Leaving the field...

or lessons learned from a freshman football player.

Today my nephew Ryan played the last game of his freshman football season. If this was a Disney movie, his team would have won the day with just enough points not to have made the other team look like a bunch of snotty-nosed 14 year olds. Ahh, Disney.

But, as we all know, this is NOT a Disney movie, so naturally Ryan's team lost. 16 to 6. And at times they really did look like a bunch of snotty-nosed 14 year olds.  They were gawky. There were errors. The ball was thrown WAAAAY over the head of the kid "receiving" it, and, when you could see through the legs of the players on the sidelines, it looked like a pretty dismal game.

But. Our boys put every muscle into this game. They fought hard, they fought with heart. And when the whole thing was over they faced the crowd of family that had turned out to cheer them on and performed their own cheer. They left us with the understanding that they did their best to make us all proud.

It is going to take me a LOOONNNGGGG time to get the extra weight off. I did the Disney thing once. The weight came off like magic, leaving me thin and bewildered as to what to do with that new body. I went through all the stuff that you go through at 14 - hormones, and new love, uncertainty about my place in the world, hormones, feelings of being rejected for not staying the same, and hormones. It frankly was less like becoming the Barbie I had always imagined my thin self to be, and more like morphing into a 41 year old version of a preteen. Not pretty. Not comfortable.

So now I have to fight my way back to thin. And, like Ryan's team I am not going to win every game. I am going to make "I ate the entire box of wheat thins" choices sometimes. But I have the option to lay down and give up without a fight, or I can stand up and give a cheer even when the crowd is disappointed. I can choose to move on, look to another season, and know that at the end of the day I won't be perfect. I will have chosen to give a cheer at the moment that I needed one myself. And I will have done my best.