This Week, I Was Louder
I am not a football mom.
I need to say that up front, because everything else only makes sense if you know where I’m starting from. My son Mikey is twelve. He’s playing his second season. I did not campaign for this. I have not grown to love it. I sit in those bleachers the way you sit in a dentist’s chair — present, polite, counting.
But I’m trying hard to be the mother who lets her twelve-year-old find his own way. That’s easy to type and hard to live. Nobody warned me the tween years would ask this much of me. Everyone talks about the toddler years like those are the hard part. Nobody tells you the real work starts when your child begins making choices you wouldn’t make, and your job shifts from deciding for him to standing close enough to catch him and far enough back that he can actually walk.
So I go to the games. I cheer. I keep my football opinions mostly to myself.
Mostly.
What I saw
Friday afternoon was a scrimmage against another independent school. Middle school football. Twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys.
From the first series, something was off. The other team played aggressive — not competitive, not intense, aggressive. Hits after the whistle. Extra force where none was needed. And their sideline had one instruction, repeated like a chant:
Hit ’em. Hit ’em. Hit ’em.
Not “wrap up.” Not “stay low.” Not “finish the play.” Just hit ’em — at children.
I did not sit there quietly. I said something — out loud, in the bleachers, to the families around me. I said I didn’t like what I was hearing. I said I didn’t like what I was watching. No scene, no yelling at anybody’s coach. But nobody sitting near me had to guess where I stood.
Mikey didn’t hear a word of that. He was on the field. Whatever he was working out that afternoon, he was working out on his own.
He still knows where I stand, though, because I have spent his whole life telling him. Not in speeches. In the small stops. We’re going about an ordinary day and something happens and I slow down and say it: that wasn’t kind. At a table. In a store. In the car. Watching something on a screen. I stop, and I name it, and then we keep going.
That’s the whole method and it isn’t complicated. Hundreds of times, in moments so small that neither of us would remember any one of them. I’ve built a career on the belief that children become who they are partly because of what the adults around them were willing to name out loud.
I left the scrimmage before the end. I learned later that after I left, a player on their team lifted a boy from Mikey’s team off the ground and dropped him. There were a number of injuries that day. And the other team won the scrimmage handily. It wasn’t close.
The thing I actually worry about
Here’s what I don’t say out loud as much.
I know I have to pour into him. I do it. What I can’t shake is the fear that it isn’t enough — that everything out there is louder than I am.
Because the outside voices are so loud. The coach who gets results. The highlight reel where the hardest hit gets the most views. The group chat. The kid who says you’re soft. A whole culture that keeps suggesting, in a hundred small ways, that dominance is the same thing as excellence and that gentleness is something you grow out of.
I get prayers at bedtime. I get ten minutes in the car on the way to school. I get the rides to and from practice and everything else — and some days I’m competing with the tablet for those. That’s my volume. And some weeks it feels like I’m whispering into a stadium.
Every parent who is trying to raise a kind, courageous kid knows this specific fear. It isn’t a fear that we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s a fear that we’re being outshouted.
Then he came home
Mikey’s school ends at 8th grade, so he’s in the thick of the high school conversation. Like a lot of Baltimore kids at independent schools, he’s been walking around with a list in his head — which schools have the teams, the fields, the energy. That school was on his list. The day before, he had lost a game to a different school and come home talking about how much he’d love to go there. Losing didn’t shake him.
He lost the game. When I got home, he ran out to my truck to meet me before I could even get out of it. He wanted to tell me about the rest of the game — everything I’d missed after I left. He talked to me about that game longer than he has talked about the first few weeks of school. And then he said it:
“I’m definitely not going there for high school. I don’t like how they play. I didn’t like the coaches.”
It wasn’t about the score, even though the score wasn’t close. He watched grown men spend an afternoon teaching boys his age that hurting someone was the point, and he decided that wasn’t a place he wanted to spend four years — not for a good team, not for a nice facility, not for the version of himself he was picturing there.
A twelve-year-old ran a values check in real time. He didn’t use the word “values.” He just knew that what he saw was unkind and unnecessary, and he knew he didn’t want it.
What that told me
He didn’t hear me on Friday. He was on the field, and I was gone before the end of it. There was no cue to pick up, no parent’s face to read across the fence.
What he took out there was everything from before Friday. All those small stops. The hundreds of times I slowed down in an ordinary moment and said that wasn’t kind. He knows where I stand because I have never once made him guess.
So he got there himself, and it cost him something to get there — he gave up a school he’d been excited about twenty-four hours earlier.
That’s what I’m sitting with. Not that he agreed with me. That the thing I’ve been pouring in was in there, load-bearing, available to him on a field where I wasn’t even standing anymore.
This week, I was louder than the world. Not because I won an argument. Because it had already taken.
I’m not going to pretend that settles anything. Next week the noise comes back at full volume, and he’s twelve, and there will be a hundred more moments where I won’t get to know what he decided or why. Most of this work happens with no scoreboard. You pour and you don’t find out.
But I got to find out once. And if you’re in the middle of it and wondering whether your one voice is doing anything against all of that — this is the only evidence I have, and I’m handing it to you. Sometimes it holds.
One more thing, for the schools
Independent schools live on enrollment. Families choose. Kids choose — more than we admit, kids choose.
If enough twelve-year-olds walk off a field and say not that one, I didn’t like how they treated people, and enough parents take that seriously instead of talking them out of it, a school with thin recruitment numbers eventually has to ask why. Maybe the answer that comes back is: tell our coaches to model something different.
It’s a slow lever. But it’s real, and it sits in our kids’ hands more than anyone tells them.
I still don’t love football. I’m still going to the games.
And those boys on the other sideline have purpose and value too — which is exactly why they deserved better adults than the ones they got that day.
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