Small Town Football

Since I had to compose an email to the parents of my eight year old's (yes, EIGHT) football teammates and found myself on the border of a scathing group email and a brain hemorrhage, I decided to switch gears for my media writing class and write a blog about parents (especially mothers) in suburban towns and my experience as a divorced (egad!) single mother of three within this challenging network.

When living in Suburbia, I quickly realized I did not have all of the necessary pieces to play with the other mothers - my car was anything but new, my house had a mere one-car garage, and I did not know how to play Bunco. While I did possess the respectable quality of being a stay-at-home mother, my rising credit card debt and lack of high end, brand name clothing betrayed me. The few play dates my youngest had been invited to would also be his last. I did what I could and filled volunteer positions at the elementary school; many weekends were spent cutting construction paper fish, grading voluntary extra math homework, and coloring jack-o-lantern faces with a black Sharpie onto orange spray-painted beans of one variety or another. But it didn't get me any more friends or any more respected, just cross-eyed and frustrated.

Then the unthinkable happened and I had the gall to get a D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Eyes rolled, lips whispered, and fingers pointed. And just when I thought I had a few friends, they packed up their minivans and screamed out of my one car driveway. After enrolling in college and getting a part-time job, I became a leper. I was no longer available to at least perform the tasks that qualified me as a member of the Stay-At-Homes; I now had a schedule that was pencilled in with work and classes, not soccer and school pick-up.

This past June my life and all of its crazy circumstances put me in the position of moving to another town. I was told the new town would be a great alternative: it was more of a "working class" town, there were actually other divorced people, and my children's father lived there. So I traded in my house for condo living and optimistically filed my change of address with the DMV, picturing a very different life ahead for my family unit.

My life was becoming increasingly more comfortable in its new surroundings - no more pressure to look the part of a suburban wife and mother - that is until football season began.

At first glance, things looked as though they were going to be different in this new town. The women weren't driving Mercedes and Range Rovers, fresh from an excursion to Talbot's; they looked like real, down to earth folks who were just dropping their kids off for football practice. But then I noticed - they weren't dropping them off, they were all staying. Cans of Off were whipped out of the storage units on the bottom of baby strollers, fold-up chairs were freed from their colored jackets, and dollars were given to concession stand attendants as families dined not on a homemade meal, but football field burgers, fries, and Airheads for dessert. As I all but shoved my kids out of the car and began to drive away, I could feel multiple sets of eyes following my SUV out of the park and I swore I could hear, "She's leaving? Football practice?"

It was then I realized small town Suburbia was the same no matter where you are. Okay, maybe some places are more affluent or have bigger houses or fancier cars. But in the end, there is little room or understanding in Suburbia for juggling jobs, kids, and schedules. Or should I say schedule in the singular? Because the children in Suburbia are expected to have schedules, just not the parents. Or should I say parent in the singular? Because isn't it really the mother who is expected to have blank pages in her Franklin Covey waiting to be filled with words like "carpool", "soccer", and "Bunco"?