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“I was.” I answer, appreciating her response.
The burden of grief is heavy enough without having to carry the sorrow and anguish of others.
“Thank you for telling me. I’m here if you ever want to talk more.” She says, before hastily adding, “You know, friend to friend.”
I’m thankful for the unwitting opening to get this conversation back on familiar, safer territory.
“Relax, we’re alone. You don’t have to convince anybody that you aren’t interested in me.”
“You’re delusional.”
“I’m extremely goal-oriented, actually.”
I belly laugh at the eye roll she gives me as she sits up, but my laughter dies out pretty quickly.
I’m not ready for this to be over just yet.
“What about you?”
“Hmm?” She asks, twisting around to look at me.
“What’s your football story?”
“You want to hear it?”
“Yeah, I do.”
She settles back onto the ground, looking up at the sky as it starts to change colors.
“I think I’ll start at the beginning like you did.” She says, and I can hear in her voice that she’s not used to telling this story.
Or that maybe no one’s ever asked her.
“My father died before I was born. I’ve heard conflicting reports about my parents’ marriage – some say they were madly in love, some say it was a toxic relationship with physical abuse coming from both sides. I think both things can be true at once. I don’t know the truth for sure, but what I do know is that when my dad died, my mom fell apart.”
“She turned to drugs — weed, crack, heroine, you name it — and then she turned to men. That’s how I’d summarize life with her since the time I can remember.”
“She’s an addict. She’ll lie, cheat, and steal to get her way, even with her own daughter. You wouldn’t believe the shit she’s pulled on me just so she could buy an ounce off her dealer. I can’t trust her, have never been able to, and that’s before you throw in her rotating door of boyfriends. She’s the kind of person who needs to be in a relationship at all times, otherwise the downward spiral gets even worse.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with that except somehow she always,always, picks the worst guys, true scourges of society. Terrible, disgusting men, usually addicts like her, who also lie, cheat, and steal with the added bonus of beating the shit out of her when they feel like it. And they feel like it often because what better way to take out the anger you feel at your place in the world than on the helpless woman who’s desperate enough for attention that she won’t limp away from you even when her lip is bloodied and her eyes are so swollen she can’t see?”
“I’m only telling you for context,” She adds, “Because home wasn’t a home for me. It was something I needed to distance myself from. I love my mom, I understand the pain she’s been through, I can imagine the grief of losing someone you love could easily be insurmountable, so I have a lot of empathy for her. But we’re not close, we don’t have a mother-daughter relationship.”
“Where your parents were always there for you, she was never there for me. And she never will be because she won’t get clean. She won’t go to AA and I can’t afford a private program, I don’t even think she’d go even if I could.”
“That’s why Trish, Bellamy’s mom, is like a second mom to me. She let me and my brother Nolan sleep over as often as we needed to when it was clear we couldn’t go home. She fed me, she clothed me, she basically raised me.”
“Before Bellamy and Trish came into my life, I turned to soccer so I didn’t have to go home. I started playing soccer at the park with some of the kids and kept playing there for years until it was just me and the boys. We didn’t have any money for classes – not that it would have gone to them even if we did – so I was mostly self taught for a while. Eventually I was scouted by the father of a boy I played with who happened to have connections to a local club. They gave me a scholarship that allowed me to keep playing and get the coaching I needed through the end of middle school before I joined my high school team.”
“So, that’s my story. Soccer is everything to me. It made me physically and mentally strong. It taught me sportsmanship, strategy, discipline, and how to be a good teammate. It kept me away from a volatile home situation and gave me a path to a better life and that’s why I’m here.”
I’m silent, trying to process the information she just gave me.
I knew she’d had a harder life than the rest of us up until this point, but I hadn’t realized it was this complex.
That she’d basically single-handedly clawed her way out of what would statistically likely have been a dead-end life to one where her future burned bright with possibilities.
Her eyes widen with what I think is embarrassment when she realizes everything she just revealed to me.
