Our soccer team was crushed\u00a0on Saturday: four to nothing. The team doesn’t usually lose, let alone that badly, and\u00a0the loss dropped us in the standings from second place to fifth.<\/p>\n
It was a weird game. My oldest son missed it because he was on a church retreat. My youngest was knocked out in the first five minutes with a jammed thumb. Other players were out as well, so the team\u00a0only had one substitution. By the end, the kids were both exhausted and dejected.<\/p>\n
Later, when\u00a0the boys and I were in the car,\u00a0we told my oldest son how the game went.<\/p>\n
“Well,” he said with a laugh, “you can’t blame it on me. I wasn’t there.”<\/p>\n
“That’s why<\/em> we can blame it on you,” his little\u00a0brother said. “We\u00a0needed you and you weren’t there!”<\/p>\n Oof. Those are pretty hard words to lay on a twelve-year old, but I kept quiet.<\/p>\n The big guy didn’t respond to his brother’s jab, which is a pretty good indicator that it had hit home.<\/p>\n “Do you think it would have been any different if I was there?” he asked me.<\/p>\n Now it was my turn to hesitate. Should I sugar coat things, or just lay it out? I went with the truth.<\/p>\n “Yeah,” I said. “You’re one of our best players.”<\/p>\n He smiled at that, but the expression\u00a0faded quickly. “Oh.”<\/p>\n “You didn’t have any choice,” I reminded him. “You were on a church retreat.”<\/p>\n “I didn’t have to go on the retreat,” he said. “It was up to me.”<\/p>\n I shrugged. “It was just a game.”<\/p>\n He looked out the window.<\/p>\n I tried to think of something to say, but came up dry as I realized my “just a game” comment\u00a0had missed the entire point.\u00a0He wasn’t upset about the game. He was upset about letting his friends down.<\/p>\n That was something that I couldn’t make better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes, I simply don’t have the words to help. This was one of those times. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-sad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-EW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}