saved my daughter.
The fact that I didn’t save my daughter from soccer saved my daughter.
* * *
Recently, Craig, Abby, and I sat on the sidelines in the cold, pouring rain and watched Tish’s team play. The girls were soaking and freezing and somehow showed zero signs of being either one. I watched Tish closely, as always. Her legs and face were both chiseled. Her hot-pink pre-wrap headband held back strays from her signature ponytail. The other team had just scored, and she was trying to catch her breath and get back into position. As she ran, she called back to her defenders, “Let’s go. We’ve got this!” Play resumed. The ball came to Tish. She trapped the ball and passed it to her forward, Anais. Anais scored.
The girls ran toward Anais, toward each other. They all met in the center of the field, a mass of tween girls leaping and hugging and celebrating each other, their team, their sweat. We parents cheered, too, but the girls didn’t hear us. In that moment, there was no one else on Earth but them. How we felt about them didn’t matter. How they felt was what mattered. For them, it was not a performance. It was real.
The game ended, and Abby, Craig, and I walked to our cars, parked side by side. We all climbed inside to get out of the rain. After a quick team huddle, Tish walked toward us with her friend Syd. They were not hurrying, because they didn’t even feel the cold. When they got to us, they hugged, and Syd walked off with her mom. Tish came over and stood outside Abby’s window to say good-bye because she was going home with Craig. It’s still tough, all this back-and-forth between houses. Divorce is hard to navigate—all families are hard to navigate—but Tish knows that she can do hard things.
The rain continued to fall around her, but Tish’s face was a floodlight framed by the window.
She said, “Coach Mel gave me a nickname today. She says she’s going to call me Elmer’s because the ball sticks to me like glue. When she called me off the bench today, she yelled, ‘Elmer’s—you’re in.’ ”
Craig’s window was open, and he heard her story. He smiled over at me and Abby. We smiled back. Tish just stood there between us—glowing and gluing.
When Abby and I first fell in love, we had hundreds of miles and a million obstacles keeping us apart. The facts laid out in front of us made a future together seem impossible. So we’d tell each other about the true and beautiful unseen order we felt pressing through our skin. Our imaginings always included each other and the water.
Abby wrote this to me from the other coast, one evening before she fell asleep:
“It’s early in the morning and I’m sitting on our dock watching the sunrise. I look and see you in your pajamas, still sleepy, walking toward me, holding two mugs of coffee. We just sit there on the dock together, my back against the piling, your back against my chest, watching the fish jump and the sun rise. We have nowhere to be but together.”
The harder things became, the more often we’d return to that morning Abby had imagined for us. That dock, her, me, two steaming mugs of coffee: That image became our unseen order, guiding us forward. We had faith.
A year later, Abby made dinner for the six of us: the kids, Craig, and me. We all sat down to eat on the back porch of the home off the Gulf of Mexico that Abby and I bought together. It was a gorgeous evening, the sky all purples and oranges and the breeze steady and warm. We ate and laughed and then cleared the table together. Craig left for his Sunday-evening soccer game, and the kids finished the dishes and then sat down on the couch to watch a show. Honey, our bulldog, snuggled up on Amma’s lap, and Abby walked outside to our dock: the Doyle Melton Wamdock. I watched from inside as she sat down with her back against a piling and looked out at the canal. I poured two hot teas and walked out to join her. She looked back toward me, and by her smile, I knew she was remembering. We sat on the dock together, my back against her chest, her back against the piling, and we watched the fish jump while the sun set and the sky celebrated