Once you become a mom of older kids, your social life changes. Playgroup is a thing of the past, you have graduated from the PTA and there are no more school parties to plan. Your weekends become an endless cycle of sports meets, matches and tournaments. You begin to skip dinner and drinks with your friends on Friday night because the thought of being even a tiny bit tired or hungover at your all day sportsball event makes you want a nap thinking about it. Your kid probably has practice then anyway.
You will attend endless clinics, practices and games with the same moms. Day after day, week after week and if your kid is in it for the long haul, year after year. If you are lucky, you may find another mom on the team who’s kid gets along with yours. As those two start to create their first inside jokes, the endless texting will begin and the sleepovers will follow. Pretty soon the texts between the moms aren’t just about when practice starts, when the game was moved to or where the sleepover is that night. They have become friends too, and their inside jokes and endless texting begin.
Sportsball mom friends may be one of the highlights of this stage in life. Expectations of the friendship are easy. You are both busy with kids and are driving all over in different directions. You back each other up to make sure everyone gets to and from practice. When one of you can’t attend a game, you take care of each other’s kid like you would your own. This includes taking the pictures, videos, extra cheering and making sure they eat. No money exchanges hands. I fed her kid today but she fed mine twice last week. It will all even out.
If you are lucky enough to play on a travel team then the real fun begins. You spend time in airports, cars and in hotels. For days your team becomes a little gypsy family on the road. While you calculate the cost of each over priced meal you know it was well spent. Your kid is living their best life with their bestie, playing the sport they love to play. All the while the moms have a front row seat together in the bleachers which, by the way, are killing your backs. You will sit there for a day or two more though, cheering, clapping and popping Advil like concession stand M&Ms.
I have heard the moms of grown kids say this was the best time of their lives. I believe it. Our kids aren’t babies and they aren’t adults. This is the sweet spot, where the last remaining years of having them in our home, lie. It’s been one of my favorite times of being a parent despite the teenage drama and know it all attitudes.
I know my days of sitting with my sportsball mom friend while we watch our kids play side by side are fleeting. Our kids will grow, they will change teams, get cut from teams, change sports or even change interests altogether. I hope their friendships will extend beyond the sport that brought them together. The two of them are a good pair. Maybe this stage of their friendship is just the first set in a long three set match.
I also hope my friendship extends beyond carpool and sleepovers. I try to imagine us 10 years from now with no one to drive to practice and all the time in the world to lunch or take a girls weekend. Thinking of us as those women, not as moms but just as women, seems foreign. Just as the days of PTA and playgroups passed us by, so will the days of driving kids around. I’ll have to think more about the future another time though, we need to leave for practice.
Erin Has Something To Say 