. He didn’t know how hard I was working at fitting in, or the worries I had over homework I didn’t understand, or friends I was trying to make, or boys I was trying to get over. He didn’t need to stand where I was, because his clicking the button on a camera and sharing it showed me something else about myself. You are sad, but you are strong. You are confused, but you show up. You are lost and you are found. All the time you are all these things.
They play while church bells ring on Concordia University’s campus; the thunk of soccer balls mix with the hymn’s melody. “Don’t watch, girls, PLAY!” a father yells. That’s our job, to watch. You’re in the game, ladies. You have to play it. We can’t do it for you.
So I watch, and I take pictures, and I think about birthday parties and making friends, and trying to get at, and then control a ball that is equally fun and frustrating to chase. And I think of Mary, who also couldn’t take on all her child took on, but who kept “all these things in her heart,” and who kept watching.
This is lovely, Callie. Thanks for letting us in on it.